Reluctant Heroes: Rickshaw Pullers in Hong Kong and Canton, 1874-1954

Reluctant Heroes: Rickshaw Pullers in Hong Kong and Canton, 1874-1954

by Fung Chi Ming Hong Kong University Press, $250

The title is almost the best part of this book. Reluctant Heroes does show something of the hard lives of rickshaw-pullers and incorporates interviews with some retirees. But nowhere does it show anything about men who sacrificed themselves for an ideal. Although rickshaw- pullers played an important part in the Canton Insurrection of 1927, this book gives their motives as their own economic condition and survival, rather than any humanitarian, political or national ideal, as the title suggests.

Is the rickshaw really a product of capitalist or colonialist oppression, paradoxically invented in 1867 by an American missionary in Japan, who created this means of livelihood for out-of-work men? The answer given here is that state propaganda chose to present the rickshaw as such. 'The policy to eliminate rickshaw traffic became politically correct, one that cut across the ideological divides of the two parties' (the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party). As a result, measures introduced to remove this common mode of transport meant that Canton rickshaw-pullers disappeared by the early 1950s - much earlier than those in Hong Kong.

Wong Chun-man, interviewed in 1990 at the age of 76, looked back on 50 years as a rickshaw-puller. 'Contrary to general belief, my work does not require heavy physical exertion, but a little skill,' he says.

'Pulling the rickshaw is self-employment. I don't feel being a puller has robbed me of my dignity. Rickshaw pulling was a low-status occupation, but I have no regrets at having spent my life as a puller.'