CO129-595-1 Anti-British feeling in China- memorandum by J V Braga 15-2-1946 - 15-8-1946 — Page 22

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pride the balm of appearing to ignore the slight. Instead, he may

politely lie, saying he admires and respects the English people, and

has no personal dislike for them; or he may attempt to prevaricate,

professing to have had too few contacts with British people to express

an opinion; or he may admit his dislike for the British people, giving

as his reasons the time-honoured grievances of the exclusion of Chinese

from residence on the Peak, the fact that Hong Kong is in British hands

at all, and so on, though inwardly he knows oftentimes better than his

questioner that these grievances are almost groundless and are often

merely & weapon used by overzealous 'patriots', propagandists, politi-

cians and political adventurers, and having nothing to do with the

genuine dislike.

Having in mind the incident at the bank to which I have just

referred, in course of conversation with a group of Asiatic bank clerks

some months later, I asked them how they were treated by their European

superiors. One of their number expressed this opinion, with which the

others concurred: "The 'big bosses' are, on the whole, true and court-

eous gentlemen, who treat us with kindness and consideration. The

'aneller bosses', with whom we come into contact daily, are not all

quite the same, The men who come out fresh from England are without

exception very gentlemanly in dealing with us local hands, but within

a year they begin to change and within two years the majority of them

get to be so overbearing that we simply fear and hate them. The

English 'small bosses' transferred from India are, as a rule, the

worst of all

J

they treat us like dogs. Our pals in the Dutch and

the American banks are treated by their bosses, no matter how long