So one must always be on guard against efforts to use “Asian” in ways which suit the user. The reported “anti-Asian” violence reported almost daily is, in reality, an issue of isolated anti-Chinese antipathy in the West, as often as not by blacks and Hispanics as by whites.

In the UK, “Asian” almost invariably refers to South Asian, not Chinese or Japanese. As for Hong Kong, discrimination against brown “Asians” (let alone Africans) is built into the system, as is the case in Korea, Japan and Singapore.

04:06

Hong Kong’s ethnic minority groups struggle as city battles Covid-19 and recession

Hong Kong’s ethnic minority groups struggle as city battles Covid-19 and recession

In many countries with multi-ethnic populations such as the US, Australia and Britain, language has not caught up with the reality of mixtures. Hence the racist pigeonholes determine that F1 racing driver Lewis Hamilton and former US president Barack Obama are “black”, ignoring the reality of their “white” mothers.

This lack of meaningful terms for those who do not fall naturally into pigeonholes is itself racist in origin, dating to the slave-era practice in the US of defining anyone who had any identifiable black ancestry as black and hence subject to segregation. It has since been taken up by some for their own use, to make anyone 10-15 per cent black to identify as black. Yet, in reality, the fastest-growing community are those who are mixed.

Multiracial migration into Western countries has been particularly significant since the 1960s. But it is not entirely new. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is himself partly “Asian”, being directly descended from one Ali Kemal, an Ottoman Turkish politician and writer who became a political refugee in London in 1909. He should have stayed, being murdered in Turkey in 1922 for his pro-Armenian and antimilitary views.

London was indeed a refuge for many, not least two fathers of revolution in China – Karl Marx who lived in exile in London for 33 years as a journalist for US newspapers as well as writing most of his famous works. The other was Sun Yat-sen, whose London stay was short but dramatic enough to make him and his revolutionary cause famous outside China.

The episode is now often largely forgotten, though he himself wrote a short book about it: Kidnapped in London, published in 1897, just after the event. It describes his capture in London by agents of the Qing and imprisonment in China’s legation, then as now at 49 Portland Place, London W1 (but rebuilt in the 1980s).

The plan, put together by a British counsellor working for the Chinese government, was to have Sun secretly shipped to China for execution. This gentleman, Sir Halliday Macartney, a soldier who had served the Qing against the Taiping rebels, evidently regarded obeisance to his adopted masters as more important than the laws of his own country where he was residing. 

Sun was told, “Everything is ready; the steamer is engaged, you are to be bound and gagged … outside Hong Kong harbour there will be a Chinese gunboat to meet you and you will be ... taken to Canton for trial and execution.” He was told his case was similar to one in the foreign zone in Shanghai, where a Korean patriot had been seized and murdered.

Such publicity prompted the indignation of a British government which, though anxious not to create an issue with Beijing, could not be seen to tolerate Qing agents conducting an abduction on a London street, using the legation as a prison and planning to ship Sun to torture and death. Sun’s release became a major story well beyond the UK.

Sun’s personal account is an entertaining read and also a reminder that Hong Kong was once a refuge from capture and likely death for such heroes of revolution and independence as Ho Chi Minh, Jose Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo.

Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator