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SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS
"To be a second-class citizen means to be needed when of any use, but to be discarded when that usefulness has expired."
Donald Yap of the Heung Yee Kuk, the New Territories District Board12
The feelings of the Chinese population of Hong Kong about British nationality are not always clear and unambiguous. This is scarcely surprising: Britishness is a colonial status, but it is also part of the identity people have grown up with. It represents quite different things to the many different groups within Hong Kong: colonial civil servants, middle-class professionals, working-class street traders, elderly people who fled from the Communist revolution, young people who are eager for change and reform. Yet within all these groups there is one common feeling: an underlying sense of bitterness and anger at the progressive devaluation of the citizenship Hong Kong people were born with or chose to acquire. 'In 1962, we had a citizenship which was the same as that of the Queen, or Mrs Thatcher... we did not change, but our citizenship did'. 13
It is not the practical effects but the emotional experience of rejection and of loss of identity which are most often stressed: 'How can they take away my birthright?'; 'I served the British for thirty years. They gave me a knighthood... now, I am nothing." Some people believe that their allegiance and loyalty have been abused the Hong Kong Association spoke of a 'deep and genuine identification of Hong Kong people with British legislation, customs and culture's; others who survived the Japanese occupation, spied for the British, held public office or were honoured by the Crown feel especially resentful (T.S. Lo, a member of the Executive Council, resigned in protest after the Agreement). But it is not only those who identified with and benefited from the colonial system who feel cheated: even people in grassroots organisations who have been
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