Q: What is Hong Kongâs coherent imaginary? In other words, how does Hong Kong imagineâand collectively understand and envisionâitself?As this variety of dialectical responses attests, the original question meant to inaugurate the cutting edge, original, interrogative subject of this book suffers from presupposition failure. This leads us to wonder why Hong Kong has no single, coherent imaginary, no shared sense of itself. The quick answer to this Hong Kong conundrum, a response that the essays collected in this volume substantiate, is that everything in Hong Kong is made into Hong Kong. This assessment accounts for the many nodes of cultural conflict in this densely populated place of almost 300 islands.
- A: Hong Kong is Cantonese-speaking.
- A: Itâs Chinese- and English-speaking.
- A: Hong Kong mainly embraces Cantonese and English speakers.
- A: Hong Kong is increasingly localist.
- A: The place remains very much outward-looking. Itâs international.
- A: Hong Kong is constructed by misconstrued cinematic representations.
- A: Itâs creative. Creativity makes Hong Kong Hong Kong.
- A: Hong Kong is evermore dogmatic and pragmatic.
- A: Itâs a place of ideals, business, and otherwise.
- A: Hong Kong is politically engaged.
- A: Hongkongers are encouraged to be ideologically aloof, to just not care.
The 50-year handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China began on 1 July 1997. In the two decades since, the city has endured drastic changes in politics, culture, and identity.1 Most recently, the Hong Kong communityâor, better, Hong Kong communities?âis increasingly divided.2 Over the past two decades, the place has witnessed, and stomached with progressively greater indigestion, an upsurge of oft-competing parties: young and old, local and expat, local and localist, wealthy and working class, pro-democrat and pro-China, pro-Cantonese and pro-Mandarin, pro-change and pro-status quo. This list is far from comprehensive. Each politicized faction, and their fracturing offshoots, attempts to interpret what postcolonialâor decolonized or recolonizedâHong Kong is.
Competing blocs construct and promote particular understandings or characterizations of Hong Kong according to sometimes self-serving, sometimes self-sacrificing, objectives. As a result, cultural clashes over any single type of unified Hong Kong cultural imaginary foment. Underlying these rival imaginary constructions is the notion of what in fact qualifies as having been made into Hong Kong. After all, with the exception of Hong Kongâs dwindling set of (natural) flora and fauna, hardly anything belonging to the territory is intrinsically native to the place. Even a rudimentary argument propounding the essential Chineseness (a tellingly current visual-culture signifier not to be confused with the eighteenth-century decorative art-style chinoiserie) of Hong Kong proves problematic. Does Chineseness denote a specific ethnicity? Or imperialism? Republicanism? Communism? Or is it a very precise form of putative communism? Adding complication to any coherent and comprehensive Hong Kong imaginary, we might envisage an endo-normative model of Hong Kong as a hybrid of England and southeast Canton, of the British and the Cantonese, to the exclusion of other versions or variations of the identifier âChinese.â A more liberal embrace of Hong Kongâs ethnic plurality might include its minority of South Asian communities as well as the smaller minority of naturalized expatriates (who tend not to be referred to as living in âcommunitiesâ) from the West.
An absorbing anxiety current among Hong Kong youths concerns the relevance of historical sovereignty, whether British or Chinese. It can be argued that neither nation deserves any real sense of allegiance. When all is said and done, in 1997 the former handed over to the latter what the latter lost to the former in 1841. Consequently, each colonial power should be disqualified from ostensible ownership. Neither is trustworthy. By this logic, neither of these places owns, or belongs to and in, contemporary Hong Kong. So Hong Kong belongs to whom? The political elites who publicly perform their claims to Hong Kong sovereignty? The local statesmen and women who claim, under Beijing fiat, to run the political marketplace? The property moguls and landowners who claim to build and house present and future Hongkongers? The financiers who claim to not only be enriching themselves? The local underclass who experience the effects of globalism but profit little, if at all, from it? The youth who have a claim in inheriting pieces, however small, however approximate, of the puzzle that is Hong Kong? The above all have strong Hong Kong entitlementsâphysical, financial, or moral. Hong Kong has a history of belonging to all since this very âallâ has made parts of Hong Kong and has been made into Hong Kong. Take universal suffrage, for instance. This is something never formally bestowed to Hongkongers, notwithstanding its official guarantee in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. Arguments continue vis-Ă -vis the basis and justification, or the present-day lack thereof, of said pre-1997 agreement(s). Still others retort that politics was almost never really relevant to Hongkongers after the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, that is, until what Ackbar Abbas has referred to as the âdouble traumaâ or a priori haunting that resulted from the spectre of the handover in 1984 and the horrors of the Tiananmen Massacre in 19893 when everything became ineludibly politicizedâthis stemming from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengist framework informing what weâve globally come to envision as the Chinese economic juggernaut. Again, though almost three decades past, the euphemized âevents surrounding 4 June 1989â loomâand, perhaps, for Hongkongers most especially, since the free circulation of information has yet to be circumscribed, as it has on the other side of the mainland perimeter.
These conflicts of ideas, these contests between ideologies, divide and provoke different people and groups. They also inflame a Trump-modelled social ambience: the egoistical and egotistical worldviews of certain individuals and collectives are at once steadfastly aloof about and assuredly convinced that certain media outlets skilfully control only the minds of their compatriot competitors (Joseph 2006, 141â2). However, the media in Hong Kong, not unlike its counterparts in the USA, India, and Nigeria, to name three main global cinematic centers, focuses on popular entertainment first and traditional news second. This point is not lost on Hongkongers, irrespective of their personal/political allegiances. It is not for nought that since 2014âs Umbrella Protests, leading local TV news and entertainment network TVBâs sardonic appellation CCTVB4 has become widespread.
In exploring and articulating Hong Kongâs manifold imaginaries, one specific irony that cannot escape attention remains writ large. Between being conceded to the British in 1841 and handed over to the Chinese in 1997 (and, to a much lesser extent, continuing in the present), the majority of Chinese material artefacts and cultural interpretations were de facto made in Hong Kong. As evidence of this global reproduction of a China once almost entirely made in Hong Kong, revisit actual and representationalâsuch as at fairs and carnivals, and in novels, movies, and televisionââChinatownsâ and the languages spoken and depicted therein. At the most standardized or popular level, reconsider Short Round and Lao Che in Indiana Jones; despite their âShanghaiâ cover stories, they are Cantonese. The same applies, for instance, to the locally famous Chinese restaurant Shanghai Chop Suey, established in 1949, and situated in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Its founders are Cantonese. Its present-day owners are Cantonese-Canadians. At the local, everyday level, this Shanghai, these Shanghais, not unlike Jackie Chanâs character in Shanghai Noon (2000), are literally made in Hong Kong. Hong Kong (as the Chinese cultural outpost, a place where citizens observed the policies of their colonial leadership) managed to perform this cultural translation in no small part by making all that passes through its ports intoâas in, part of, and integral toâHong Kong. Traditionally contrasting cultures have been and are made into Hong Kong.5 Given the assortment of cultural elements that constitute Hong Kong, it is no wonder that the territory now finds itself at serious loggerheads. Hong Kong is a place in translation, just like any place undergoing a regime change, anywhere experiencing a systematic alteration in its governing (and self-identifying) structures. Yet, historically, Hong Kong has always been a place in translation and transition. Indeed, the contest of ideas concerning what Hong Kong is, what Hongkongers are, and what its collective imaginary might or might not be is arguably the very incoherence that binds Hongkongers, the incoherence that establishes the place as actually coherent. In Hong Kong, irony may very well be the preserve of solidarity.
On the 20th anniversary of Hong Kongâs 50-year return, this volume provides a look into the divisions, dynamics, and interactions between Hong Kongâs two most obvious competing identities: colonial and post-handover. Essays collected in this volume excavate the ways in which variegated cultural elements are appropriated into the Hong Kong imaginary, and the process by which they gain (or fail to gain) recognition by Hongkongers. The topics of each essay in this volume differ, but whatever issues individual contributors examine (be it an author, a director, a cultural happening, a political event, a linguistic variety, a public policy, a new language usage, or selected fictional versions of Hong Kong), the overall focus and stake of the book remains indebted to this serious question: how is what is made in Hong Kong made into Hong Kongâand legitimated as such? Integral, if not too patent, addenda to this question are: And by whom and why?
In order to facilitate, and at times complicate, the complex Hong Kong identities and imaginaries existing and developing two decades following the territoryâs return to China, this collection is categorized into three interrelated parts: surveillance, sousveillance, and equiveillance. This gyroscope methodology facilitates a multitude of perspectives by which to investigate and organize a selection of underpinnings to the incoherent imaginaries inhabiting Hong Kong. Big Data and biometrics forerunner Joseph Ferenbok and computer scientist and public intellectual Steve Mann coin the âsousveillanceâ and âequiveillanceâ neologisms as a means of articulating âinverse surveillance,â by which the colleagues mean the ways in which people can digitally record images and actions from below, thus negating or counterbalancing âsurveillanceâ from above (Mann and Ferenbok 2013).
Surveillance
Part 1 of this collection covers representative made in Hong Kong cultural artefacts as products of power that merge both downward and upward, and inward and outward. These five chapters unpack a range of privileged power dynamics that have been made into Hong Kong. Not necessarily advocating any specific Hong Kong top-down power-structure perspective, papers in this section analyse current modes of power, or discuss the ways in which these modes functionâand (may) malfunction.
John Wakefieldâs âTurning English into Cantonese: The semantic change of English loanwordsâ discusses how particularly poignant loanwords are contextually appropriated and adapted by Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Although, so Wakefield mentions, loanwords are inevitable products of language contacts, it proves edifying to assess how English, the language of Hong Kongâs former colonial power, continues to impact Cantonese, the language of the colonized. Counterfactually, itâs not the other way aroundâeven two decades after the official end of this colonial influence. Reflecting the power imbalance between colonizer and colonized, anisotropic linguistic influence literally speaks to the dynamics of surveillance: a top-down power model. Tempering this local model, of course, is the greater intern...