Apartheid

52
soon become a prosperous ‘free trade’ haven for these kinds of people and their associates. It
has remained so until this day, although the drugs have since been banned.
As in all other colonies, the British remained a tiny minority dominating a huge
indigenous population, which was largely impoverished and lacked social, civil and political
rights, as well as citizenship and human rights, until the return of the colony to Chinese rule in
1997, and afterwards. One authoritarian, state capitalist ruler has now been exchanged for
another one. But at least, the new one is less ignorant and ethnically more similar to the
subjects of the authoritarianisms. Prosperity had actually spread a great deal during the last
couple of decades as Hong Kong became a vanguard global city, and Chinese middlemen had
in fact been involved in the initially dominant opium trade from the beginning. Already in the
late 19 th century, the number of wealthy Chinese families in the city outnumbered the small
number of western families. And so Hong Kong may well have been less racist in this regard
than most colonies in Africa and elsewhere. But for the poorest, there was and is no
difference. There is not much in either appearance or essence that separates Mongkok or
North Point, shanty towns of Hong Kong, from the ‘townships’ of Soweto or Gugulethu in
South Africa. Giant reserves of cheap labor, of expendable people, are constants in systematic
racist crimes against humanity. And today, the racism is still there. Notwithstanding the 1990s
revolutions that did away with legalized ethnicist privilege, Whites (especially British Whites)
are richer and still have many more informal privileges than the indigenous people do, in
Hong Kong as in South Africa.
Again, though, Hong Kong was never independent, and in this important respect
unlike South Africa and other true apartheid societies. And it never had a large number of
Whites, either. Today, a mere 0.3 per cent of the population of Hong Kong is white. A few
decades ago it was around one per cent, but hardly ever more than that. This is typical for
colonial societies, in which large civilian settlements preceded or followed by ethnic cleansing
are not necessary ingredients, as opposed to apartheid societies. 60
Soviet Oppression
The parallel with the Soviet Union could also, at first, be argued convincingly. Both
apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union created a giant state apparatus and undertook
massive social engineering programs, including forced removals of millions of people, whole
segments of the population. Millions of people who in one way or another stood in the way of
the raisons d’état, or simply innocent bystanders, were killed. These costly adventures – in
financial as well as human terms – were made possible only by industrialization, the advent of
which nearly coincided in the two countries at the end of the 19 th and beginning of the 20 th
centuries. Moreover, both states, it has been argued, were rendered obsolete by further
industrialization. The development of an increasingly dominant globalized capitalist economy
– in which both countries were increasingly becoming enmeshed due to circumstances
ultimately beyond their own control – demanded a state with less expenditure and less market
intervention and control. 61
60
Wong: Hong Kong Growing as Part of China: A Historical Perspective, 1998; Knowles: Making Whiteness:
British Lifestyle Migrants in Hong Kong, 2005. Hong Kong has been compared to colonialist aspects of
apartheid Israel, most notably by Israel’s Labor Party leader, Amir Peretz. He has suggested that Israel’s
settlements in the West Bank (illegal under international law) be ‘leased’ from the Palestinians, as most of Hong
Kong’s territory, the so-called ‘New Territories’, was leased from China for 99 years in 1898. An Israeli critic,
Meron Benvenisti, noted: ‘It is impossible to give any more fitting expression to the colonialist nature of the
annexation of parts of the West [Bank] than the example of the takeover by the British Empire…of parts of the
hapless Chinese Empire. Indeed, the inventors of the Hong Kong paradigm identified the similarity: robber
capitalism that operates under the auspices of military power against an impotent rival, the bullying takeover of
land and water resources while displacing the natives, and making huge profits…’ Quoted in Barghouti, O.: The
Israeli Elections: A Decisive Vote for Apartheid, 2006.
61
Iliffe 1995: 282ff; For the Soviet Union, see Castells: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,
Volume III, End of Millennium, 2 2000: 1-69.