When colonialism and other such loaded terms become convenient labels for competing groups’ pet ideas
- Were all colonisers white? Were they benevolent reformers whose destruction of local culture was a mere side effect? The colonised might not see things that way
- Take two railways, one built in China by Japanese firms, the other in Hong Kong by Chinese ones, one seen as hostile colonising, the other as rejuvenating
In my student days at Hong Kong University, one of the best history lecturers was an American Southeast Asian specialist; a no-nonsense son of former China missionaries, Professor X took no prisoners when intellectually shoddy work came within his eagle-eyed sights.
“Big” historical terminology, with inherently contradictory layers of meaning, is perennially problematic; applied as “one-size-fits-all”, it makes definitional consensus impossible.
Certain loaded terms – “colonialism” being an example – become convenient catch-all labels for whatever hobbyhorse competing groups or individuals have chosen to mount, with surprising results.
Professor X found quizzes an aid to thought clarification on such themes – and an antidote to Hong Kong’s rote-learning school culture.
In one, we were asked to identify examples of colonialism from specific examples; these ranged from invasions, occupations, installation and enforcement of laws, religion and cultural practices, music, literature and theatre, to impositions of languages, and food and crop introductions.
Carefully deconstructed in the next seminar, many found their long-held perceptions profoundly challenged.
We learned colonialism meant the imposition through superior political, military or economic power of the dominant group’s language, culture, religion, foods and so on, upon another group unable to resist that dominance.
Seen by the coloniser as a civilising mission, any changes – education, access to “civilised” languages, infrastructure development, global economic connection – were inevitably portrayed as benevolent.
Environmental degradation, expropriation of traditional lands, loss of language, culture and degradation of traditional ways of life were unfortunate side effects, whose costs were greatly outweighed by lasting benefits.
Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, introduced by early 20th century “white” settlers to East Africa, was ticked by most students as an example of colonialism. Dal and chappatis – brought to the same place in the same period by “brown” settlers from the Indian subcontinent – strangely were not.
Both, however, were foreign to “black” inhabitants; as the 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, and Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda showed, blacks regarded both white and brown as unwelcome interlopers.
From this eye-opener, we learned about inherent bias; in this case, the assumption that only whites perpetrated colonial behaviour.
Such muddied thinking often gave a free pass to second-rate academics whose careers were profitably hitched to “subaltern studies” bandwagons, and the research grants, conference subsidies and tenure track roles that cynical exploitation of guilt-ridden, post-colonial hand-wringing in the West could bring them.
Successive Chinese administrations, allegedly, refused to acknowledge the existence of the “unequal treaties”, despite following the provisions within them. Chinese insistence on removal of Hong Kong and Macau from the United Nations list of territories for decolonisation made clear that these were integral sovereign territories of China, and therefore did not require any decolonisation process.
A century earlier, the Japanese-built South Manchuria Railway was bond-issue financed; tenders for rails, rolling stock, signalling and everything else were exclusively awarded to Japanese firms.
Greater connectivity with elsewhere in China resulted from both projects, yet today, one is hailed as a shining example of national integration and rejuvenation, the other demonstrates self-serving, hostile foreign colonialism.
So, which of those railway projects is an example of colonialism? As Professor X would have said: “Discuss …”
