ssessions twice already. Some Sindhis who abandoned everything en they fled from Pakistan went to Shanghai, which the Chinese Communist leaders promised would remain a free port; when that promise was broken they came to Hong Kong and began again. Others, who went straight to Hong Kong, lost everything during the Japanese occupation; promised war reparations and insurance payments were not made and they had to borrow money to start again. There are also a number of East African Asians in Hong Kong, people who have seen the results of Britain's refusal to honour pledges to its citizens in Uganda ('I do not want the same fate to happen to me and my family under the new government in Hong Kong'31). Such people have vivid memories of exile, and will not risk it happening to their children.
Some non-Chinese British nationals are elderly people who were prisoners of war or internees under the Japanese and who simply want security for their old age. One man, born in India while his father was in the Indian Civil Service and later permanently disabled as a result of his imprisonment in Changi jail, served in military intelligence in Malaysia and Hong Kong: 'I cannot find any good words to say about British bureaucrats as they ... deny me my citizenship after I have given most of my life in the service of the Crown'32
Many outside the business community share another distinctive characteristic: they often identified very closely with the colonial power and indeed were deliberately used in a buffer role between the expatriate British administrators and the local Chinese popula- tion. The ex-president of the Sikh gurdwara believes that 'half the Sikh community in Hong Kong are descendants of policemen and army contingents brought out by the British'33
Most Eurasians, Malays and some Indians, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, are junior clerical and public servants. They are the people potentially most at risk in the new Hong Kong. Sinisation of the civil service is long overdue and entirely right, but it means that non-Chinese public servants feel that their jobs, and the jobs they expected their children to follow them into, are at risk as promotions and vacant posts increasingly go to Chinese colleagues. The Agreement confirms that no-one will lose a job in the public sector and that 'other foreign nationals may (our italics) also be employed to serve as advisers or hold certain public posts in government departments of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region' (this excludes appointments to heads of department and
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