Hong Kong, China

Learning to belong to a nation

Gordon Mathews, Eric Ma, Tai-Lok Lui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134091874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The idea of 'national identity' is an ambiguous one for Hong Kong. Returned to the national embrace of China on 1 July 1997 after 150 years as a British colony, the concept of national identity and what it means to "belong to a nation" is a matter of great tension and contestation in Hong Kong.

Written by three academic specialists on Hong Kong cultural identity, social history, and mass media, this book explores the processes through which the people of Hong Kong are "learning to belong to a nation" by examining their relationship with the Chinese nation and state in the recent past, present, and future. It considers the complex meanings of and debates over national identity in Hong Kong over the past fifty years and especially during the last decade following Hong Kong's return to China. It also places these arguments within a larger, global perspective, to ask what Hong Kong can teach us about national identity and its potential transformations.

Multidisciplinary in its approach, Hong Kong and China explores national identity in terms of theory, mass media, survey date, ethnography and history, and will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, cultural studies, and nationalism.

1 The significance of Hong Kong

Many Hong Kong people in recent decades, unlike people elsewhere in the world, have lacked any sense of national identity; they have not understood what it means to belong to a nation or, to its synonym, a country. This situation is changing today, now that Hong Kong has returned to China; but while some in Hong Kong eagerly accept their new Chinese national identity, others remain skeptical of the idea of “belonging to a nation.” As Chinese control over Hong Kong grows more “natural,” will people in Hong Kong become like people elsewhere in the world, in feeling a taken-for-granted sense of belonging to their nation, or will many Hong Kong people continue to resist having a national identity? What can Hong Kong teach us about the meanings of national identity in the world today? These questions underlie this book, examining Hong Kong’s complex sociocultural relations to China in recent past and present. In this opening chapter, we set forth the larger issues at stake in this examination. Why do people throughout the world feel that they belong to their country? And how have so many Hong Kong people missed out on this belonging?¹

Hong Kong’s lack of “a nose and two ears”

Today, “a man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears,” Ernest Gellner has written. “Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such” (1983: 6). Individual Japanese, mainland Chinese, Mexicans, French, Germans, and so on may differ in the degree of conscious emphasis they place upon their national identity; but for the large majority, this national identity is, again, taken for granted. One is German or Chinese just as “naturally” as one is a man or a woman.²

However, Hong Kong has been one of the few places in the world in which Gellner’s statement has not applied. Stories abound of Hong Kong people in the 1980s and 1990s (and to a lesser extent today as well) not knowing what to write on immigration forms when traveling overseas. As one woman said to one of us in 1995 (Mathews 2000: 122), “Every time I travel to another country, I have to write down my nationality…. I have to ask the flight attendant, ‘What should I write, “British,” “British Hong Kong,” “Hong Kong,” or “Chinese”?’ For a long time I didn’t know how to properly fill out the forms.”³ But the issue transcended the filling out of forms; it was a matter of where people in Hong Kong were to belong, of what country they should feel allegiance to. Not to the distant colonizer Great Britain: most Hong Kong people felt little allegiance to Great Britain and in any case had no right of abode in Great Britain. Not to China: China was most Hong Kong people’s cultural and ethnic home, their ancestral roots; but China was also communist, a communism many in Hong Kong had fled. Not to Hong Kong itself, for Hong Kong wasn’t a country, and never could be a country, given its geographical proximity and historical linkage to China. Many Hong Kong people have thus not felt that they belonged to any country at all.

A nineteenth-century American novelist, Edward Everett Hale, wrote The Man Without A Country (1905), a story whose protagonist was a tragic misfit spending his life at sea, unable to return to the country he had renounced. Hong Kong people have, in a sense, been the collective equivalent of Hale’s protagonist (see Dittmer and Kim 1993: 5), and, like Hale’s protagonist, have been anomalies in the world. But many Hong Kong people have not realized this; they have not felt their lack of national identity until confronted by those who did possess such an identity, particularly those of their “motherland” to the north. As one Hong Kong student said in 1997, “I went to Guangzhou [a large Chinese city a two-hour train ride north of Hong Kong] for a meeting with Chinese students…. I couldn’t believe it…. Those students there – they feel proud of their country!” A newspaper columnist wrote in 1997 of how strange he felt when, at a ceremony, the Chinese flag was raised and the national anthem played: “it was more embarrassing than being in church … when everyone else is praying” (Lee 1997, quoted in Mathews 2000: 157). These statements illustrate the astonishment and incredulity that some Hong Kong people have felt over anyone’s “belonging to a country.”

But of course now Hong Kong too belongs to a country: Hong Kong, since 1 July 1997, has become part of China. The Chinese flag flutters on flagpoles beside many public buildings. Television programs show Hong Kong throngs cheering visiting Chinese astronauts, and eagerly lining up to gaze at People’s Liberation Army exhibitions of weaponry. The Chinese national anthem is played every night before the news on Chinese-language television channels; schools offer education into national identity from kindergarten onwards. Newspapers that a decade earlier expressed foreboding over the coming Chinese control of Hong Kong in recent years have offered headlines such as “‘We’re Chinese and Proud of It’” (J. Cheung 2002) and “Why it’s less the Mainland than the Motherland Now” (G. Cheung 2002). The message that “Hong Kong is Chinese” is apparent throughout Hong Kong today; there is a growing sense of Chinese identity in Hong Kong, according to some surveys (for example, G. Cheung 2002) if not to others (Hong Kong Transition Project 2002, 2005; see Chapter 6, this book, for our own sets of surveys). As one Hong Kong student told us, “I feel happy that Hong Kong has returned to China, because now I can have a clear sense of identity. Before 1997, I always felt confused, but now I can say that I’m Chinese.” It seems that many people in Hong Kong are indeed acquiring “the nose and two ears” that, until recently, almost everyone in the world has possessed except for them.

But this process is being contested by many more people, who insist that they need no such appendages; they feel they are Hongkongers, not Chinese like the people on the mainland. On 1 July 2003, the sixth anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China and officially a day of celebration, 500,000 people in Hong Kong took to the streets in protest, a protest against the Hong Kong government, but underlying this, against the sinification of Hong Kong – the Hong Kong government’s effort to enact an anti-subversion law that would make Hong Kong more like the mainland. On 1 July 2004 a similar protest took place. Pro-China commentators sometimes lament that many Hong Kong people don’t yet feel love for their country: “Since the handover … the government has spent six years trying to make young people believe they belong to the motherland, with no results…. This is like a six-year-old child who doesn’t know how to say “Mama” and “Papa”’ (L. Leung 2003). Commentators less favorably disposed towards China speak more disdainfully: “Look at the behavior and speech of those ‘patriotic people’ [in Hong Kong]. It makes other people want to vomit” (Chung 2002).⁴ Others present more nuanced views: “Top students love China but can leave the party,” states a report on Hong Kong students’ attitudes (Lai 2004): they love the country but have no use for communism. Another commentary (K. Chan 2004) contrasts love for Chinese tradition with the current fear of mainland foods coming into Hong Kong with their sub-standard and perhaps dangerous ingredients – emphasizing Hong Kong’s “First World” status as against “Third World” China.

This process by which Hong Kong people are accepting or resisting belonging to a nation or, to use its popular synonym, country is of considerable importance in its own right. How are members of one of the richest, most cosmopolitan societies in East Asia experiencing their return to the society that their forebears fled, a society that is their ethnic home but also a communist dictatorship – and a society that, within decades, will probably become economically the second most powerful country in the world? Will China become more like Hong Kong – an icon of capitalism (albeit suffering hard times in recent years), wide open to all the world’s goods, media, and information? Or will Hong Kong become more like China: more closed to the world, and more ideological; economically booming but rife with corruption?

This process is also of considerable significance beyond Hong Kong, for what it indicates about the meanings of national identity at large. Most people in the world take for granted their national identity, and thus cannot easily examine it critically; they may disagree with their country’s policies, but their subliminal feeling of rooted attachment to their country – the unexamined sense that they “naturally” belong to their country – makes critical examination difficult. Citizens everywhere may sometimes feel dislike or disdain for their government, but few ever say, “I hate my country,” or, even more strikingly, “I don’t care at all about my country.” In Hong Kong, however, because national identity is new, it is indeed often reflected upon in a critical and conscious way: pundits and ordinary citizens alike sometimes vociferously argue over the question “What does it mean to belong to a country?” with some saying that national belonging involves rediscovering one’s long-lost home and roots, and others saying that national belonging means succumbing to state propaganda. This argument in Hong Kong can shed light on the meanings of national identity throughout the world, this book contends. Let us in the following section briefly consider these meanings.

Why do people throughout the world “belong to their country”?

In a purely cognitive sense, “belonging to a country” may seem to be nothing special: people may belong to their country just as they belong to their city, province, or school; “belonging to a country” may be no more than a matter of showing a passport at border controls, with no meaning beyond such procedures. This is certainly true for some people in the world; but for many others, “belonging to a country” entails more than this. It entails not just cognitive belonging but emotional belonging: “belonging to country” may mean, for many, “love for country.” Over the past century, well over a hundred million people throughout the world have died “fighting for their country.” While some of these people were coerced, many more fought and died willingly, even eagerly, sacrificing their lives for their country. Why? How has their country been able to inspire in them such ultimate devotion? There are a number of salient identities people hold today, such as those based in gender, religion, family, and occupation – but among these, why is national identity so salient that at least some people are willing to die for it?⁵ This is a huge question, that cannot begin to be fully explored in a few pages, but a brief consideration may be worthwhile.⁶

A “nation,” as defined by Anthony Smith (1991: 14), is “a named human population, sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.” Despite the occasional claims of political leaders otherwise, “the nation” is not a natural locus of identity for human beings from time immemorial, but rather is a product of more or less recent history. There has been a lively debate over the origins of national identity: some scholars, such as Smith (1991) have emphasized the premodern background of contemporary national identities, while others, such as Gellner (1983), have emphasized that senses of the nation are products of little more than the past two hundred years.

Both views have a degree of validity. Some members of some nations have had for hundreds or thousands of years a notion of belonging to a particular ethnicity and society. This is the case for China, according to Watson, who argues that there has been for many centuries a shared sense of cultural identity embodied in rituals, such as those of funerals, practiced in the lives of ordinary people. “It is my argument that ordinary people (not just state authorities) played a central role in the promotion and perpetuation of a shared sense of cultural identity. In China, nationalism – and with it, national identity – came later” (Watson 1993: 81).

As the above quotation indicates, while cultural identity in China and elsewhere may have a long history, national identity is more recent. National identity emerged only in the modern era, Gellner (1983) maintains, when the idea fully took hold that people intrinsically belong to a nation to which they should “naturally” be loyal. “Premodern states,” writes Lie (2004: 105), “had neither the capacity nor the will to instill a common political-cultural identity…. The dominant ideology of premodern polities was the superiority of the ruler over the ruled…. National identity remained largely latent,” in that governments had little interest in unifying their members through a common ideology. National identity was catalyzed by events such as the French Revolution, whereby “the vocabulary of pride, dignity, and honor that had been the privilege of the nobility became the property of the whole nation” (Lie 2004: 118). “Belonging to a nation” apparently didn’t matter much for most people in premodern times throughout the world, in that the bonds of kinship and village, as well as to some extent religion, had not yet been loosened by modernity’s solvent. As Eriksen suggests (2002: 107), “One may perhaps go so far as to say that urbanization and individualism create a social and cultural vacuum in human lives…. Nationalism promises to satisfy some of the same needs that kinship was formerly responsible for…. Nationalism appears as a metaphoric kinship ideology tailored to fit large-scale modern society.” We see this metaphor in such terms as “motherland” and “fatherland”: the nation as one’s parent.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ideology of nationalism spread throughout the world. The nationalisms of European societies clearly differ in their historical trajectories from those of China and Japan, and differ as well from those of colonized societies such as India and Pakistan. To speak only of China,

The quest for Chinese national identity in a modern sense finally began at the turn of the [twentieth] century.... In order to cope with the wrenching ambiguities and uncertainties created by China’s encounter with the other (Western) world, to fight fire with fire as it were, the Chinese were forced to accept such Western concepts as nation, sovereignty, race, citizenship, and identity.

(Kim and Dittmer 1993: 251)

While intellectuals today in China, as well as other societies, write of their nation’s long historical and cultural tradition as justifying belonging to one’s country, the idea of attachment to one’s country seems distinctly modern.

In its early development, nationalism was often conceived of as a progressive force: “Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century republican and nationalist thinkers, blaming militarism on nobility or feudalism, had envisioned inter-national peace after the victory of the people” (Lie 2004: 131). In more recent years, however, after the terrible wreckage and inhumanity of two world wars, many analysts have come to see nationalism in a profoundly negative light: “Nationalism is the starkest political shame of the twentieth century” 1993: 57). Nonetheless, although nationalism, as an ideology proclaiming that one’s nation is the essence of one’s identity and must be valued over all else, may have become devalued in at least some critics’ eyes, senses of national identity have become thoroughly entrenched in contemporary human life as never before. As earlier touched upon, it has become increasingly difficult to imagine a people in the world apart from their “natural” belonging to the nation; we live in a world of nations, and can scarcely imagine a people not ensconced within a nation.

Senses of national identity take different forms in different parts of the world today. To mention just one pivotal difference (discussed in Chapter 7), there is a distinction between national identity as based in ethnicity and as based in civic loyalty (see Smith 1991: 11). The former refers to identity based on belonging to a particular ethnicity, as in China and Japan (no non-Japanese, whatever their legal citizenship status, will be fully accepted as Japanese if they are not ethnically Japanese; China is similar to Japan in this respect, although with its “minority nationalities” and historical tradition of sometimes incorporating foreigners as “Chinese,” it is not as ethnically exclusive).⁷ The latter refers to national identity based on adhering to civic principles: citizens’ personal choice to belong to their nation. Racism clearly exists in the United States; but nonetheless, anyone, regardless of ethnicity, who has lived in the United States for a few years and speaks English can be regarded as American, in legal status and socially as well to at least some extent.⁸

Theorists have emphasized that both these forms of identity, the ethnic and the civic, are present in every society’s senses of national identity: “Modern identities are never constructed solely out of either the ethnic or the civic models. Rather they reflect a profound dualism at the heart of every nationalism” (Jones and Smith 2001: 112; see also Smith 1991: 13). It seems clear that in discussing national identity across societies, we are discussing a common type of identity – this is what makes a universal analysis possible. In Lie’s words, “the transnational diffusion of peoplehood identity ensures that the same set of attributes, tropes, and predicates is found in all nation-states…. Chinese and Belgians, or French and Sudanese belong to the same order of entities” (2004: 157), and inspire, broadly, the same order of senses of “belonging to one’s country.” Tensions nonetheless clearly remain: if most mainland Chinese adhere firmly to ethnicity as the basis for national identity, many in Hong Kong waver between ethnic and civic conceptions, and do not fully trust Chinese conceptions of national identity, as we shall see in Chapter 7.

Why, again, do people hold to national identity? One commonly offered explanation is that it is natural to belong to a nation and to love the nation to which one belongs. Indeed, if the nation consists of all those who share one’s deep-rooted ethnic identity, or all those who share one’s deeply committed loyalty to one’s chosen nation, then love for nation or country may indeed seem akin to loving one’s mother or one’s spouse or closest friends. However, there is an essential difference. Love for one’s mother or spouse or friends is a love for those one knows; love for nation is a love for multitudes that one has never met, and has no personal relation to. The nation is an “imagined community,” in Anderson’s celebrated term, (1991), and this imagination does not come naturally but must be developed. There may indeed be a distinct psychological need for national identity, as we discuss below, but it is not natural but taught – taught by the state in its control of education and of the mass media.

The state we may define as “the administrative apparatus and mechanisms of power through which the nation is maintained.” The state has the power to tax its citizens, arrest its citizens, and educate its citizens to believe that they “naturally” belong to the nation and to the state which claims to represent it. States propagandize their citizens to believe that their ultimate loyalty should be to the nation that the state claims to represent. Despite the oft-used obfuscation “nation-state,” “nation” and “state” are by no means synonymous, even though states labor to make them seem synonymous. States try to blur the distinction between nation and state in their citizens’ minds, and at this they are often successful.

How much do citizens feel that they actually belong to their nation, as defined by their state? Inglehart and his associates (2004) show that in answer to the question “How proud are you to be [your nationality]?” 60 percent of respondents across the globe answered “very proud,” with Puerto Rico, Iran, and Venezuela at the top, with over 90 percent, and South Korea, Germany, and Taiwan – all three divided, recently divided, or politically contested societies – at the bottom, with under 20 percent. In the United States, 72 percent of respondents answered “very proud”; in China, just 26 percent of respondents answered “very proud” (2004: 380). Another question in the survey asks “Would you be willing to fight in war for your country?” Among the 54 countries in which responses are available, the median was 74 percent answering affirmatively. (Interestingly, substantially more people across the globe say they are willing to fight for their country than say they feel proud of their country.) China was among the very highest in expressed willingness to fight for country, at 97 percent; the United States lay at 73 percent; and Japan was by far the lowest of any country surveyed, at 25 percent.

It is unfortunate that, in this treasure trove of data, nothing is provided for Hong Kong, for it would have been highly valuable to be able to compare Hong Kong with other societies. In examining these data, what stands out is, first, the remarkably high rate of positive responses globally, showing the hold that “belonging to a nation” has on people throughout the world today. There is, second, the wide individual variation among countries, a variation that can be explained only in terms of each country’s particular history. Dijkink (1996) discusses how each country has its own historically shaped geopolitical vision, molding the senses of “belonging to country” that its citizens hold; Oommen (1997) provides these views for a number of additional countries. These range from Germany’s ongoing agony of guilt over World War II, as well as its subsequent split and reintegration, to the United States as a land of once limitless frontier and still extant sense of manifest destiny, to Argentina’s “peripheral dignity and pain,” as one of the world’s wealthiest societies in 1900, later a police state and still later an economic basket case.

We may add to these particular national portraits China: China’s low sense of pride in country and high willingness to fight for country are a reflection of Chinese senses of historical humiliation at the hands of the West and of Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and fervent desire never to let such a thing happen again. This is also a marker of the deep desire to reclaim Taiwan as part of China (see Lee 2001, citing surveys showing that between 82 percent and 97 percent of Chinese people favor using military force to retake Taiwan). If Hong Kong were inc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Hong Kong and Chinese
• Prologue
• 1 The Significance of Hong Kong
• 2 Fleeing the Nation, Creating a Local Home, 1949–1983
• 3 Rejoining the Nation: Hong Kong, 1983–2006
• 4 Representing the Nation in the Hong Kong Mass Media
• 5 Hong Kong Schools and the Teaching of National Identity
• 6 Hong Kong People’s Changing Comprehensions of National Identity
• 7 How American, Chinese, and Hong Kong University Students Understand “ Belonging to a Nation”
• 8 Hong Kong People Encountering the Nation in South China
• 9 Hong Kong’s Market-Based National Identity
• Notes
• References