Two Systems, Two Countries

A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong

Kevin Carrico

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520386761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Asiatische Politik

As Hong Kong is integrated into the People's Republic of China, ever fewer people in the city identify as Chinese. Two Systems, Two Countries explains why. Two Systems, Two Countries traces the origins of Hong Kong nationalism and introduces readers to its main schools of thought: city-state theory, self-determination, independence, and returnism. The idea of Hong Kong independence, Kevin Carrico shows, is more than just a provocation testing Beijing's red lines: it represents a collective awakening to the failure of One Country Two Systems and the need to transcend obsolete orthodoxies. With a conclusion that examines Hong Kong nationalism's influence on the 2019 protest movement, Two Systems, Two Countries is an engaging and accessible introduction to the tumultuous shifts in Hong Kong politics and identity over the past decade.

CHAPTER 1

Hong Kong Ethnogenesis

On June 30, 2017, hundreds traveled from across Hong Kong to a remote corner of Baptist University in Kowloon Tong to mark the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to the People’s Republic of China. In stark contrast to the festivities of twenty years prior as well as the elaborate ceremonies that would take place just twelve hours later alongside Victoria Harbor, this gathering did not celebrate but rather mourned Hong Kong’s 1997 handover.

This event encapsulated the degree of change in Hong Kong over the preceding twenty years. Andy Chan of the Hong Kong National Party, who had organized the event in collaboration with the student unions of various Hong Kong universities, succinctly summarized this shift as follows: “We disagree with the thinking of the past, and with the approaches of the past. We do not want to build a democratic China. We do not feel that we are Chinese. We feel that we are Hong Kong-ers. We don’t want to remain confined within this One Country Two Systems trap.” The ideas expressed here, reorienting matters of politics and identity away from China toward an explicit focus on Hong Kong, are so novel that they would have been unthinkable just a few short years earlier. At the time of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule in 1997, 31.6 percent of young people aged eighteen to twenty-nine identified as “Chinese in the broad sense” (meaning having a sense of Chinese identity while not necessarily identifying with the People’s Republic of China). By 2017, that number had jarringly dropped to just 3.1 percent.¹ Polling has also indicated growing support for the idea of independence: one 2016 poll found that 40 percent of respondents aged fifteen to twenty-four supported the only recently articulated idea of Hong Kong independence.² Paradoxically, identification as even broadly Chinese has plummeted precisely as Hong Kong has been integrated into China, while the once taboo idea of Hong Kong independence has found growing resonance among an ever larger group of residents.

The twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China was supposed to be cause for celebration. Chairman Xi Jinping had rented out the entire Renaissance Hotel adjacent to Victoria Harbor and was to present a triumphant speech the next morning. An ever smaller minority, however, took Xi’s boastful declarations of the success of One Country, Two Systems even remotely seriously. At Baptist University, Chan continued: “We need to tell the world that July 1st is nothing to celebrate. Rather, this is a day to be mourned. 20 years ago, the United Kingdom handed us over to a ruthless dictatorship. And from that moment, our fall began.” As if to prove Chan’s argument, the Hong Kong government had gone to great lengths to prevent this gathering from happening at all. Originally to be held at the clock tower at Tsim Sha Tsui, directly across the harbor from Xi’s hotel and the Wan Chai Exhibition Center where official celebrations would be held the next day, the clock tower area had been conveniently cordoned off for unspecified “repairs.” Threatened with arrest while setting up at an alternate location in Tsim Sha Tsui East, the event finally found a home in a remote corner of Baptist University, far removed from the symbolic center of the city. In a suitably paradoxical situation that reflects the conflicted nature of this idea in practice, One Country, Two Systems was to be defended from its critics by denying them the very freedoms of speech and assembly that One Country Two Systems had promised.

I sat among other speakers from the university student unions as Chan concluded his remarks by leading the crowd in chants. In both Cantonese and English, the crowd shouted, “Hong Kong independence,” “we are not Chinese,” and “no Chinese colonization.” As my gaze wandered to the stage’s maroon backdrop, which read “freedom from Chinese colonizers,” I thought to myself how we had all arrived here. Just ten years earlier, not to mention two decades earlier, no one would have believed that in 2017 a political party would be holding a rally to mourn the handover and advocate independence from China. The One Country, Two Systems model that, in providing a supposed solution to the “Hong Kong question,” was also supposed to provide a path forward for the “Taiwan question,” had ironically opened a reverse path of political imagining: rather than the people of Taiwan seeing hope in One Country, Two Systems as Beijing had hoped, ever more people in Hong Kong living under One Country Two Systems had instead come to find hope in Taiwan’s model of a free nation independent from China.

How exactly did this happen? Why have ever more people’s visions of themselves and their city’s future coalesced at this historical moment around the idea of a Hong Kong nation distinct from China? What can we learn about the formation of ethnonational identity by observing this process in real time? This chapter examines four theoretical frameworks for interpreting the emergence of the idea of a Hong Kong nation, tracing the formation of this identity in the interaction between political affect and logical critique of the founding myths of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

TAKE ONE: THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF IDENTITY

The first book-length English-language study of Hong Kong independence to reach library shelves was Zhu Jie and Zhang Xiaoshan’s Critique of Hong Kong Nativism, published by Springer in 2019.³ Zhu and Zhang are members of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong-Macao Studies, an official academic organization under the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of China’s State Council, about which I have more to say in chapter 3. For now it will suffice to say that, according to its own official mission statement, the association’s main objective is to “plan and coordinate research on the theory and practice of One Country Two Systems” across its three main research clusters: politics and law, economics, and society and administration.⁴ Zhu and Zhang are legal scholars who have focused their research on the emergence of the idea of a Hong Kong ethnicity and the corresponding vision of a Hong Kong nation. Their research focus is thus largely the same as my own: Why has Hong Kong nationalism emerged at this particular moment in history? And what are its implications for Hong Kong-China relations?

Zhu and Zhang’s take on these matters, however, is quite different from mine: in short, they characterize Hong Kong nationalism as at once pathological, growing out of a perverse relationship with the city’s motherland, and fundamentally impossible, taking Hong Kong down an irreversible path of self-destruction.

Zhu and Zhang analyze the development of Hong Kong nationalism from a historical perspective, dividing Hong Kong’s history into three stages: (1) a period of blurred borders and mutual exchange from 1842 to 1949, (2) a period of closed borders and growing distinction from 1949 to the late 1970s, and (3) a period of inverted hierarchy and emergent pathology from the 1980s to the present. Belying the heavily Sinocentric assumptions of their framework, each stage of Hong Kong’s history is defined solely by the city’s relationship with China, disregarding all other factors, with a particular emphasis on whether the relationship adheres to the authors’ underlying assumption of a natural pan-Chinese unity.⁵

For the first stage, from the establishment of the colony of Hong Kong in 1842 to the communist takeover of China in 1949, Zhu and Zhang portray the border between Hong Kong and China as largely open, facilitating a constant flow of people and goods.⁶ Such fluidity and openness, they argue, was manifested not only in cross-border movements but also in identity: even long-term residents of Hong Kong at the time, according to Zhu and Zhang, viewed the city less as a permanent home than as a temporary shelter from the series of tumultuous events that reshaped politics and society in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷ This argument coheres on one level with the general scholarly consensus on the flexibility of identity in Hong Kong’s first century as a colony, but this consensus is very obviously being deployed by Zhu and Zhang on another level to ignore non-national modes of identification, such as local hometown identities, thereby projecting rigid pan-Chinese nationalist assumptions back across time.

In the second stage, from 1949 to the end of the Maoist era in the late 1970s, the Hong Kong-China border hardened considerably, with both the British colonial administration and the Maoist regime enforcing border controls from 1950 onward.⁸ Zhu and Zhang’s singular focus on the border as a line between the two territories alludes to the considerably more complex identity processes produced by this border. The development of distinct visions of culture, society, and identity on either side of such a border is a natural process of community formation, but insofar as it deviates from Zhu and Zhang’s racial teleology of unitary Chineseness, these developments are labeled as anomalous. The hierarchy emerging between the two societies in this period is in their view even more disconcerting. The emergence of a distinctive Hong Kong identity coincided with the rise of Hong Kong as a major regional economic center from the 1950s through the 1970s, a period in which China itself remained trapped in the self-defeating, yet also as a result perpetually self-reproducing, cycle of political mobilization toward an imaginary Maoist utopia. Confidence in the city’s economic and social developments led to a certain pride in Hong Kong as a site of “rapid development, high efficiency, incorrupt administration, and political freedom,” which contrasted with the perpetual turmoil and poverty to the north of the border.⁹ According to Zhu and Zhang, the people of Hong Kong came to see themselves in this period as not only distinct from China but also distinctly better than China, a belief that Zhu and Zhang call “Hong Kong chauvinism.”¹⁰

In Zhu and Zhang’s third historical stage, from the late 1970s to the present, this unnatural chauvinism has been subverted by the rise of China. In 1997, Hong Kong was handed over to China, making the city “China’s Hong Kong.” And since this handover, China’s rapid economic growth has challenged Hong Kong’s status as a regional economic center.¹¹ The historical inferior now not only has higher GDP growth rates but is also the city’s sovereign ruler. Zhu and Zhang argue that as the hierarchies of the past are overturned and Hong Kong’s perceived superiority fades away, the people of the city have grown increasingly determined to repress these realities: “Mentally and psychologically, many Hong Kong residents are stuck in the middle 1980s, and they have not been prepared for all the changes that happened after 1997.”¹² This is where Zhu and Zhang trace the origins of the idea of Hong Kong independence: as a pathological response to China’s unstoppable rise. Seeking to maintain their imagined superiority relative to China yet feeling that superiority rapidly slipping away, Hong Kong residents have in Zhu and Zhang’s analysis turned to Hong Kong nationalism, which the authors interpret as little more than an angry cry of despair emanating from a city that time has left behind.¹³ The chauvinism of past eras has, in the relative marginalization of the present, mutated into pathological self-affirmation, obsessively repeated in a failed attempt to cover over its own deep insecurities amid the inexorable historical trend of China’s rise.¹⁴

Having laid the city down on the analyst’s couch to reveal its psychopathologies, the authors proceed to introduce their analysands to the reality principle: Hong Kong independence, they tell us, is not only pathological but also impossible. The arguments that Zhu and Zhang deploy in this regard are neither particularly novel nor interesting, so I cover them only briefly. First, Hong Kong’s livelihood and entire economy are reliant upon China, whether for basic supplies like food and water or for economic growth.¹⁵ Second, China will never allow Hong Kong to be independent, particularly on account of the torturous modern history of national division and humiliation that the CCP heralds itself as overcoming.¹⁶ Finally, Hong Kong independence is illegal because it violates Article 1 of the Basic Law, which states, “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is an inalienable part of China.”¹⁷ Zhu and Zhang are not aiming for subtlety here: Hong Kong independence, they tell us, is not only pathological but also illegal, impractical, and at the end of the day fundamentally impossible. This idea’s fundamental impossibility, they argue, means that it contains within itself an inevitable drift toward violence, attempting to overcome its own insurmountable failures by ever more forceful means: “In order to keep their influences and realize their separatist dreams, separatists in many countries are spreading panic and fears by street violence, arson, assassination, abduction, massive slaughter and bombing. In China, ‘Xinjiang independence’ and ‘Tibet independence’ were not accepted by the society, so they became extremism and terrorism.”¹⁸ A similar path, they tell us, is inevitable in Hong Kong.

There can be no compromise with such trends, Zhu and Zhang warn. Earlier compromises by the central authorities, such as the decision to withdraw Article 23 legislation in 2003 or the national education program in 2012, gave the unruly natives of the south the wrong impression of the central state’s determination: “Unfortunately, this kind of compromises [sic] are seen as the sign of ‘weakness,’ so that many democrats believe that as long as they ‘play hard’ and mobilize the masses, Beijing would give in at the final moment.”¹⁹ They continue: “The folk [sic] also have the mindset of ‘the solution to a big problem is a big fuss, the solution to a little problem is a little fuss; all in all, no fuss, no solution.”²⁰ Continued indulgence of such pathological impracticality, driving politics in Hong Kong toward the impossible, is fundamentally unsustainable. The central authorities thus need to “explain to the [sic] Hong Kong society the impossibility of ‘Hong Kong independence’ in a way that is acceptable to Hong Kong residents,” “press charges against those separatists who infringed the law,” and address economic and livelihood issues so that the people of the city will not be so perpetually hopeless and angry.²¹

To think that Hong Kong is just one more explanation, one more arrest, or one more massive infrastructure project away from finally acquiescing to Beijing’s will is to fundamentally misunderstand everything. Yet as official academics working in the Chinese Association of Hong Kong-Macao Studies, Zhu and Zhang’s job was never to develop independent analyses explaining the dynamics of contemporary politics that have led to the emergence of a feeling of ethnic and national difference in Hong Kong. Their job is to attack new and potentially liberating developments in Hong Kong politics, as well as to rationalize Beijing’s predetermined solution of further tightening its grip as the best and indeed only option. Accordingly, the authors tellingly never bother to provide readers with any details about their research process. There is no explanation of their methods, no literature review, no mention of inter...