Hong Kong’s New Identity Politics

Longing for the Local in the Shadow of China

Iam-chong Ip

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000764987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Ip uses Hong Kong as a case study in how the production of the desire for "the local" lies at the heart of global cultural economy.

Perhaps more so than most places, the construction of a local identity in Hong Kong has come about through a complex interplay of neoliberalism, postcoloniality and reaction to the consequent anxieties and uncertainties. As its importance as an economic centre has diminished and its relationship with Mainland China has become more strained, its people have become more concerned to define a "Hong Kong" identity that can be defended from external threat. Ip analyses the working and reworking of power relations and modes of agency in this global city.

A must read for scholars of Hong Kong politics and society as well as a fascinating case study for scholars of identity politics as a global phenomenon.

1 Introduction

Midway along the journey of our life

I woke to find myself in some dark woods,

For I had wandered off from the straight path.

(“Inferno,” Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri)

Two turns

Should an underdog give up the fight? Let’s put aside the talk of international politics favoring China rather than Hong Kong. While the police had guns and already fired (in the Mongkok riot in February 2016), why didn’t the “rioters” run away? As a Chinese saying goes, “The commander of the forces of a large state may be taken down, but the will of a man cannot be taken from him.” Fighting requires the will to live. This could not be taken away by guns and bullets. One would not give up resistance even in a one-sided game.

(Lu, 2016, my translation)

Lu, a Hong Kong pro-nativist critic, explained why people engaged in the Mong Kok riot in 2016. He portrayed the rioters as fighters in the name of Hong Kong against the rule of China. The remarks above help paint a picture of an angry young man hurling bricks to police on the street of Mong Kok. But Lu admitted that it is a struggle doomed to failure. My question is: Why was he so keen to do something in vain or self-defeating? What Lu believes and the politico-economic setting confronting Hong Kong are not even a loose fit. They are contradictory. His words, rather than prompting me to challenge his argument or advocacy, remind me of something at odds with his seemingly “unrealistic” account of “Hong Kong.”

The early attention to Hong Kong identity was unanimously informed by a sociological conception of identity, described by Stuart Hall (1996) as a somewhat old-fashioned idea, in one way or another. It is an alignment of subjective feelings with the city in its post-war era. For example, Tai-lok Lui (2002[1997]), Eric Ma (1999), and others focus on the economic changes in the 1970s and delineate the late colonial contexts in which we derived our sense of belonging to this city from popular culture and project ourselves into a cultural identity. Murray Maclehose, who became the Governor of Hong Kong at the time, rolled out social policies, launched a massive public housing program, and set up the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Hereafter, his legacy has defined Hong Kongers’ self-understanding. Stephen Chan (1995: 24) conceptualizes Hong Kong identity, rather than as an ideology engineered by the state, as a “tacit popular acceptance of the existing regime of power” in its final years and subsequently perpetuated by the Beijing government and its proxies in Hong Kong. Other critics, despite their post-colonial and postmodern rhetorics, portray a Hong Kong identity implicit in the broader socio-cultural contexts. Rey Chow (1992: 158), focusing on an image of Hong Kong as being doubly victimized by the two dominating states, Britain and China, renders Hong Kong’s coloniality/post-coloniality a “third space,” serving as “the forefront” of Chinese modernity. Ackbar Abbas (1997) positions Hong Kong as a “non-space” or a culture of disappearance within the global cultural economy. In a more recent study, Hong Kong is posited as an object of desire functioning as a satellite city of modernity between highly developed areas and developing countries in the world (Ma, 2012). The accounts above, despite their different concerns and conceptual tools, share a discursive impetus to locate Hong Kong in an institutional or geopolitical context.

However, the notions above do not address adequately the two turning points in “identity.” The first one is about the global trend while the second concerns Hong Kong in particular. As most cultural narratives of globalization suggest, the social anchorage on which identities rest has now become more contradictory and problematic. One is tempted to summarize this process in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s famous quote: “All that is solid melts into air.” But it turns out to be much more complicated than this phrase suggests. As we are living in a society of rapid changes in pace and scope, our way of life is not simply changing endlessly and undergoing boundary collapses. Simultaneously we have become increasingly reflexive in the sense that all our previous social practices, traditions, and identities are constantly retrieved, examined, and reformulated. The political claim of identity does not fade out; instead it intensifies across the world.

The second turn is marked by the gulf between identity claims and institutional politics in Hong Kong. This gulf, rarely addressed by cultural critics, has become widened since the dramatic changes in the post-handover years: The burst of the economic bubble since the 1990s, the repeated setbacks of democratic reform, and the escalating politico-economic influence of China. These give birth to a new time consciousness, a new concept of political practice, and a new notion of legitimation. The power elites, despite their refusal to abandon the status quo in words, attempt to reposition Hong Kong by engineering a new vision of the city as a gateway to China’s state capitalism and a special administrative region tightly integrated into its national power matrix. The integration, by no means agreeable, is hierarchical and full of conflicts. The relationship between Hong Kong and China, however, is more complicated than any simple notion of “colonialism/imperialism” suggests. It is true that the elitist attempts are state-led projects of identity rendering invisible Hong Kongers’ own perspectives and group-specific experience. The city is marked out and stereotyped as the Other. Its own colonial legacy, capitalist success stories, and neoliberal subject are varloried and fed back into the imaginary of Chinese nationalism and economic triumphalism. Ironically, these projects, with limited effect in fostering political compliance, serve to generate new problems and to stake out a territory fertile of conflicts over belongings and allegiances. For the political opposition, the new consciousness means a break with the political compliance of the nature-like continuity of the status quo. It is expressed in the conviction that a new beginning could and should be made. Political practices, uncoupling the present from the past, are now understood, legitimized, and contested in terms of self-determination and self-realization, i.e. the basic features of political modernity, as noted by Jurgen Habermas (Habermas, 1996[1988]: 467). The new generation sees themselves burdened with the responsibility for the future of the city. Yet, no road map is found.

These two turns refer to the crisis of identity as a structural process in which modern identities are being “de-centred” (Hall, 1996). It is now commonplace to celebrate or bemoan the withering of individuals’ stable anchorage in the social world. This book endorses this direction but yet works somewhat differently. It is written from a position attentive to the diverse attempts to “recenter” the identity of Hong Kong. Identity becomes an issue not simply when it is in crisis, but also when it is assumed to be something worthy of longing and pursuit.

Hong Kong: minority rights

In order to examine the notions of identity in Hong Kong, I would like to take a step back and look first at how they emerged. Identity, as Zgymunt Bauman notes, is “born to be a problem” (1996: 19). The talk about Hong Kong identity, as most local scholars and critics note, came out of the socio-cultural changes of the last two decades of the British colonial rule. In the post-war years, the colonial government continued to localize the civil service, to provide homes for local people, and to expand the scope of welfare assistance and public services. Since the 1970s, the rise of local popular cultures, such as local TV programs and Cantopop, served as the major medium through which people imagine their community. The city, comparable to what “nation” or “ethnicity” means, is a more or less institutionally complete community having a given territory and sharing distinct customs, language, and culture.

In this light, one may see Hong Kong’s post-war legacy as something complicating its journey of unification with China. However, this is not simply about a community finding ways of coexisting with and respect for the central state, which is a familiar feature of many empires and modern states throughout history. It is a much more complicated historical phenomenon, surfacing on “a larger human rights revolution in relation to ethnic and racial diversity” (Kymlicka, 2010: 100). Despite its late-/post-colonial specificities, Hong Kong’s political concerns appear to follow the global trends of expanding the scope of human rights, advocating multiculturalism, and struggling for minority rights. In western countries, they are about legal and political accommodation of ethnic diversity in liberal-democratic constitutionalism, which is usually portrayed as proceeding in an orderly way. But in the case of Hong Kong, no stable political framework, not to mention liberal democracy, serves as the backbone for accommodation. The principle of “One Country, Two Systems” implies an expedient arrangement for integrating and dividing two incompatible political systems under the rubric of national unification. What we have witnessed is a process full of foreclosures, contradictions, and recurrences of minority rights.

As Ernest Gellner said, having a nation is not an inherent attribute, but it has now come to appear as such (Gellner, 1983: 6). National belonging came to Hong Kong very late. In defining themselves, the local people often said they are “Chinese” in a casual way until the late 1970s. Few thought as if national as well as local identities are part of their essential nature, not to mention their political implications. However, since the transitional period before the handover, one has been obliged to identify oneself as something greater and more serious – as a member of a home he/she recognizes instinctively and of a nation in formal sense. Hong Kongers are no longer supposed to follow the alien rule as if it was the only way to be.

Therefore, one may understand why the voices for self-determination were only confined to a handful of students or intellectuals when the political prospect of Hong Kong firstly became the contested agenda for the general public in the early 1980s. These voices were so weak that they were completely overwhelmed by the concerns about maintaining the “status quo,” i.e. the capitalist way of life and the “current system.” These concerns, informed by the interests of the colonial elites, represented the desire of evading the troubling issues of identity and political allegiance continuously. No one could convince Hong Kong people of accepting wholeheartedly the membership of the family of the Chinese nation. Instead, it only temporarily unified the classes across social divisions by providing them with a pragmatic but shaky point of identification. The political arrangements made by the British and China government were only intended to address the “confidence problems,” i.e. confidence in the continuity of the status quo.

Historically speaking, this status quo was not vividly imagined as a social and political life specific to Hong Kong people until the late 1970s. With their new and rough imagination, Hong Kongers were so ill-equipped to deal with its own political prospect. It did not lend itself to people’s political consent, not to mention deliberating the various forms of self-government. Less than a decade later, after the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed, Hong Kong people, usually termed as “residents” (jumin) rather than “people” (renmin) in official documents, were required to come to terms with the structures of the Chinese state, Hong Kong’s existing system, and its distinctive way of life. All these make up a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the future. Their individual rights and right to a “high-degree of self-government,” rather than demanded and announced in any Hong Kong’s founding moment, are supposedly “given.”

For Hong Kong’s political future, all options except national unification were foreclosed. A report published by an European human rights non-governmental organization (International Commission of Jurists, 1992) in the early 1990s, is an interesting example. It pointed out that the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the PRC was illegal because no consent of the local people was sought formally. This report and its view came far too late to have any impact on public debate and to arouse people’s interests. The graduated sovereignty (Ong, 2006), engineered by the Beijing government under the rubric of “One Country, Two Systems,” absorbed the late-colonial elites, governing techniques, and political mechanisms to facilitate a set of institutional arrangements. They function as accommodating Hong Kong’s distinct culture, a sort of self-government, and human right consensus within the straitjacket of Chinese authoritarianism. Against this background, inspired by the discourses on minority rights, the political struggles in Hong Kong continue with an increasingly strong devotion to the local.

In the post-handover years, the longing for the local has become more complicated. On the one hand, while there is little room for the city negotiating national identity, the power elites, under a different constitutional structure, attempt to maintain Hong Kong’s “colonial legacy,” i.e. its governing techniques and power mechanisms, in the name of “Hong Kong ruled by Hong Kongers,” to serve China’s project of national unification. On the other hand, Hong Kong’s farewell to the colonial rule and approaching the unification with China came alongside aspirations for self-government and the local. However, the perpetuation of coloniality within the framework of national unity, coined as “sub-imperial relationships” by some post-colonial critics (Johnson and Chiu, 2000; Law, 2009), has never allowed its dominance to be undermined by political aspirations from below. These two contradictory trends have paved the way for different agenda of making local identity.

The economic upheavals, such as those immediately after 1997 and in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008, stimulated more policy and planning initiatives for integrating the city with China, which served as rescue packages and development projects. Following these initiatives and their social consequences, there have been attempts to refashion the identity of Hong Kong as one manageable, governable and acceptable to the authorities. However, all these projects constitute a confusing imaginary geography (Said, 1990) in which the subject sees “himself/herself” mirrored in the fractured faces, in a “home” “he/she” no longer recognizes, and in a disjointed time. This is the first time for Hong Kongers to live in the condition of modernity characteristic of a strong affection for their “home” (Giddens, 1990: 18). In the opposition camp, all these spur the new generation of political activists on to bring up the issue of Hong Kong’s political autonomy again and again in the campaigns for democratization and even self-determination. An emerging mode of political talk and action that postulates popular sovereignty and constituent power resulted in serious conflicts with the sovereign power of the Beijing government (Ip, 2016b).

It is one of the clichés that the local comes under siege. Locality is perceived as a passive and fragile homestead as an achievement of restoration against various kinds of odds. This perception perpetuates an endemic sense of anxiety and insecurity. The political project under the rubric of “Hong Kong” embodies a sense of belonging to a territory as well as a body politic. Yet, most take it as an outcome or a given fact rather than as moments of localization, i.e. the spatiotemporal production through complex ritualistic practices of performance, representation, and action (Appadurai, 1996: 180). It is substantially a process of locality building. It includes producing reliably local subjects as well as a structure of feeling under conditions of anxiety and uncertainty, through which such subjects recognize and organize themselves. This is the major theme of this book.

Neither inside nor outside China

Hong Kong’s eccentric position within the wider framework of modern Chinese nation, in particular, contributes to a special structure of feeling. The city’s journey of national unification defies not only the organic view of nation as something grounded in common language, shared history, and folk culture, but also Ernest Renan’s view of nation as a political entity pursuing the common legacy of memories and a commitment to go on together (Renan, 1990: 19). Yet, unlike many disparate cultures, Hong Kong was not unified by violent conquest and the following forcible suppression. Neither does “Chinese” culture consist of an equal partnership between Hong Kong and the Mainland. Instead, the city institutionally and imaginarily occupies a space neither inside nor outside the nation-state. The Beijing government, apart from holding on to its “graduated sovereignty” in the name of “One Country, Two Systems,” relies on double formulations to accommodate Hong Kong in the imaginary of Chinese unity: the quasi-ethnic or historical origin of Chinese nation and the gradual “melding” (ronghe) of Hong Kong and the Mainland into a capitalist-developmentalist future. Yet for Hong Kong, the national imaginary has never been free of counter-collective memories and political feuds.

Hong Kong’s involvement in the major events of modern Chinese history, ranging from the Opium War, anti-Manchu campaigns, Xinhai revolution, political agitations against western imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century, often cited by pro-China scholars, do not eradicate the city’s colonial legacy. More ironically, it is deemed by China’s patriotism as national humiliation, on the one hand, and imperial statecraft transposable to the Chinese state and the local elites for governing the city, on the other (Law, 2009: 173). The cold-war memory of Hong Kong as a settlement for refugees escaping from the current Chinese regime during the political campaigns in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, an unpleasant shared history, still lingers in the minds of the local people and the Beijing government as well. For the latter, there is also very much a confusing picture of what Hong Kong was and is. In Mao’s period, the city was depicted as a corrupted capitalist society, yet a window to the West subject to the Chinese Communist Party’s “long-term planning and full utilisation.” After Deng Xiaoping came to power, Hong Kong’s post-war economic success served as a model for China’s economic reform, but sometimes in political controversies the city is often portrayed as a base used by the “foreign forces” to contain China, if not to overthrow the regime. Given the contested memories not to be forgotten and Hong Kong’s problematic national identity, an allegiance to a more unified national identity could barely begin to be forged.

The modern nation, as Timothy Brennan (1990) notes, refers to making a connection between a vaguely defined ancient past and a community of local belonging. In the case of Hong Kong, these two halves of the equation never come together. For many locals, the Chinese nation never feels like home. Likewise, local identity, neither simply a strategic retreat to more defensive position nor a return to the past, is subject to the play of history, politics, and difference. The loosening of strong allegiances to the national culture, in most western countries, usually came as the outcome of globalization. But it is not the case for Hong Kong. The problem of national identification has loomed large since the 1980s. However, the sense of what it is to be Chinese can never have a straightforward answer or consensus. And the new interest in the local is much more a reaction toward the national than the global.

The oddity of Hong Kong is further reinforced by its socio-economic achievements in its late colonial period. Since the 1980s, Hong Kong’s economic success, l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The fall of the Hong Kong Myth
• 3 The city of jiyu/geijyu: refashioning a neoliberal subject
• 4 Ethnocracy: a study of the campaigns against mainland Chinese visitors
• 5 Defending the city: nativism and political existentialism
• 6 Neoliberal populism: ethnicization of right-wing economics
• 7 Poised between two times: young men, temporality, and identity politics
• 8 “Hong Kong is not a dream”: disengagement, translocality, and gangpiao
• Epilogue: will to power
• References
• Index