At Christmastime I was in England and took my daughter to see a pantomime performance of Aladdin. Pantomimes are rare in Hong Kong.

The production was replete with the appropriate Brookside and Coronation street soap stars so necessary to achieving a full house. Unlike the Disney cinema version of Aladdin, the pantomime is traditionally set in China.

The production I must say was disappointing. It reproduced all the old stereotypes and cliches about China and Chinese people. There was, of course, Widow Twankey's wishee washee laundry. Widow Twankey, by the way, got her name from a brand of Chinese tea marketed in England in the nineteenth century, and the laundry harks back to the pre-War image of John Chinaman and the local laundryman immortalized in George Formby's Mr. Wu. Apart from a rendering of Formby's Chinese Laundry Blues, there was a liberal sprinkling of "Chinese fourths", the musical pattern that western musicians have used to musically suggest Chineseness for over a hundred years.

And then there were the jokes - the bad puns based on English perceptions of the Chinese language. One that sticks in my mind, as it must have done in everyone's, was about the overweight Mrs. Wong, the woman with more chins than the Peking phone book. Earlier in the day I'd noticed in Blackwell's bookshop a 1997 omnibus reprint of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories; so popular in the first half of this century. TIME OUT's critic declared in the blurb that the reprint had made "his heart sing" and he hoped new generations would discover the joys of reading about the evil Oriental Fu Manchu.

It's ONLY popular culture you might say. But that's just the point. It's precisely because it IS popular, that so many people absorb it, that so many people get their ideas about the world from it. To satirize and represent Chinese people in these simplistic ways, lodges such perceptions and clichés in the mind of the British public. Later that evening I was listening to Radio 4. It was the special end of the year edition of the news quiz programme. I was somewhat shocked to hear yet another Chinese pun-joke from such an august source. The joke focussed on the recent Hong Kong stock exchange crash. The spoof news item claimed that a correspondent reported never having seen chins so low on the floor of the exchange, but then Chin So Low stood up, and said it wasn't the first time he'd fallen down.

Attention was also paid to Hong Kong at the end of the year in Britain's quality newspapers. Avian flu, bird influenza, which led to the slaughter of Hong Kong's entire chicken population was the big news item. But I noticed that the story gradually became meshed into that other Asian story - the stock market collapse and the way it was being represented. Like a new Yellow Peril, Asian stock troubles were already being described as a contagion. And then on top of that there came the chicken 'flu. Suddenly contagion was everywhere. The West, it seemed, was under threat from the East. The Asian economic miracle had succumbed to a deadly virus. When capitalism in Asia succeeds it is described as a "miracle", and when it fails it is a fearsome disease, a contagion.

Here in Hong Kong people have taken the collapse of regional markets seriously too. After all, people are being laid off work. The impact of the economic collapse has overshadowed what some people expected to be "post-handover blues". How has all this affected local culture? Well, since Hong Kong culture, just like culture in Britain, is mainly to do with the consumption of the popular, the effect has been profound. Under British rule, Hong Kong was successfully turned into a consumer society, a shopping culture. When I ask my students at the university what their favourite pastime is - the answer is almost unanimously: shopping. Singing along in karaoke bars comes in a poor second. Culture then in very late twentieth-century Hong Kong, just as in the UK, is for most people not about the opera or the symphony - we have those in Hong Kong, but ticket prices are exorbitant and only the professional classes attend in large numbers. Culture is about the popular. My students listen to music, of course. Cantopop, local pop groups, one or two even follow the alternative rock groups. But for most people culture is about the everyday - and chart hits, TV, shopping are all a part of the everyday.

Last year before the handover, I asked my students to write some poems about Hong Kong, how they saw Hong Kong's culture, their memories of Hong Kong, what made Hong Kong, Hong Kong for them:

One student, whom I shall call M.L., wrote the following poem,

After all, sentiments, memories, and their cultural expression in Hong Kong are quite similar to yours in Britain. So maybe it's about time for British people to put aside the silly jokes, to silence the echoes of Yellow Peril contained in metaphors of contagion, and to stop reprinting the offensive Fu Manchu. It's time to think again about cultural representations of the Chinese, and to start depicting Chinese people, China and Hong Kong differently. After all you should know the reality well, you were here for long enough.