Ethnic Minorities, Media and Participation in Hong Kong

Creative and Tactical Belonging

Lisa Y.M. Leung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367439200
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000343120
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Second and third generation South and Southeast Asian minorities in Hong Kong, being marginalized from mainstream social and political affairs, have developed an ambivalent sense of belonging to their host society. Unlike their forefathers who first settled in Hong Kong under British colonial rule, these younger generations have spent their formative years in the territory. As such, they have increasingly engaged in the public and political realms of society, partly in response to the territory's rapid political changes. Leung discusses and analyses the complex and diverse engagement of migrant and minority youths in Hong Kong - and their struggle for recognition, while desiring to 'be-long' to a place they call home. Some are joining the calls for democratic changes in the territory. In particular, she argues that much of this struggle can be seen in minorities' involvement in creative sectors of society.

While it will be of especial interest to scholars with an interest in Hong Kong, this book presents a compelling case study for anyone interested in the dynamics of migrant and minority engagement in the creative sector as a strategy for engagement.

1Introduction

Situating ‘South Asian minority’ in Hong Kong

Arjun Singh, an 11-year-old Hong Kong-born Indian, was in the Wanchai MTR station one day in 2010 when he was suddenly grabbed by a Chinese woman, who accused him of knocking into her whilst walking up the escalator. An argument broke, and both parties called for the police. But while the woman was not arrested or investigated, Singh was detained at the nearby police station for several hours because the police had to wait for a Punjabi interpreter, although Singh repeatedly told them he understand English. When his predecessors would have just stayed angry but silent over the ordeal, Singh decided to file a complaint against the police to the Equal Opportunities Commission Hong Kong of racial discrimination, on grounds that the police have failed to provide adequate services. After a 6 years' wrestle with the authorities, the District Court finally issued a judgment on May 30 in a racial discrimination case against the police.¹

This is one of many incidents that could happen to South Asians on any given day in Hong Kong. But unlike those other cases, this is the first-ever case where the complainant, the young teenager at the time of the incident, filed a complaint and actually won. Since the passing of the Racial Discrimination Ordinance in 2009, South Asians – as ‘ethnic minorities’ (EMs) in Hong Kong – have finally been able to voice out against ‘discriminatory acts'. However, even the passing of that Ordinance – itself contains many loopholes, has not been doing enough justice to the all too many facets of unfair treatment bestowed upon the minority communities over the years. South Asians have had a long historical presence in Hong Kong, yet many have been marginalized from mainstream society. Often times, rather than the structural forms of discrimination, it is the daily inter-cultural experiences that ‘ethnic difference’ is asserted, where boundaries of identities could manifest in a chancy daily encounter. From small acts of ‘un-recognition’ to the pinching of the nose, somebody not taking the seat next to you on a crowded MTR or the shouting of ‘go home Paki!’ are some of the sights, sounds and smells of marginalization, exclusion and denial of one's belonging/rightful membership in the territory. But dissimilar to migrants, second–third generation EMs find themselves ‘stuck’, cornered, in time and space that they are not allowed to belong to, a place they have known all their lives and developed feelings for, and hence rooted in. This is essentially the case of second to third generation South Asian youths in Hong Kong, whose forefathers have settled in Hong Kong since early British rule, yet their qualification for citizenship is as indeterminate as ever. One may not be qualified for an HKSAR passport, even one has spent most of their formative years in Hong Kong.

As such, these EMs have had to develop tactics to ‘make do’ with everyday contestations of identity and belonging, which could occur at different moments and different layers of public life, from the every day to more fundamental and structured government measures of non-recognition/neglect and denial. ‘Tactical belonging’ ranges from passive linguistic or behavioural practices to negotiate the situations, hoping to resolve the predicament, more progressive forms of activism to visibilize, protest, or shout in the face of the majoritized ‘Other’. Over time, minority communities have accumulated and turned these practices into skillsets and methods to survive. Those experiences have also been internalized into a system of logic and mentality guided by intrinsic universal values of justice, equality, and even maximalist ideals of harmony through racial diversity. Apart from having to fight for equal political, cultural and civic rights, EMs are facing up the hard wall of racism, one of the essentialist notions based on fundamental corporeal distinction of human species, which could manifest itself at the chanciest of situations, but persist through time and space … For EMs, then, ‘tactical belonging’ is situationally conditioned, flexibly methodized, yet organizable and fathomable to become fundamental knowledge, mentality, or a life attitude. The repertoire of ‘belonging’ is textual yet kinetic, filled with nuanced dynamics and contradictions, oscillating between resisting while desiring. Minority tactical be-longing, hence necessitates the adoption of ‘fluidity’ in articulating and examining the dynamics as well as nuances of the tactical be-longing employed by EMs in their struggle for as well as expression of citizenship in the host culture.

Apart from more cultural forms of expression, the younger South Asians, being born and/or raised in Hong Kong, have become more assertive in struggling for their deserved rights. In recent years, as many socio-political problems have re-surfaced, these EM groups, an increasing number of younger members who are either born or grew up in Hong Kong, engage more actively in political social action.² During the Umbrella Movement in 2014, as the territory experienced a 79-day political movement, a group of South Asian youths marched every night through alleys within the occupied spaces outside the government headquarters. While the Chinese protesters looked on, they shouted slogans ‘We want Universal Suffrage’, ‘Don't forget our original intention!’, but also carried a banner with words such as ‘We are Hong Kongers!’, and ‘Hong Kong is our home (leave us alone)!’³ The group of around 7–8 youths, compromising Indians, Pakistanis, and Filipinos, may not be representative of the entire South Asian community, but they did shout loud and clear of the voice of many EMs in Hong Kong. Having been marginalized from mainstream social and political affairs, many second- to third-generation South Asians have developed an ambivalent sense of belonging to the host society. But unlike their forefathers (who have first settled in Hong Kong since the dawn of British colonial rule), they have chosen to engage in public and political realms of the society in recent years, to join their fellow Hong Kong citizens to struggle for a better future in a place they call home, yet they want to make themselves visible as ‘Hong Kong citizens'.

The struggles of South (East) Asian minorities in Hong Kong for equal rights and recognition have been a rough journey. EM communities involvement in social advocacy and activism in Hong Kong has only recently become an emergent phenomenon. The supersonic advancement of media technology has seen South Asian youths, being second-, third-generation residents in Hong Kong, come forward to organize advocacy work, especially during the Umbrella Movement in 2014. EM youths, being media savvy, have been capitalizing on the technology for creative media production, as well as a platform for voice, visible expression and protest. In recent years, the emergence of other youths is also seen engaging in diverse art forms as a way to just ‘talk back’ at the mainstream or target at the public audience in a bid to raise awareness on the marginalized situation of the EMs, as well as on the importance of cultural inclusion. The reasons for the ability and conviction of this rising population of EM youths could be to do with the various capitals they possess, but their agency and initiative couple those of the increasing social and political involvement – or ‘participation’ of youths in Hong Kong, who resorted to more direct forms of public protest, apart from more institutional forms of advocacy and electoral politics. The increased use of cultural and artistic practice as ‘ethno-resistance’ could also be an awareness and response to the long-held ethnic and racial movements worldwide, dated back to civil rights movement in the US, ‘black’ politics in the UK, or aboriginal/Maori movements in Australasia. Compared to more radical and direct forms of ethno-protest, it produced very different/diverse ‘effects' that could trigger direct infrastructural changes. The transformative impact on the audience, or as importantly, the actors involved, could be more internal, discursive, reflective, far reaching, diverse and effectual.

This work could not have been more timely, as at the time of writing, the world witnessed how yet another act of police enforcement (gone wrong) exposes the deep-seated and institutionalized racism against African-Americans in the US, sparking off waves of protests across the country, re-igniting the necessity and importance of globalized political movements such as ‘#Black Lives Matter’. The scale of protests goes to show that more and more people across the globe are beginning to realize the dangerous liaison between racism, which runs deeply in the veins of ‘white supremacists' and in law enforcement institutions, and the increasing signs of authoritarian governance. In fact, it is not difficult to draw parallels in contexts that appear to be dissimilar. In Hong Kong, commentaries have indeed likened the Hong Kong police indiscriminate use of violence against protesters (or bystanders and passersby) during the Anti-ELAB movement, to that in the US, while drawing reference to the rampant racial profiling and hostile handling of minority suspects. The reason why racial hostility by the police has not sparked off widespread protests in Hong Kong has a lot to do with the historical, demographic and cultural specificities of Hong Kong. But the recent outbreaks in the US have cautioned Hong Kongers to the dangerous closeness between Hong Kong and the US, in the increasing collusion between authoritarianism and racism.

This book, then, is based on my research that examined the complex and diverse engagement of migrant/minority youths in their host society – Hong Kong – to struggle for recognition, while engaging in calls for democratic changes in the territory. The book argues that they use creative (mediated) tactics to enhance their recognition, while fostering a desirable civil society conducive to cultural diversity. Unlike most scholarship around migration/multiculturalism and movement studies, this book focuses on minority agency by discussing the different (mediated) tactics of minority participation in the areas of (ethnic) media itself, as well as arts, education, social activism, with aims from survival, gaining recognition and visibility, fight for deserved justice and rights to fostering a desirable civil society conducive to cultural diversity and democratic governance. Adopting interdisciplinary approaches and research methods, it hopes to fill a much under-researched area of minority/migrant studies in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia. Combining theoretical fields such as critical multiculturalism, creativity, and participation, the book aims to forge new ways of critically reflecting on the timely theme of intercultural citizenship in the increasingly complex migratory flows in Asia. It also aims to provide contextual insight to the growing social movement and pro-democracy forces at work, at an increasingly complex political conjuncture in the region.

This project, which aims to detail the answers to these questions, is an extension of the concerns and conceptualization of an earlier work (Erni & Leung, 2014), which hopefully has laid the foundation to an overall understanding of the struggles as well as ‘tactics of cultural negotiations' of South Asians in Hong Kong. I also hope to offer new and alternative insights to sociological scholarship which stresses the ‘coping strategies' of EMs in Hong Kong. In the following, I shall begin with a critical overview of the historical, structural and social marginalization – or ‘minoritization’, as will be discussed in this chapter – of South Asians in Hong Kong.

South Asian minorities as ‘EMs' in Hong Kong – de-historicized ‘Other’

In Hong Kong, the discussion of ‘EMs' is complex because of the unique historic, cultural and ethnic set up of Hong Kong. By ‘south Asians' I refer to the three ethnicities, Indians, Pakistanis and Nepalese, and the reasons for singling them out was because of their comparatively long histories in the territory, and thus had a strong association with the territory's colonial background. A foremost look at the demography of Hong Kong reveals that ‘EMs' as a whole account for 8% of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Situating ‘South Asian minority’ in Hong Kong
• 2 Minority, media and ‘participatory performance’: Theorizing ‘minority participation’ in the Hong Kong context
• 3 Contextualizing ‘minority participation’ – Histories of South Asian engagement in Hong Kong
• 4 ‘We are more you (than you)’! Performing ‘multi-culturalism’ in ethnic minority Facebook pages in Hong Kong
• 5 Closeted love? Borders of (mediated) belonging in ‘minority radio broadcasting’
• 6 Standing up to racism: The case of standup comedy as ethno-resistance
• 7 Fashioning the ‘included-out’: Embodying Minority 
Talent and Communities of Practice
• 8 Conclusion: From minority ‘be-longing’ to majority ‘re-cognition’ – Politics of ethno-racial inclusion in the ruins
• Index