Hong Kong Viscera

 by Koon-Chung Chan

published in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 10, No.4, December 2007

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The (re-)localization of Hong Kong culture, starting from the 1960s but went on full speed in late 1970s, had been a process of incessant hybridization. Ironically, it was in the labyrinth of such hybrid cultural localization that a distinct identity of the locals had emerged.

Together with contemporaneous economic growth, social reforms and strict border control, the burgeoning hybridized and localized Cantonese culture helped the locals to construct a sense of belonging to the colony and as a result a notion of us and them slowly emerged – Hongkongers subjectively considered themselves different from the mainlanders. It is first and foremost through this distinction from mainlanders that Hong Kong people constructed their strong identity.

Even internally, the Hongkongers – mostly Chinese, but also a small number of often Cantonese-speaking British Commonwealth or South Asian longtime local residents – began having a shared self-awareness that differentiated them from other resident groups such as illegal immigrants, Gurkha mercenaries, British army, subsequent new immigrants from the mainland, maids from Southeast Asia and expatriates.

On the visceral level, locals have an unmistakable sense of their identity and rooted common culture. Mini-narratives abounded with insightful depictions. But the colonized mind suppresses the local mind to think outside of borrowed terms when it comes to ‘rationally’ describing the big picture of Hong Kong. They too often revert back to rehearsed cants -- Hong Kong is a place where east meets west, an island of barren rocks turned economic miracle, a free economy, a modern city that is advanced and developed, prosperous and stable. This is the colonized mind of myopic self-congratulating winners.

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From the cold war era to the age of neo-liberal globalization, the colonized mind had internalized uncritically all tenets and values of modernization, westernization,, developmentalism, managerial rationality, Thatcherism, new classical economics, free trade globalism and, increasingly prominent after 1997, Chinese nationalism. It had prided itself on fulfilling all the best promises of the above, except nationalism, while it was still a colony. It was considered a successful experiment, where people were lifted out of poverty and relatively good governance was guaranteed. Along with highly popular locally-generated culture, American, Japanese and European cultures were eagerly consumed by affluent local people, donning the colony with a cosmopolitan oomph. Instead of feeling deprived of dignity, the locals – not limited to the elite class but the majority – were emboldened by their achievements and wanted to maintain the colonial status quo. At least that was the manifested public will in the 1980s.

In other words, by the early 1980s, neo-liberalism had already trumped late colonialism, not only neutralizing but also normalizing the latter. The colonial government was regarded as a commendable surrogate on borrowed time. The locals almost felt sorry that it eventually had to go. Coloniality was no longer fore-grounded. The colonized mind turned subtlest at this point and was all the more untouchable, as if it was in a mental airlock. The word colony had been a weak signifier since then; instead, the colony was fondly called the territory, the city, our town or just Hong Kong.

It goes without saying that by then the locals did not see Hong Kong as part of the third world, the tri-continents, the south of the north-south divide, or even an emerging country. It could not imagine itself sharing any commonality with other ex-colonies in South and Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Caribbean islands or Polynesia. Most locals hardly noticed the Irish question in the British Commonwealth, or felt solidarity with anti-colonial armed struggle by led by the Chinese in British Malaya. They readily bought into the CCP-calibrated nationalist discourse and never questioned the legitimacy of Chinese presence in Tibet and Xinjiang. In other words, the so-called cosmopolitan outlook that the local elites were so proud of had very little to do with Hellenistic or Enlightenment cosmopolitanism or socialist internationalism and was very much a product of British colonialism, the Cold War, neo-liberal globalization and Chinese nationalism.

Singapore was the only ex-colony-turned-independent-state considered worthy of comparison, as a competitor to out-number each other in the capacity of container ports, GDP per capita or free economy ranking by the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation. But probing the colonial history of both places would be too sensitive for Hong Kong. Like the word colony, the words city-state, federation and confederation, though not strictly tabooed, were rarely used descriptively or prescriptively. State, nation, nation-sate, country or independence for Hong Kong was unthinkable and thus unutterable. In one breath, Hong Kong is now a special administrative region under the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China and, according to the principle of ‘one country, two systems’, is administered by Hong Kong people with a high degree of autonomy.

Only with the post-1997 gambit and the (re-)celebration of the nationalist agenda in tandem did Hongkongers feel mildly inadequate again culturally. Unlike my intellectual mainland friend who took the quaint view that Hong Kong was more (traditional) Chinese than China, local officials and most elites accepted the conventional view that Hong Kong is not Chinese enough because it has been a British colony. Since practically all SAR officials and most locals had acquiesced to and abetted the colonizers, to exonerate one’s unsavory association with colonialism, the only de-colonization project left seems to be this: to become more Chinese, whatever the word means.

Meanwhile, apologists of neo-liberal globalization continue to beat the drum that Hong Kong’s role is to be a hub of world capitalism – ‘Be like Manhattan’, a SAR high official once said..

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Let’s backtrack a little. On the eve of the Japanese surrender in 1945, the British navy outran the Nationalist (Kuomintang) forces under Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek to claim control of Hong Kong. This was a violation of the agreement of the Allied powers which specified that the Japanese forces in the China theatre should surrender to Generalissimo Chiang. The British colonized Hong Kong for the second time in 1945. Its territorial claim however was not strongly contested by both Generalissimo Chiang and the CCP, too busy in their scramble to control different parts of the mainland. Hong Kong resumed its pre-War entrepot role for a few years, only to be disrupted by the Korean War as the United Nations imposed embargo on China. Sided with the ‘free world’, Hong Kong participated in the global manufacturing division of labor and manoeuvred itself to become a colony of export-oriented light industries. It is reasonable to say that Hong Kong’s coloniality since the Pacific War was shaped by Japanese imperialism, the incapacitating civil strife and the eventual victory of Communism in China, the Cold War and Brettenwood-era globalization as much as by British colonialism.

The discourse on the so-called East Asian economic miracle routinely grouped Japan with Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong. Explanations of their economic success ranged from government–led industrial policies to Confucian work ethics. Hong Kong was always the odd place out. The colonial government was known for its professed policy of ‘positive non-intervention' in economic affairs. As for the ambivalent Confucian influence, emphases were usually placed on authority, conservatism and corporate loyalty, while Hong Kong was noted for its entrepreneurship, can-do spirit, flexibility, workforce mobility and, as one sociologist put it, functional familialism.

Happy with the status of being one of the Asian Tigers, Hong Kong however sought explanation from elsewhere for its economic success and embraced neo-liberalism. Thatcherites and acolytes of Chicago-trained economists were so successful in their edifying efforts that by the early 1980s an ideology akin to free market fundamentalism became the orthodoxy among the local ruling elites. Unfortunately, this ‘official’ view is neither an empirically accurate description of Hong Kong’s recent past nor an adequate guiding light for its near future.