Colonial memories and transnational mobilizations: Asia’s colonial veterans and their struggle for British citizenship,c. 1980

Abstract

This article focuses on campaigns by former colonial soldiers from Nepal and Hong Kong and their struggles for British citizenship over the last three decades. When analysing these mobilizations, we combine approaches from social movement research with insights from cultural memory studies. We use the concept of ‘relational fields’ to determine how these former colonial soldiers systematically utilized the past as a political framing device and thus revealed themselves to be not outsiders to the political system but equal players therein. We argue that their actions are best understood as a series of connected postcolonial civil rights campaigns that often reinforce rather than reverse romanticized and positivist representations of Britain’s imperial past. While in some instances colonial veterans were able to mount meaningful political interventions, our analysis shows that the veterans’ eventual acceptance into British society could only come at the price of their continued stereotyped depiction as colonial subjects.

Keywords

citizenship colonialism memory social movements veterans

Introduction

Despite the fact that Britain has long but ceased to rule a global empire, its colonial past lingers on. More recently, this past has, in what some would term a nostalgic distortion of its memory, even been employed to serve as the ideological bedrock of a tentative plan for a post-Brexit Britain – a revival of old trade relationships overseas, an ‘Empire 2.0’ (Olusoga, 2017). While such use of Britain’s colonial past elicited both praise and scorn, it appears that not only are many ideas and concepts of this seemingly bygone era still eerily present and hold considerable emotional purchase, its difficult memories loom equally large and often appear insufficiently addressed. Shashi Tharoor (2017), citing recent polls, attests the majority of British society to be engaged in an exercise of romanticizing the country’s colonial past. Even more nuanced voices support the view that imperial assumptions and their perpetuation by popular nostalgia colour many Britons’ perceptions of the (non-Western) world and Britain’s role in it (Darwin, 2012). They further contend that the memory of Empire continues to be a historical projection point for national reassurance, even pride, shaping political life in the former metropole (Gilroy, 2005).

Among the actors who played an important role in Britain’s colonial past, and who embody the difficulties and contradictions associated with its memory, are those whose careers and professional identities were bound up with the protection of imperial interests across the globe – Britain’s colonial veterans. This article looks at select groups of this community – namely, the Nepalese Gurkhas and ex-servicemen from Hong Kong – who prominently made headlines in their struggle of working through the complex memories of Britain’s colonial past. At the centre of our analysis are these veterans’ attempts to obtain British citizenship and residence rights in Great Britain between 1980 and 2015.

From a historical point of view, the mobilizations by these veterans confront us with the question of why the memories of their colonial service would be able to be addressed at this point in time and for what purpose. Claims-making movements that relate to working through difficult memories of imperialism in Asia have often shied away from matters touching on colonial collaboration and tend to focus on more clear-cut victims of imperial oppression (Soh, 2008). Furthermore, colonial veterans appear, at first sight, to be members of a group that lack the resources for becoming successful political actors. Historically, colonial soldiers could largely be found on the receiving end of the unequal colonial power relationship (Osterhammel and Jansen, 2012). In present times, too, (former) colonial soldiers seemingly remain outsiders to the British political system and do not possess any social or political rights on which to build their political demands. However, in this article, we argue that colonial soldiers’ mobilizations are less subversive than one might think. Despite being located outside the established decision-making circles in Britain, colonial ex-servicemen have access to and command authority over a critical political resource – the past – which enables them to mount meaningful political interventions.

Their actions, and this is the central assumption of this article, are in fact functional for creating and sustaining a positive image of British colonialism across borders, which afforded the veterans the possibility to negotiate their own place in postcolonial British society. To develop this argument, we will look at three campaigns of interest groups representing colonial ex-servicemen: first, the 1980s/1990s campaign of Hong Kong’s World War II veterans; second, the Gurkha Justice Campaign fought in the United Kingdom throughout the early 2000s on behalf of Nepalese ex-servicemen; and third, the ‘Campaign for Abandoned British Chinese Soldiers Left in Hong Kong in 1997’, which commenced in 2012 and is still ongoing. A comparison between the three will reveal them not to be isolated incidents but a sequence of events of postcolonial claims-making, which constitute an important, yet underappreciated, part of remembering Britain’s colonial past. By using a theoretical framework, the relational fields approach, that views the activists not as outsiders but as ‘equal players’ among established political actors and institutions, we identify several factors which encouraged the emergence of these civil society movements. We argue that in order to fully understand these mobilizations, the role of memory as a mobilizing factor must be included in the analysis.

Defending the Empire: colonial troops and the British military

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Britain never fought its wars or secured its territories overseas without a significant number of soldiers that it had recruited from its Empire (Hack and Rettig, 2006: 12). ‘Divide and imperia’ was the order of the day, and London routinely relied on its mostly non-White troops to defend its colonial possessions and to project power on a global scale. Until decolonization in the aftermath of World War II, colonial troops played an integral part in all major military conflicts Britain was involved in. These armies were assigned White British officers to command them, who often ‘believed they did so because they were inherently racially superior’ (Greenhut, 1984: 15).

The British labelled certain groups ‘martial races’ and thus reduced them to their allegedly inherent and ‘untamed’ warrior characteristics (Kochhar-George, 2010). This practice of racial stereotyping served the British to construct themselves as sophisticated ‘masters’ by contrast (Golay, 2006: 31). The group which was ascribed the greatest warrior-like disposition was the Gurkhas, a vague ethnic term that denoted soldiers from Nepal (Des Chene, 1993). Since 1815, Gurkhas have fought in most British armed conflicts, and they continue to play an active role in the British Army to this day. Their large-scale appearance on the battlefields of the First World War and their subsequent reimagination through popular imperial ephemera firmly embedded their image as a breed of ferocious warriors in modern British memory (Kochhar-George, 2010). After India had achieved independence in 1947, the recruitment of Gurkhas into the British military continued. Britain declared that there should be no difference in career prospects between a British Army soldier from Nepal or Britain. In reality, however, after World War II, the British military continued to treat Gurkhas as ‘second-class soldiers’ who enjoyed limited mobility within the chain of command and received lower pensions than their British comrades. There was also never an explicit arrangement made that would have granted them residence rights or full British citizenship at the end of their service. Gurkhas were intended for service in Asia, to eventually return to and benefit Nepal (Kochhar-George, 2010).

Besides the massive amount of soldiers recruited on the Indian subcontinent, colonial forces could also be locally raised and deployed. One such example is the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Force, first formed in 1854 as a part-time home defence militia and made up of Hong Kong’s European, Eurasian and Chinese residents. This auxiliary force saw its biggest engagement in the Second World War when it fought alongside regular troops against invading Japanese forces in December 1941. The Volunteers’ exploits were memorialized in 1962 with a Shrine of Remembrance and Memorial Gates at Hong Kong’s new City Hall (HKRS70/3/298, 1960–1971; HKRS156/1/4400, 1954–1965).

Another notable example of a locally raised colonial unit is the Hong Kong Military Service Corps (HKMSC). Formed in 1962 for Hong Kong Chinese to join the British military as career soldiers, it institutionalized and professionalized a practice that, since the Second Opium War, had allowed the occasional recruitment of ethnic Chinese into regular British Army units (Kwong and Tsoi, 2014: 250). Until Hong Kong’s ‘handover’ to China in 1997, both the Volunteers, then transformed into the Royal Hong Kong Regiment (The Volunteers), and the HKMSC played significant roles in guarding British Hong Kong. Both units were disbanded in the mid-1990s with the clear prospect of not being awarded citizenship for their service (Kwong, 2014).

Despite their virtual omnipresence as the military enforcers of British interests across the Empire, colonial servicemen remained invisible in public remembrance and were long left without a voice. Since the 1980s, several groups of veterans from the aforementioned units and other colonial formations have been making public demands for Britain to make good on promises allegedly made during colonial times and to be recognized as British nationals.

Theoretical starting points: the concept of relational fields

An approach that has the potential of grasping the various factors which may inform the emergence and the success of collective action is the concept of relational fields (Goldstone, 2004). This concept proposes to analyse social movements as emerging from and acting within a ‘relational field’ that consists of a number of interacting elements: first, political and economic institutions (and their history) that provide a framework for action; second, elite actors such as state authorities and political parties; third, the media and the public; fourth, symbolic and value orientations available in society; and fifth, contingent events such as wars, economic crises or incidents of violence (Goldstone, 2004: 357):

[i]t is the relations among these elements of the external field – both among the elements and their relations to the movement claims and actions – that appear to shape movement dynamics.

The approach challenges the established idea that members of social movements are outsiders who attempt to gain leverage over a more powerful and established adversary. The concept is based on the assumption that social movements are an integral component of the political system and of conventional politics. In fact, it maintains that social movements are a regular expression of politics in democratic settings (Goldstone, 2004). This approach has several advantages. It encompasses political–structural, cultural and contingent factors and makes it possible to highlight relationships between actors. Most importantly, it locates activist groups within the same field of politics as the established political actors – a perspective, we argue, appropriate for analysing colonial veterans’ mobilizations. However, for such a group, the relational fields concept lacks a central dimension: the mobilizing effects of memory. The way in which the past is reconstructed and represented is indeed of pivotal importance here. It necessitates augmenting the relational fields approach with relevant findings from memory studies.

Research on collective memory points to several ways in which the past may play a role in the emergence of collective action. One of the central assumptions of research on processes of remembrance is that memory always contains norms for future action (Tumblety, 2013). Concepts of collective memory stress its instrumental character: ‘Collective memory links the past and the future in a way that from a specific memory a specific claim (…) is derived (…). Collective memory is an instrumentalized and politicized memory’ (Assmann, 1999: 208). Consequently memories are ‘highly selective reconstructions whose content depends on the situation in which they are generated’ (Erll, 2005: 7).

Memory may become a factor in political processes in other forms, too. Assmann (2011) put forward the idea that in societies, ‘memory turning points’ exist that bring reconstructions of past events to the surface with an unprecedented intensity. This often happens at the transition point from communicative to cultural memory (Assmann, 2011), that is, when a generation that has witnessed certain historical events gradually dies, and the memories of the passing generation are transformed into cultural memory. Cultural memory can manifest itself in monuments, museums, biographies and fiction, and favour specific interpretations of the past that are championed by those commanding authority over the creation and/or use of these carriers of cultural memory. They are hence potential sites for articulating specific narratives and ideas, definitions and legitimizations that can have a significant impact on political processes. Cultural memory can be used to construct historical legitimacy for current political decisions (Wijermars, 2016).

Finally, social movement research shows that biographical and generational memories may be the sources for motivating political participation. Nomyia (2009), for example, shows how stories on World War II experiences related by older Japanese family members prompted their children and grandchildren to participate in the peace movement.

Fighting for residence rights in Britain

After 1945, non-White colonial soldiers initially had to discover that their deeds were remembered in a highly selective fashion and in a way that placed more emphasis on their White comrades. The former’s service in the defence of British interests overseas did, moreover, not translate into certain legal rights anymore. The dissolution of the British Empire prompted the radical transformation of British nationality and immigration law in the second half of the twentieth century. The British Nationality Act 1981 marked the final milestone in a decades-long process since the end of World War II of substituting the principle of ius soli for that of ius sanguinis, thus redefining who was considered ‘British’ and allowed to freely travel to and settle in the United Kingdom (Paul, 1997, 2001). These changes also had serious repercussions for colonial veterans. Britain’s non-White colonial soldiers, in particular, now saw themselves stripped of privileges that they, as British subjects, had in theory previously enjoyed by right. Hong Kong, Britain’s last colony in Asia, presents itself as a special laboratory and role model for postcolonial claims-making where the transnational dimension of civil society action and the cross-fertilization of colonial veteran campaigns can aptly be observed.

Hong Kong’s Pacific War veterans, wives and war widows

In the 1980s and 1990s, a drawn-out civil rights campaign for a few hundred Eurasian and Chinese war veterans, mostly from among the Hong Kong Volunteers, drew public attention to the disenfranchised situation of non-White colonial soldiers. Headed by Welsh-born Hong Konger Jack Edwards who had been a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese in World War II, the campaign capitalized heavily on the role of Hong Kong’s colonial soldiers in the safe-keeping of this imperial outpost and the honourable cause they, it was implied, had thus served.

In 1986, Edwards wrote a letter to Hong Kong’s most widely read English-speaking newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP). This letter was also submitted for publication to the London Times, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, and was quoted frequently over the years. Its principal message read:

If those who fought to preserve the freedom of this territory and most still suffer as a result are not given assistance in a future free from anxiety, the justice they fought to preserve must deem to have been extinguished. Their ‘lasting honour’ will become Britain’s ‘lasting dishonour’. (Edwards in SCMP, 1986)

It repurposed Winston Churchill’s words who had promised all of Hong Kong’s defenders the ‘lasting honour’ for their resistance against the invading Japanese in World War II. The letter thus exposed the discrepancy in Britain’s behaviour towards its colonial troops. After the war, the British authorities had readily enlisted the remembrance of the colonial soldiers’ loyal service to lend legitimacy to their efforts of reinstating colonial rule overseas. At the same time, Britain had been gradually taking away, so the veterans believed, what it had promised its colonial warriors would be theirs by right; namely, a life free from anxiety as members of a greater, if vaguely defined, British citizenry. Shortly after Edwards’ angry letter had been published and widely circulated, his campaign succeeded in winning British passports for these veterans. After 10 more years of campaigning, it also managed to secure full British passports for the veterans’ wives and the war widows, shortly before Hong Kong’s ‘handover’ to China (SCMP, 1996).

Edwards’ success had mainly been made possible by bringing together two things. First, his campaign had been able to muster strong support from the local and overseas press, such as Hong Kong’s principal English-language daily and outlets in Britain and Australia. Edwards further enlisted help from senior members of the Hong Kong and British governments, including Governor Patten and Prime Minister Major, as well as from members of the Royal Family. Second, he successfully exploited different windows of opportunity that presented themselves in the political sphere, most notably in the run-up to the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong, which coincided with British general elections at home (Royal British Legion 1989–1996). In one of his media appearances, Edwards reminded his audience that

[m]en of all nationalities from Chinese to Gurkhas fought and died for Britain. Survivors were rounded up and packed off to Japanese camps.

After the war […] emaciated POWs who returned to Hong Kong were treated as British citizens. Then came Britain’s 1981 Immigration Act. And overnight the 250 still left alive were deprived of British citizenship and vital passports to get out before China moves in. (Edwards in Daily Express, 1986)

In 1984, Prime Ministers Zhao Ziyang of China and Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom had signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration. It decreed that Britain would, in 1997, ‘hand over’ the entirety of Hong Kong to China to be governed for 50 years as a semi-autonomous Special Administrative Region (SAR) with considerable political and economic freedoms under its own Basic Law. However, this agreement left many weary of the future of the territory. The massacre of pro-democracy protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 aggravated such fears and served Edwards and his followers with an even more ‘favourable’ background before which their campaign became relevant.

Thus, the issue of appropriately rewarding colonial ex-servicemen and their families who had made sacrifices in the defence of British Hong Kong became tied up with Britain’s interest in releasing the country’s last colony in Asia in a face-saving manner. The British general election of 1997 added additional political momentum and sensitivity to dealing with such matters. Neither the Labour nor the Conservative Party was keen to risk being accused of racially discriminating against Britain’s colonial soldiers who had hitherto been used in public remembrance to suggest that the colonized had in fact welcomed and endorsed British rule abroad. Moreover, seeing former colonial subjects off into a post-British future by offering a safe place to permanently retreat to from a potentially hostile China came with familiar undertones that can be seen as reinforcing in public a romanticized image of the Empire.

Edwards’ campaign exemplified the political gains that could be won from civil society action in Hong Kong and created expectations among the wider local veteran community, especially among those who had served as regular soldiers and had not been able to secure UK passports then. With the successful conclusion of Edwards’ campaign in 1996, the completion of the ‘handover’ and the end of the British elections in 1997, the window of opportunity that had created a relevant backdrop for similar action to fall on fertile ground closed temporarily. Only in the mid-2000s did this window reappear, pushed open by the Gurkha Justice Campaign in Britain.

The Gurkha Justice Campaign

In 2008, a political campaign commenced in Britain, which aimed at winning UK residence rights for Gurkha veterans. Its protagonists were the Liberal Democrat politician Peter Carroll and the well-known British actress Joanna Lumley. Together, they formed the Gurkha Justice Campaign and called for all former Gurkha soldiers to be granted the right of abode in Britain. The campaign ignored the fact that the official arrangement with the Gurkhas never foresaw residence rights for these soldiers in Britain, and it criticized that only veterans who had left the British Army after 1997 were entitled to live in the United Kingdom. Gurkha veterans who had been discharged prior to this date and who wanted to come to Britain had to comply with the general immigration rules. This could result in veterans having to undergo asylum applications or even in becoming irregular immigrants. A case that received a lot of media attention and which politicized the right-of-abode issue was that of the 84-year-old Tul Bahadur Pun, a highly decorated World War II veteran. His visa application was rejected, because immigration authorities had apparently found that ‘his ties with Britain were not strong enough’ (Langton, 2007). The activities of the Gurkha Justice Campaign received a lot of media attention, thanks in particular to the presence of Joanna Lumley. In her efforts on behalf of the Gurkhas, Lumley used a framing technique that mixed biographical elements and heroic memories of the Second World War in an efficient way:

Ms. Lumley said that her father, who was a Major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles (…) would have been ‘overwhelmed with shame and fury’ at such a story. (Blakely, 2009)

The papers repeatedly capitalized on the fact that Lumley’s father had fought with the Gurkhas (The Times, 2009b, 2009c). By discursively relating the Gurkha issue to the war experience of a British officer, and thus to a whole generation of British men who had fought in the Asian theatre of World War II, the Gurkha question was framed as a British issue first and foremost. Many letters to the editor reflected this. One veteran wrote,

I am 91 and served throughout the Second World War […]. Besides being quite a privilege it was also a great relief to have Gurkhas at your side because the enemy were aware of their reputation for courage and ferocity. (The Times, 2009a)

Others told the story of their parents:

One of my happiest childhood memories is sitting in the back garden of my parents’ house […] eating curry with Gurkha soldiers. My father was a Gurkha officer. […] He loved their company and admired their courage, good sense and dedication. […] I do know that the debt of gratitude that Britain owes these men dwarfs the estimated 200 Pound it would cost to put them on an equal footing with our own soldiers. (The Times, 2008)

When covering the campaign, the media focused on elderly veterans who had fought in World War II and invoked the (heroic) histories of these veterans. The tabloid press in particular made the campaign into a human interest story:

Lachhiman Gurung spent four hours holding Japanese soldiers at bay alone in a trench after a grenade exploded causing him serious injury. He was heard shouting ‘come and fight a Gurkha’ by helpless injured colleagues, whose lives he saved by preventing the Japanese advance in Burma in 1945. (Daily Mail, 2010)

The photographs that served to illustrate the Gurkha Justice Campaign showed frail and elderly Gurkha veterans, often in wheelchairs and protectively held by Joanna Lumley (Roberts, 2010). On the one hand, Gurkhas were painted in all the ‘warrior’-like colours as British imperial propaganda would have done a century earlier. On the other hand, the display of their decrepit physical state sent a message of impotence, a state that required help from others. The connecting element between the two representations was the underlying message that sounded a familiar chord from the colonial past. The Nepalese warrior required British guidance and support – an image Lumley and her colleagues appeared to willingly, perhaps even strategically, employ.

The campaign furthermore benefitted from the political situation of the day in which the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats challenged an increasingly unpopular Labour government. The latter, led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, opposed granting Gurkhas residence rights, citing both financial considerations and fears of an incalculable immigration wave that such residence rights might entail. Conversely, the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives supported the demands made by the Gurkha Justice Campaign and used it to mount attacks against the deeply unpopular prime minister (Smith and Dowling, 2009). Labour’s position on the Gurkhas stood in stark contrast to what the majority of the British public deemed right. A poll in May 2009 showed that 74% believed that the demands brought forward by the Gurkha Justice Campaign should be met. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, stated,

Are there any moral principles left in this hollowed-out Government? People who are prepared to fight and die for this country should be entitled to live in this country. This is the week Labour lost its last principles: (…) and now turning its back on brave and loyal soldiers who simply want to live in the country they love and served. (UK Liberal Democrats, 2009)

The Gurkha issue also unfolded in a political context that saw Britain involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where Gurkhas, too, were deployed. Newspapers covering the Gurkha Justice Campaign drew attention to this fact and drew a direct link between the Gurkhas’ role in Britain’s past and present conflicts (Smith and Dowling, 2009):

[…] Doing right by these warriors because they were living evidence of the former glory of empire seemed suddenly very important in the context of economic collapse and a steady stream of casualties in an unwinnable war. (Ware, 2012: 12)

The Conservative Party depicted the government’s refusal to concede as a lack of commitment to British values. When David Cameron addressed members of the Conservative Party in September 2008, he said,

[…] we’re going to stop treating our soldiers like second-class citizens. […] today there are a particular group of heroes that I have in mind. They fought for us in the slit trenches of Burma, the jungles of Malaya and the freezing cold of the Falklands. […] I say to the government […]: let’s give those brave Gurkha soldiers who defended us the right to come and live in our country. (The Guardian, 2008)

Yet, Gurkhas themselves neither played an active part in the Gurkha Justice Campaign nor did Gurkha organizations appear in public debates. This, however, did not stand in the way of the campaign’s eventual success. In 2008, the British High Court granted 36,000 veterans’ UK residence rights (The Guardian, 2008). In March 2009, the Labour government had to give up on further restrictions when it lost in the House of Commons against a motion by the Liberal Democrats that called for unrestricted residence rights for all Gurkha veterans. This event can be seen as one of the most important defeats of the Labour government before it lost power in 2010.

Apart from the popularity of Joanna Lumley and her discursive strategy of linking the issue to her personal biography and thus to that of many other British families whose fathers or grandfathers had fought alongside the Gurkhas, another aspect contributed to the campaign’s success. The experiences of those who had served under British command in Asia during World War II had begun to penetrate the British public’s consciousness on an increasingly large scale. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the conflict’s end, veterans’ recollections of fierce combat in tropical jungles or of horrible suffering during years in Japanese captivity triggered responses of great sympathy and sparked renewed interest in public (Flower, 2008). The campaign also benefitted from a political window of opportunity that had opened when a Conservative opposition started to look for opportunities of applying further pressure to an already weakened Labour government.

As a consequence, Gurkha veterans were formally included in the British citizenry. However, the negotiation of their settlement rights did not constitute a challenge to apologetic or uncritical representations of British colonialism. On the contrary, public debates on the Gurkha issue reflected a reaffirmation of former colonial power relations. While the Gurkhas’ public image shifted from ‘colonial warrior’ to ‘colonial victim’ (The First Post, 2009), their overarching colonial representations persisted. Gurkhas remained passive objects of British rejection or benevolence and continued to be represented along the lines of familiar stereotypes – either as exotic figures out of the colonial fantasy or as frail old men saved by acts of British paternalism. Before the backdrop of mounting casualties in Afghanistan and in the context of a contracting British economy, the above stereotypes provided opportunities for pleasantly reminiscing about a time when Britain was still ‘great’. It also allowed for more complex ways in which the Gurkhas or indeed other non-White communities might have been identifying with Britain’s imperial past, to remain unaddressed. At a time when the British commemorative landscape at home had begun to shift and take note of the country’s colonial veterans, a more nuanced understanding of their multifaceted roles in British society past and present was largely absent (Ware, 2012). This did not mean, however, that endeavours such as the Gurkha Justice Campaign could not serve as a source of inspiration, even beyond Britain.

Abandoned British Chinese Soldiers

The success of the Gurkha Justice Campaign prompted a coalition of British military veterans in the United Kingdom, who had completed tours in colonial Hong Kong, and their former Chinese comrades from the HKMSC to commence a new right-of-abode campaign in 2012 (Chong, 2015). Britain’s release of Hong Kong to China, though celebrated as a smooth and graceful departure of the former colonial power, was anything but for Britain’s colonial soldiers of Chinese heritage who had been integral to the local security apparatus during the Cold War. Their service had bound their professional lives and even their identities to Britain and its military esprit de corps. So much so it seemed that they openly identified as British Chinese, as we will see below.

The run-up to London’s exit from East Asia had already begun to shake the belief that these emotional ties were mutual as the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Selection Scheme of 1990 failed to award British citizenship to hundreds of HKMSC servicemen. According to the campaigners, 1500 British–Chinese soldiers had thus ‘been abandoned and left’ in Hong Kong in 1997, leaving them with the feeling that Britain saw them as Chinese alone with more meaningful connections to the country they had been trained to protect Hong Kong from rather than the country whose military they had served. The campaigners’ predominant objective thus became to procure UK passports for these HKMSC veterans, following a two-pronged strategy: first, by raising awareness and building a solid basis of public support, and second, by lobbying British politicians and the press to help effect legal change in parliament (CfABCS.org 2014).

To muster popular support, the campaigners collaborated with non-governmental organizations in both the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. Among them were the HKOR Benevolent Association, an HKMSC veterans’ charity formed in December 2011, whose mission it is to provide ‘quality welfare services to needy persons, including but not limited to British Chinese soldier veterans and their family members’ but which does not fully share the campaigners’ view of the veterans’ alleged ‘abandoned’ status (HKOR Benevolent Association, 2014). In the United Kingdom, the Ming-Ai (London) Institute of Chinese Culture became an active collaborative partner. Its researchers conducted interviews with HKMSC veterans in April 2013, intended for use in a 4-year British Chinese Armed Forces Heritage project (2015–2018), funded by the United Kingdom’s Heritage Lottery Fund, and for workshops, road shows and an online exhibition, titled ‘British Legion, Chinese Dragon’, put on by the National Army Museum London (2013). According to the parties involved, these Anglo-Hong Kong efforts aimed at ‘better highlight[ing] the contribution of the Chinese, and other Commonwealth soldiers to the British Army and British military history’ in a larger time frame, exceeding that of the HKMSC’s regimental history (CfABCS.org 2014). Despite such endeavours of building archival evidence for Hong Kong’s role in the imperial defence network and exhibiting the emotional and political baggage still attached to it, public visibility remained limited and synergies could not be exploited quite as effectively as in other campaigns. Even when in November 2013 the Royal British Legion allowed for the first time a band of HKMSC ex-servicemen to partake in London’s Remembrance Day ceremony (Purdie, 2013), the anticipated boost to the veterans’ efforts failed to materialize. The campaigners, it seemed, could find no one among the broader public that their message resonated with.

In the political field, too, promising endeavours were not rewarded with the kind of success the Hong Kong veterans and their comrades in Britain had hoped for. Political support came from right-wing Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Andrew Rosindell who had just given staunch support to British World War II veterans who had served in the Arctic Circle and who felt they as well had been reduced to ‘second class citizens’ and ‘been left behind’ (Alwakeel, 2012; Rosindell, 2012). The HKMSC veterans’ case offered Rosindell the opportunity to capitalize on his newly won reputation as a champion of veterans affairs. In May 2013, he tabled an early-day motion in support of the British Chinese soldiers’ right-of-abode plea to ensure they would not feel ‘left behind’ either (Rosindell, 2013). The motion urged the British government to acknowledge

that these men and their ancestors have served British commitments in south-east Asia greatly, stood shoulder to shoulder with Britain through two World Wars as well as alongside Britain in France, Burma, Korea, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and the United Nations for King, Queen and country; and call[ed] on the Government to recognise that the decision not to have asked each serviceman to freely transfer their nationality from British-Hong Kong to Hong Kong-Chinese was unjust and an error that should be rectified. (Parliament.uk, 2013)

The identity narrative pushed by the HKMSC veterans that thus entered the political stage in Britain was not only based on claiming a reimagined imperial identity, it also relied on presenting Hong Kong in a way not dissimilar from images conveyed in previous campaigns by former colonial soldiers, such as the one led by Jack Edwards in the 1980s/1990s. It painted a picture of a highly uncertain future of the territory because of growing mainland Chinese influence. In 2013, the potential failure of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong served as further justification for seeing Hong Kong’s future jeopardized by Beijing once more. On the occasion of the 16th anniversary of the ‘handover’, Emily Lau, chair of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, publicly warned that the local democratic process, as codified by the Basic Law, might be rolled back altogether by an increasingly oppressive and untrustworthy Chinese regime (Lau, 2013).

A year later, such fears were greatly amplified when an unofficial pro-universal suffrage referendum held in Hong Kong prompted Beijing to clearly dismiss any prospects of allowing a fully democratic election process in the near future. When subsequent mass protests were violently dispersed, many media outlets were quick to report on the events by evoking comparisons with the Tiananmen protests in 1989 (Hoyng and Es, 2014; Lian, 2014; Lim, 2014; Mok et al., 2014).

The pro-democracy movement and its favourable coverage by the local and Western media thus provided the backdrop for the HKMSC campaigners to give their cause a sense of urgency and rootedness in political reality. Public comments by Anson Chan, former chief secretary in both the British and the SAR government of Hong Kong, further bolstered the campaigners reasoning that, even a decade and a half after the ‘handover’, Britain still had responsibilities towards Hong Kong (Chan, 2014). Combined with the upcoming British general elections of the spring of 2015, another political opportunity promised to bear favourably on the HKMSC campaigners, like similar events had done in 1997.

However, when in March 2015 MP Rosindell managed to bring to discussion in Westminster Hall the case of the HKMSC veterans, none of the above factors appeared to aid in his efforts, and the House of Commons rejected the veterans’ demands (Westminster Hall, 2015). The right-of-abode claim, run primarily on emotional appeal, was shut down on legal grounds by British Immigration Minister James Brokenshire who insisted that ‘[i]t has been long established practice in British national law for British Nationality to be lost when a country ceases to be a UK territory’ (Fung and Ng, 2015). The HKMSC campaign is still ongoing and it remains to be seen whether framings such as the above will, in the end, contribute to a successful conclusion of its bid for UK passports. However, it suggests that the alignment of favourable circumstances at a particular point in time might not be sufficient for resulting in a campaign’s success.

The HKMSC veterans’ efforts indeed point us to the many complexities of working through imperial memories and of decolonization’s present-day ramifications that complicate our analysis. The negotiations of both postcolonial British and Hong Kong identities come together in the right-of-abode campaign. The HKMSC veterans can be seen as having been caught in between different opportunities for identification that either did not hold currency for them or were inaccessible by definition. They, like many other Hong Kongers, did not identify as Chinese nationals, which they had automatically been made by the People’s Republic of China following the 1997 ‘handover’. Identifying in disassociation to mainland China instead evidently collides head-on with Beijing’s understanding of Hong Kong’s postcolonial status and the role of its ethnic Chinese majority population (Carroll, 2006; Vickers, 2011; Watson, 1998). Thanks to the legal redefinition of British citizenship around a notion of ‘White Britishness’, coupled with present-day fears of foreign immigration, the HKMSC ex-servicemen were also denied the opportunity of becoming British nationals. By tying their self-image to an imperial value canon through their military service, they provide us with an example of identity formation that has been complicated by clashing with both Britain’s and China’s understanding of what a postcolonial society is supposed to look like.

That previous right-of-abode campaigns by colonial veterans did, however, result in the latter being accepted into the community of British citizens can be seen as Britain slowly but, still reluctantly, re-evaluating its self-understanding as a post-imperial nation and confronting some of the long-term effects of decolonization at home. For the HKMSC campaigners, however, this re-evaluation has not yet translated into palpable effects, which maps out the long road ahead.

Conclusion

Having examined these colonial veterans’ mobilizations through the lens of the relational fields approach shows that an interplay of several factors encouraged the emergence and – at least in two cases – the success of such endeavours. Historic institutions, in this case British colonialism and its specific military arrangements, provided the general legitimizing framework on which veterans built their demands. Contingent events proved essential for creating a basis that could resonate with the broader public and the political hierarchy of the day. Hong Kong’s ‘handover’ to China in 1997 produced windows of opportunity that opened because political decision makers had viable interests in handling the aforementioned event in a smooth and respectable manner. Support by influential allies and the media ensured that this event could be fully exploited for its potential to resonate with the public and politicians.

However, the analysis would not have been complete without having accounted for the role of memory. The three cases enabled us to obtain a closer understanding of the workings of memory as a mobilizing factor. The ex-service activists and their champions strategically used staple images from cultural memory, enriched by pieces of biographical memory, as framing devices to make their demands resonate with a wider public. This could, however, only be effectively exploited if there was indeed a public that was emotionally invested and political actors who could advance their own agendas through engaging with the veterans’ cause.

In this context, the transition point from communicative to cultural memory brought with it intensified memory-making and memory-remaking processes. These processes proved to be important for the mobilizations of colonial veterans who also utilized the impact of general shifts in society’s cultural memory to legitimize their efforts. Even though not all right-of-abode campaigns by Britain’s colonial ex-servicemen have achieved their aims (yet), our analysis indicates that employing the past as a resource can indeed significantly aid these actors in mounting meaningful political action.

Despite their historically marginalized position, these colonial veterans can no longer be perceived as being on the margins of political action in general or the politics of memory in particular. Yet, while seemingly aiming to reverse a predominantly White-centred notion of ‘Britishness’, the campaigners actively fell back on and evoked a romanticized image of Britain’s imperial past for their own purposes, fuelling and perpetuating this image in public at the same time, sometimes inadvertently so. This allowed them to make successful forays into the relevant political decision-making processes by generating favourable responses among a target group for whom such images – of the benevolent British colonizer, on the one hand, and the grateful loyal non-White subject, on the other – were still relevant. As a result, certain colonial veterans have achieved significant political success and a new level of inclusion into British society by winning UK citizenship. However, this achievement came at the price of their continued stereotypical representation in the British public sphere, familiar from colonial times. Paradoxically, the memory of colonialism is thus being challenged by a reaffirmation of empire.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Barbara Laubenthal’s research for this article, in particular the Gurkha case study, was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the framework of the research project ‘Reparations for colonial soldiers in France, Great Britain and the United States: National movements and transnational dimensions’. She thanks the DFG for their support. Daniel Schumacher conducted research for this article under the umbrella of the ‘War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership’ (WARMAP), which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Author biographies

Barbara Laubenthal is DAAD Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She was the director of the international research project ‘Reparations for colonial soldiers in France, Great Britain and the United States: National movements and transnational dimensions’, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Her research interests include memory politics in Europe and the United States, and European immigration policies.

Daniel Schumacher is Associate Fellow at the Centre for Public History, University of Essex, where he currently coordinates the Leverhulme project ‘War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership’ (WARMAP). His research interests include global/transnational and public history, transcultural education and the history of memory politics in East and Southeast Asia. His latest book (co-edited with Stephanie Yeo), titled Exhibiting the Fall of Singapore: Close readings of a global event (NMS, 2018), brings together academic and curatorial perspectives on World War II in Asia.

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Colonial memories and transnational mobilizations: Asia’s colonial veterans and their struggle for British citizenship,c. 1980–2015