Lost in Transition

Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China

Yiu-Wai Chu

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438446479
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

In this timely and insightful book, Yiu-Wai Chu takes stock of Hong Kong's culture since its transition to a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China in 1997. Hong Kong had long functioned as the capitalist and democratic stepping stone to China for much of the world. Its highly original popular culture was well known in Chinese communities, and its renowned film industry enjoyed worldwide audiences and far-reaching artistic influence. Chu argues that Hong Kong's culture was "lost in transition" when it tried to affirm its international visibility and retain the status quo after 1997. In an era when China welcomed outsiders and became the world's most rapidly developing economy, Hong Kong's special position as a capitalist outpost was no longer a privilege. By drawing on various cultural discourses, such as film, popular music, and politics of everyday life, Chu provides an informative and critical analysis of the impact of China's ascendency on the notion of "One Country, Two Cultures." Hong Kong can no longer function as a bridge between China and the world, writes Chu, and must now define itself from global, local, and national perspectives.

1

Introduction

After the End

In 1995, Fortune wrote a cover story for its international editions entitled “The Death of Hong Kong,” claiming that “the naked truth about Hong Kong's future can be summed up in two words: It's over.”¹ Different from most, if not all, of the postcolonial regions in the world, Hong Kong has a unique postcolonial history of its own. In its colonial days, long before 1997, Hong Kong had already enjoyed great economic prosperity, deemed by many as having surpassed its colonizer. Some would thus say that Hong Kong had actually entered its “postcolonial” period in the 1980s. However, while other former colonies (re)gained their independence after their colonial history ended, Hong Kong reunited with its motherland, China, after 1997.² In fact, Hong Kong had been under the shadow of “1997” for almost two decades before its reversion to China. One of the major watersheds was arguably Lady Margaret Thatcher's infamous slip on the steps in front of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 1982. Before the slip, Lady Thatcher had a heated exchange of ideas with Deng Xiaoping, the late leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC), in the Great Hall of the People regarding the future of Hong Kong. Deng made it very clear that Hong Kong's return to the motherland on July 1, 1997 would not be compromised, and the Iron Lady was reportedly so taken aback that she tumbled down the stairs upon leaving. Immediately after the incident, the real estate and stock markets dipped as Hong Kong's fear of its end in 1997 eventually came to the fore. After the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, in which the United Kingdom's government affirmed that it would hand over Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China with effect from July 1, 1997, Hong Kong's culture was obsessed with China on the one hand and fin de siècle on the other. The innovative “One Country, Two Systems” concept proposed by the late Deng Xiaoping served to soothe the anxieties of Hong Kong people, but the populace had grave doubts about whether this could be realized, and thus 1997 was seen by many as the “end” of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong did not die in 1997. To the surprise of those who had no trust in Deng's experiment, 1997 was, in a sense, anticlimactic. People expected dramatic changes, but the “unchanged for 50 years” slogan proved to be realized—at least in the first few years after the handover. As aptly put by Allen Chun, 1997 turned out to be “a year of no significance”:

The ritual façade of the handover has marked the fictive significance of 1997, and the fiction of Hong Kong's autonomy in a meaningless ideological framework has reset the clock again on its eventual integration with the mainland…. In Hong Kong, embrace of the motherland has instead refined institutional capitalism to new heights.³

However, after 1997, Hong Kong witnessed a dramatic change in its attitude toward its motherland. The economic downturn in 1998 and 1999 shattered Hong Kong's myth of economic success, putting Hong Kong people in dire straits in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis. Perhaps for the first time, as noted by John Erni in a special issue of Cultural Studies published in 2001, the people of Hong Kong found their rescue through the Chinese polity: “At the end of the (postcolonial) day, the unfolding but parallel events of nationalization and economic hardship co-stage a fuzzy historical vista.”⁴ In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, many Hong Kong people willingly turned to their motherland, not because of the Hong Kong government's edification of national consciousness, but because of China's surprisingly swift economic growth in the new millennium.

In his account of Hong Kong culture, Ackbar Abbas makes an inspiring point about “the end of Hong Kong.” He argues that Hong Kong in 1997 “inaugurates an intense interest in its historical and cultural specificity, a change from the hitherto almost exclusive fascination with its economic success,” and thus Hong Kong culture “is very precisely a culture of disappearance because it is a culture whose appearance is accompanied by a sense of the imminence of its disappearance, and the cause of its emergence—1997—may also be the cause of its demise.”⁵ According to Abbas, the (dis)appearance of Hong Kong culture cannot be separated from the events of 1997. Hong Kong disappeared from a fixed definition through the duality of East/West and tradition/modernity. If Abbas's Hong Kong is a stimulating account of Hong Kong culture at and before 1997, Leo Lee's City Between Worlds is the best description of Hong Kong culture at the tenth anniversary of Hong Kong's reversion to China. While Lee's book does not focus on high theory, his more “pedestrian” way of presenting Hong Kong articulates new dimensions that cannot be fully captured by the “disappearance” model. As convincingly put by Lee at the beginning of the book, “Abbas's observations were extremely perceptive at the time, especially about the West's images of Hong Kong. But more than ten years after the handover, perhaps they need to be revisited and updated.”⁶ In a conference entitled “After the End: Hong Kong Culture after 1997” held at The University of California, Los Angeles, in May 2001, Abbas noted in his “After 1997; or ‘What do we do now, now that we're happy?’ ” that “the relationship to China can no longer be oppositional in the old way,” and “we seem to be moving away from a politics of opposition and binary relations, to a ‘dispersed politics’ without a clear scenario.”⁷ It is important to theorize post-1997 Hong Kong by placing the emphasis not on binary relations but on “dispersed politics” outside the box of the China-West framework. To borrow the words from the aim of the “After the End: Hong Kong Culture after 1997” conference, it is important to “theorize and substantiate the ‘after’ by not only asking the question of what comes after 1997 and why culture takes a certain turn, but also asking what is at stake in using 1997 as the temporal demarcating line.”⁸

As the fifteenth anniversary of reversion to China is already behind us, it is necessary to avoid being trapped by 1997, and to examine Hong Kong from new perspectives. While Hong Kong's distinctive colonial history can be used to account for the characteristics of its culture before 1997, its relation to China, the most swiftly developing economy in the world over the past decade, has introduced a paradigm shift. The important point is that Hong Kong has been caught in a paradox since 1997: on the one hand, it took great pains to retain its status as a global city, and on the other, it cannot but lean toward China for the sake of economic opportunities. Meanwhile, the rise of China and its soft power has exerted an enormous impact not only on the world in general but also on Hong Kong in particular. When China surpasses Hong Kong in terms of capitalism, Hong Kong culture can no longer retain its special role between China and the world—at that point, China has become the world. Hong Kong's singular, ambiguous but prolific existence has changed, and the loss of “in-between-ness” fuzzes the edges, shifts the foci, and alters the shape of its cultural identity. The current flux in Hong Kong can be attributed to three factors: “writing about Hong Kong involves a triangular articulation of Chinese nationalism, British colonialism, and globalism, which also evokes the impossibility of serving three masters.”⁹ As its status and hence culture after the reversion to China have changed significantly, Hong Kong would need to redefine itself by necessity. China no longer needs to rely solely on Hong Kong as a “window” or “bridge” to the outside world. This is a key, underlying theme of this book, and it will be argued in the following chapters that the Hong Kong government failed to respond to this need. Hong Kong government has still been seeing Hong Kong as China's gateway to the world. Its lack of imagination in redefining itself has exerted very negative impacts on the recent developments of Hong Kong culture. While Abbas's argument that for Hong Kong “the cause of its emergence—1997—may also be the cause of its demise” may be valid before 1997, it is argued in this book from a different perspective: “Hong Kong” became lost in transition when it took great pains to define its international visibility. The cause of its “demise”—China—may also be the cause of its emergence in a different form.

By “lost in transition” I am not trying to say that Hong Kong culture has disappeared in the strict sense. Instead, it has changed after 1997, but the changes have by far been negative. It also has to be stated at the outset that I believe, to borrow Rey Chow's insightful argument, that Chineseness should be plural in nature: Chineseness-es.¹⁰ Hong Kong culture, together with other Chinese cultures, would contribute to the vigorous heterogeneity of Chineseness-es. Toward this end this book is intended to offer an updated account of Hong Kong culture from the perspective of a local critic, and due allowance has to be made for differences in assumptions and ways of thinking among Chinese peoples of different backgrounds. To probe into my argument further, it is necessary to revisit the famous notion of “One Country, Two Systems.”

One Country, Two Systems

As mentioned above, Deng Xiaoping proposed the famous “One Country, Two Systems” idea during the negotiations with then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Deng's highly original concept maintains that while most of China will adopt the socialist system, areas such as Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan will retain their own capitalist economic and political systems under the one-country principle. In the fifty years after reunification, the two Special Administrative Regions (SARs) of Hong Kong and Macau are expected to enjoy a high degree of autonomy and a capitalist system, and their ways of life will remain unchanged. The two Special Administrative Regions will handle their own domestic affairs, whereas the Central People's Government in Beijing is responsible for issues related to diplomatic relations and national defense. According to the Hong Kong Basic Law, “The socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years.”¹¹ In brief, “One Country, Two Systems” grants Hong Kong SAR the autonomy to be administered by Hong Kong people, and it will continue to operate under its existing systems, such as English common law. Meanwhile, “One Country, Two Systems” has created an aura propitious for the maintenance of the status quo of Hong Kong—the rule of law, a capitalist economy, etc.—under the slogan “50 years unchanged.” Although people were skeptical about whether this principle could be upheld in reality, it was welcomed by both Hong Kong people and the West in general. Hong Kong and transnational corporations agreed to keep its system unchanged—and Mainland China did not disagree with this arrangement. As pointed out by Lau Siu Kai, the Head of the Central Policy Unit of Hong Kong, “When he [Tung Chee-hwa] was considered by Beijing as the first head of the HKSAR government, both Beijing and Tung himself saw the primary duty of the job-holder to be to secure the implementation of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ arrangement for Hong Kong.”¹²

Worries about whether “One Country, Two Systems” would be upheld appear to be unfounded. Hong Kong has since its reversion been administered by Hong Kong people during the time of chief executives Tung Chee-hwa (1997–2005), Donald Tsang (2005–2012) and Leung Chun-ying (2012–17). If government officials' repeated affirmative acclaim of this idea is not enough to relieve anxieties, then independent studies should bolster its effectiveness. James Forder of Oxford University conducted a study entitled “Hong Kong—Ten Years On,” which was commissioned by John Swire & Sons, a renowned British company dedicated to conducting business in Hong Kong. He concluded in the report completed in 2007 that “One Country, Two Systems” can be “regarded as, economically, a striking success.”¹³ James Hughes-Hallett, chairman of John Swire & Sons, added after the release of the report, “We believe the report clearly demonstrates Hong Kong's unique position, both as the international finance center of Asia and at the same time as a Chinese city with a strong and distinctive British culture and administration heritage.”¹⁴ In Hughes-Hallett's view, the sui generis status of Hong Kong reaffirmed its role as the platform for British business in China. At that juncture, it is widely believed that the doomsayers were wrong.

“One Country, Two Systems” prescribes that Hong Kong will play a special role between China and the world. As Rey Chow astutely noted shortly after the handover, countries such as Britain and the United States “share with the P.R.C. the objective of keeping Hong Kong as it is, that is, as (nothing less but nothing more than) the capital of freewheeling capital.”¹⁵ Having fully embraced global capitalism for quite some time, Hong Kong is often seen as a springboard for China's entry into the global economy, but, at the same time, it must retain its autonomy so as not to become simply another city of China. In reality, it is not that Hong Kong is becoming another Mainland city but, rather, that other Mainland cities are becoming more and more Hong Kong-ized. The “two systems” has become vulnerable to changes not because, surprisingly, of the socialist system encroaching into Hong Kong but because of the increasing capitalization of Mainland markets. In this context senior government officials are seeking to bolster Hong Kong's international status, which, as they see it, will contribute to differentiating Hong Kong from other Mainland cities. When TIME coined the term “Nylonkong” in its special issue in January 2008, putting Hong Kong side by side with New York and London, the Hong Kong government was complacent with its achievements. This is in fact an extension of the notion of keeping Hong Kong as the “capital of freewheeling capital.” This, in turn, conjures up the myth of the status quo, in which Hong Kong citizens are led to believe that should Hong Kong retain the status quo after the handover, Hong Kong will continue to prosper.

The emphasis on being an international center of finance is, of course, not new. During the roughly thirty years before the handover, because of the absence of political autonomy as a colony of Britain and as a Special Administrative Region of China, Hong Kong people have come to accept a so-called “compensatory logic”; it is “because the people in Hong Kong are lacking in something essential—political power—that they have to turn their energy elsewhere, economics.”¹⁶ Due to this compensatory logic and its consequent economism, Hong Kong has been shaped as a port city that places commerce and trade at the top of its priority list. “Free market” has been one of the most widely used slogans in Hong Kong for many years. After its reunion with China in 1997, the “free market” economy is still one of its greatest assets, demarcating its special status as a Special Administrative Region from other cities in China. One might even say that because of its special status, Hong Kong has changed from being “a huge Chinatown”¹⁷ to a transnational corporation that mediates trade between China and the capitalist world. Despite its continued emphasis on economism, Hong Kong “could no longer pursue profits at the expense of patriotism” after 1997, according to Leo Goodstadt, chief policy adviser to the Hong Kong government as head of its Central Policy Unit from 1989 to 1997. Hong Kong's market and other priorities have been defined in terms of the Mainland over the past decade. As rightly noted by Goodstadt, “While the community had an abiding concern for political autonomy, economic autonomy was slipping away, almost unnoticed.”¹⁸ Cultural autonomy, in this special context, would also be seriously jeopardized. The myth of the status quo secured by “One Country, Two Systems,” in this sense, is far from a guarantee of “One Country, Two Cultures.”

The Myth of the Status Quo

“One Country, Two Systems” spawned a myth of the status quo both before and after Hong Kong's reversion to China, which has significantly limited its political, social, and cultural imaginaries. The “rule of law” is often represented as the most important weapon in the defense of Hong Kong's autonomy and, hence, its future.¹⁹ Since Hong Kong had been deprived of political autonomy before 1997, a relatively independent and impartial legal system has since become the pride of Hong Kong. Facing a central government in which Hong Kong people have little faith, the Basic Law and the rule of law are being seen as the essential bulwark for Hong Kong's political autonomy and the ...