picture was much more mixed. The KMT had few supporters left in Guangdong by the time that their government fell in 1949. Long before that many individuals had given up on the party as being hopelessly corrupt, venial and incompetent. Huge amounts of wealth had been forcibly extracted from local merchants to support nationalist causes like the Northern Expedition. Nor had the Nationalist proved to be all that effective in protecting the nation from the Japanese.

Just as in Japan the creation of a unified national identity had been one part of a larger policy in which huge amounts of wealth were transferred from the population to the government to support the building of a modern state. But unlike the case of Japan during the Meiji Restoration, it wasnot always apparent to the residents of southern China that they had gotten their money’s worth.

As we have already seen elsewhere, it is clear that a sense of Chinese nationalism did emerge in Guangdong and Hong Kong following the fall of the Qing dynasty. Yet we should probably not be too surprised to discover that by the 1950s residents of Hong Kong were facing a more complicated situation. Many of these individuals were refugees from other areas who had just witnessed a succession of national crisis in a short period of time. Other individuals were local residents who felt that their regional culture was increasingly besieged and under threat not just from the forces of modernization and imperialism, but by the recent influx of new refugees from the