Organizer: Jane A. Margold, University of Helsinki
Chair: Gordon Mathews, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Discussant: Alvin Yiu-Cheong So, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Over the past half-century, mutability has been Hong Kong's most salient characteristic. Once a place of transient shelter for the mainland refugees of the late 1940s, it was a manufacturing outpost by the 1960s, and-less than two decades later-a marketing economy of global stature. Throughout these transitions, the city's prosperity was widely thought to be grounded in its merger of Chinese entrepreneurship and a laissez-faire British managerialism that allowed free-for-all capitalism to flourish. The local citizenry were seen, by colonial administrators and scholars alike, as accommodating pragmatists, concerned only with economic expansion.
Yet, as this panel will establish, the body politic refused to vanish. The Tiananmen massacre drew a million protesters to Hong Kong's streets; other, albeit far smaller, mobilizations have occurred in response to such issues as the reach of the post-1997 government, industrial restructuring and worker dislocation, housing, and student press freedom. In all these efforts, we argue, the one constant has been civil society's attempt to assert itself and be heard in Hong Kong: an aim growing ever more urgent as the change in governance becomes imminent. Individually, the panel presenters consider various facets of civil society's expansion, from Hong Kong student demonstrations, to the fragile sense of Hong Kong cultural identity, to resistance in the territory to the Chinese state's attempts to reinscribe colonialism. Jointly, we seek to make some guarded forecasts as to the future of Hong Kong's state/civil society relations.
Whistling in the Dark: Statist Self-Encouragement and Civil Society in Hong Kong
Fred Yen-liang Chiu, Hong Kong Baptist University
Post-war British colonial rule in Hong Kong was characterized by grandiose social engineering schemes whose aim was to neutralize popular demands and mitigate societal discontents arising from the rapid incursion of capital into both natural and human resources. This particular form of social design was deliberately adopted to forestall an expected takeover of the British colonial administration by a totalistic communist China. Ever since the 1967 riots in Hong Kong, committees and departments were instated by the colonial government: crime-fighting committees, a housing authority, a land development corporation and the like. The aim, overall, was to transform the colony's imperial subjects into "modern" citizens. However, the Chinese state, in the attempt to turn Hong Kong people "back" into nationalist subjects, has taken the claims of an outgoing colonial state at face value. Its major mouthpieces have been coopted and the rhetoric turned into an ideology of stop-and-go democratization and tutelage patriotism. This paper, therefore, investigates the discursive formation as well as politics involved in these social engineering proclamations and their various reincarnations. It argues that the Chinese appropriation and subsequent "ideologization" of colonial proclamations is meant to effect a statist self-encouragement amidst an unknown world of civic dissent. Like whistling in the dark, the author expects that these tunes will be amplified even more loudly in the near future, indicating that civil society in Hong Kong has a certain strength.
Heunggongyahn: On the Past, Present, and Future of Hong Kong Identity
Gordon Mathews, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Civil society, as opposed to the apparatus of the state, can only exist on the basis of civic identity. This paper, based on two years of ethnography, explores the past, present, and possible future meanings of Heunggongyahn: "Hongkongese."
Throughout Hong Kong's history, its people saw themselves as Chinese; resistance to British colonial rule, up to the 1967 riots, was linked to movements in China. Since the 1970s, however, many have come to see China as alien and Hong Kong as home. Today, on the eve of 1997, two broad constructions of identity vie for the allegiance of Hong Kong's people: "Hong Kong as a part of China" and "Hong Kong as apart from China." For some who adhere to the latter, "Hongkongese" connotes consumptive choice, but for others "Hongkongese" means political choice, "an identity to distinguish ourselves from the Chinese government" that at the same time may be linked to the dream of a larger non-authoritarian China. Some argue that democracy is only a last cynical legacy of colonialism, but others maintain that democratic values have become key to Hong Kong's autonomous identity.
In this paper, I explore the fissure that opened between the competing hegemonies of the British and Chinese empires within which Hong Kong people began to define themselves; and I consider the prospects for that fissure, for the survival of Heunggongyahn.
Big Words and Micro-Practices: Hong Kong Student Activists Confront 1997
Jane Margold, University of Helsinki; Sze-ping Lo, Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology
Democracy has become one of the most free-floating and ubiquitous of signifiers, its meaning more readable in an analysis of the actual practices of a nation-state or subgroup than in claims by powerholders that a particular political system is pluralistic and representative. Indeed, there are few states that do not describe themselves as democratic because they maintain formal structures for considering the demands of competing groups. Yet, it is in a regime's uneven willingness to dialogue with dissenters that its degree of democracy can best be gauged.
Thus, our paper focuses both upon the post-Marxist politics that local students have sought to enact and upon the preemptive policies and peculiar vacuums of leadership that characterize the pre-1997 government's response. Contemporary Hong Kong, student radicals argue, requires improvisational-at times theatrical-strategies, ranging from displaying Big Word posters to appropriating a campus central plaza for late-night showings of feminist and gay liberation films. Far from being "utopian anarchists," as they have been called by their more traditionalist peers, the group of student radicals whose strategies are documented here view themselves as pragmatic, grounded in pressing local concerns and highly attentive to the democratic egalitarianism of their own practices. We assess their efforts and evolving ideology within Hong Kong's current discursive climate, where "administrative absorption" of opposition (i.e., polite inattention) is a widespread official posture.
Managerializing Colonialism
Wing-sang Law, Lignan College, Hong Kong
Nationalism is often thought of as a response to colonialism. Yet in these final days of British colonialism in Hong Kong, what we see on the one hand is a hostile rejection of the British presence in Hong Kong politics and on the other, an attempt to preserve the continuity of colonial practices on many fronts. Far from eradicating the British political and cultural remnants to make space for national reunification, the Chinese state is continuing particular colonial institutions and ideologies as an imperative for a "stable transition." I will argue that the changes that have occurred are geared toward sustaining an indigenized colonial system and mentality. Basic to this effort, as I will claim further, is the managerialist construal of "Hong Kong experience" by the old colonial elites. It is these same groups of coopted elites-always powerful-who are now being delegated the role of defining Hong Kong. It is their ideas that are being enshrined by China as the foundation for running the future "special administrative region."
In this paper, my aim is to discuss the moments of discursive shift in the past years that have facilitated the managerialization of Hong Kong culture and politics. Recent examples of fetishistic representations of Hong Kong will be provided. It is through these illustrations that we will see the processes of decolonization, nationalization and recolonization proceeding in concert as Hong Kong comes under Chinese sovereignty.