Iwas born in Hong Kong in 1956. My family had come from Guangdong in the early 1940s—my father was an artisan, making small ornaments and the like. He came from the city of Foshan, which was known over centuries for its porcelain. In Hong Kong, he did several brief spells in factories, but couldn’t endure factory discipline; he loved his freedom as a craftsman. My mother worked alongside him in their workshop at our house. They didn’t earn much: my three brothers and I sometimes had to walk the streets with my father selling souvenirs he had made. We lived in Kowloon, but I went to a Catholic secondary school—though I’m not a religious person—on Hong Kong island.

People were divided in their attitudes towards China—though not the Hong Kong bourgeoisie, who of course loathed the ccp. But in the labour movement, there was a deep split between Communist-led unions and those run by the kmt, which lasted up until the early 70s. The hostility between the two peaked in 1956, when the kmt trade unions physically attacked ccp unionists. The ccp had extensive influence among workers: the ‘Socialist Fatherland’ was seen as a counterweight to colonial rule. But then in 1967 the Maoist pro-ccp union called a general strike that no workers supported, and then in the wake of its failure launched an ‘urban warfare’ campaign. This was a bitter disappointment to many workers who had been dedicated to the cause, and who paid a high price for the ccp-led unions’ desire to emulate the Gang of Four. The popular saying at the time was that they wanted a big strike, Da bagong, but instead it was Dahua bagong, a big exaggeration.

I was a schoolboy during this period, but two things in particular made a strong impression on me. I remember seeing long queues at the post office in the early 1960s: people were sending rice, clothes, daily necessities back to their relatives in China because of the famine. And in 1967 and 68 there were stories of people beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution, and their bodies floating into Hong Kong harbour from the Pearl River.

British rule in the postwar era can be divided into two periods either side of 1971. In the earlier period, there was a form of spatial apartheid—the Tai Ping Shan area was restricted to Westerners—and conditions were much more oppressive: working hours were long, wages low and strike activity ruthlessly suppressed by the colonial government. National oppression took a very visible form: nearly all high-ranking posts were occupied by Brits, and English was the only official language; at school, we would be refused permission to go to the bathroom if we didn’t ask in English.

The British clamped down hard on the labour movement after the 1967 events—perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 trade unionists were sacked, and thousands put in prison. This took a toll from which the Maoist unions never recovered. Nevertheless, by the early 70s, pressure had begun to mount on the British, both from within and from without, to make some reforms in order to maintain any legitimacy. Hong Kong students and social activists were agitating for Chinese language rights, and against the possible transfer of Diao Yu Island to Japan. A key turning point came on 7 July 1971, when the colonial government harshly repressed a demonstration by radical nationalist youth movements. A wave of further protests ensued, and the government was forced for the first time to permit demonstrations. After that student groups mobilized with some success against official corruption, and in 1973 pressured the government into forming an Independent Commission, which continues to function. Externally, China’s rising international status—its assumption of a un Security Council seat in 1971, Nixon’s visit and so on—was an important factor pushing the British into granting limited political freedoms.

By the 1971 mobilizations around the Diao Yu Island. They were organized by young students, many of whom were beaten and hospitalized by the colonial police. The worldwide radicalization of the 1960s was late in coming to Hong Kong—it wasn’t till 1970 that young people began to respond to socialist or Marxist ideas, for instance. Though the ccp had lost much of its base among the Hong Kong workers after 1967, it benefited greatly from the upsurge in national sentiment among students and intellectuals. China, and its Maoist model, was seen as an alternative to British rule—though during the course of the 1970s the local ccp moved away from advocating the end of colonialism, in the name of stability. In student circles, the Maoists were constantly challenged by liberal currents and the radical left, notably Trotskyists and anarchists. The Chinese Trotskyists had had a presence in Hong Kong since the 1940s, while anarchism had become fashionable in the early 1970s. I followed lively debates in the papers between the two groupings, and read Marx and Trotsky as well as Marcuse and Fromm. I was attracted to Fromm’s humanism, and found Trotsky’s analysis of bureaucracy highly relevant to contemporary Chinese history. Many of my classmates became Maoists, but despite my youth I felt a strong aversion to the cult of personality. I joined the Young Socialist Group, which moved increasingly in a Trotskyist direction, but disintegrated in the early 1980s.

I finished high school in 1974, and worked in the offices of a British and then us trading firm until 1977. After that I spent two years working in factories, making garments and Japanese watches. I then enrolled at Hong Kong Baptist College to study Chinese, which I went on to teach in high schools until 1995.