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As everyone’s probably familiar now, the Emergency Regulations Ordinance invoked by Carrie Lam yesterday to ban masks at protests was born during the 1922 Seamen’s Strike. But the idea that Hong Kong people had unique values and interests separate from China’s was also born then. 
Many of the striking seaman went back across the border to Canton, where the cost of living was lower and Sun Yat-sen’s government offered lodging and food to support them. This was so crucial to the success of the strike that the Governor cancelled train services to Canton.
It was a wake-up call for local elites. They realised their interests no longer aligned with those of their countrymen across the border. They put more faith in British institutions and adopted a HK-style patriotism that emphasised the differences between them and the mainland.
The 1922 Seamen’s Strike was the first large-scale strike organised by a modern labour union in HK, and it inspired many others—particularly the 1925 General Strike, when the inherent contradiction between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese interests became starker than ever before.
It’s ironic that a law that helped create the first stirrings of “HKness" is now being used to quash it. But in another way it’s perfectly in keeping with local tradition: those elites were pursuing their own interests, just as they are now—only these have realigned with the CCP.
