Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on New Findings in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Experiences of Mobility under the Colonial System: Sikh Police in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore
Yu Linhao
ABSTRACT:
The Sikh police had a strong representational role in the British imperial colonial period in the Shanghai Concession, Hong Kong and Singapore, where they themselves, as colonized people, played a role in the maintenance of the British imperial colonial order overseas. By comparing the origin, performance and action of the Sikh police in the three colonial possessions, this paper firstly analyzes the reasons for the British colonial authorities’ employment of the Sikh police as well as the process of the Sikh police’s establishment of the flow from Hong Kong to Shanghai. Secondly, using the Singaporean experience as a reference, it analyzes the commonalities, interactions and exchanges among the three places with the Sikh police as a medium, and such interactions also profoundly affect the behavioral decisions of both the colonizer and the colonized. The interaction with the Sikh police is again examined through the lens of Shanghai and Hong Kong, as a window into the “foreign” relations between Shanghai and Hong Kong during the British colonial period. Finally, it concludes with a look at the Sikh police’s post-colonial exodus from Shanghai back to Hong Kong, where they constructed local and unique life experiences and became a part of Hong Kong society.
keywords: colonization; Hong Kong; mobility; Shanghai; Sikh police; Singapore