The only people Sakai didn’t want to get rid of were a handful of British bankers whom they required to oversee the transfer of economic control, a handful of medical people to help manage the deteriorating health of the city, and so-called Chinese “justices of the peace” like Old Mah, whom they needed to help administer the colony by exercising influence on the general populace. They preferred to put Chinese people, rather than British, into positions of responsibility.

Not all anti-colonial things are good, Ophelia—think about it! It matters how you get there! And it matters what you put in place after the Europeans are gone.

There were two committees—the Chinese Cooperative Council led by Shouson Chow, and the Chinese Representative Council lead by Lo Kuk-Wo, also known as Robert Kotewall. Mah was placed on the Chinese Cooperative Council. His job, along with that of thirty other men, was to convey the needs of the people to the Chinese Representative Council, who in turn consulted with the Japanese leadership, who brought directives back down to the Chinese Representative Council, who passed them on to the Chinese Cooperative Council. Both the Representative Council and the Cooperative Council then did their best to lay out those directives to the people.

Old Mah’s political sympathies, such as they were, lay with Dr Sun Yat-Sen, and after Dr Sun died, with his successor, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang. Old Mah knew vaguely that Chiang was a very different kind of man from Sun, but he believed in Chiang’s ability to carry Sun’s republican project forward. Though Mah had no interest in serving the occupation government, he was also a shrewd businessman. There was no such thing in Hong Kong as a businessman who wasn’t shrewd, because, if you weren’t, you didn’t survive. So Mah did what he could to protect himself, his family, and the Hong Kong people, in that order. He assisted in the devising of a workable rice rationing scheme. He worked with Shouson Chow to put an end to the rape epidemic that plagued the city by setting up military brothels—a far from perfect solution that really only protected women from gentry families. Like all the other so-called “justices of the peace,” he was good at protecting those close to him, but bad at protecting ordinary people.