E30: The Hong Kong riots 1967, part 1
Working Class History
Working Class History
5.0 • 813 Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2019
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We interview to Zhou Yi (Chau Yick/周奕), Leung Po Lung (梁寶龍) and Chui Yat Keung (徐日強) who were in Hong Kong at the time, as well as Lala, an activist and historian who interpreted for us and spoke about her research.
This podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. You too can support us on patreon and get exclusive benefits like early access to episodes and bonus audio: https://patreon.com/workingclasshistory
Part 2 of this double episode is out now for our patreon supporters here: https://workingclasshistory.com/2019/07/15/e26-27-the-hong-kong-riots-1967/
Full show notes for this episode, with loads of photographs, sources and more information are here on our website: https://www.patreon.com/posts/e27-hong-kong-2-28392618
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | In the 1960s, a wave of rebellion was sweeping the planet. |
| 0:04.0 | One of the places it reached was Hong Kong, then part of the British Empire. |
| 0:08.0 | In 1967, for several months, workers in the city fought their bosses and British colonial authorities with strikes, riots and bombs. |
| 0:16.0 | This is working class history. At its height, the British Empire covered a quarter of the earth's surface, a fifth of its population, |
| 0:43.3 | and Britain has invaded or had some level of military incursion into about 90% of the world's nearly 200 countries. |
| 0:50.3 | Its death toll is truly incalculable, and its crimes are too numerous to list here. |
| 0:56.2 | But they include things like genocides of indigenous people in North America, Australia, |
| 1:01.4 | and Otero, New Zealand, enforced famines in India and Ireland, concentration camps in Kenya, |
| 1:07.1 | Malaya, South Africa. The list goes on. But in Britain, lots of people are really proud |
| 1:12.6 | of the empire. Opinion polls generally show around 40 to 60% of people, so they're proud of it, |
| 1:17.9 | with only about 15% to 20% being ashamed of it. But with the way that the empire has spoken about |
| 1:23.2 | in the press and taught in schools, it's not really surprising. Just taking myself as an example, |
| 1:29.4 | in the entirety of my education in British schools, I got one 40-minute lesson on the British Empire |
| 1:35.0 | about India. And we didn't learn about the Amritsal massacre or the Bengal famine or anything like that. |
| 1:41.2 | What we would talk about was the thing called the black hole of Calcutta. |
| 1:49.8 | So the lesson pretty much went that British people went to India to build railways and teach them how to play cricket. |
| 1:52.0 | But one day some ungrateful local ruler attacked a British fault, |
| 1:56.8 | took the people inside a prisoner and then locked them up in a small hot room |
| 2:00.0 | and causing a lot of them to die of suffocation or heat exhaustion. |
| 2:04.6 | So yes, not a very nice thing, but it was around 40 to 140 deaths. So peanuts compared to the numbers killed by the British. |
| 2:12.6 | Also, this happened in 1756, so trains and railways hadn't been invented yet, and my teacher |
| 2:19.7 | never really explained why you needed faults full of soldiers to teach people cricket. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Working Class History, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Working Class History and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.