Hong Kong Viscera

By Koon-Chung Chan

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

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‘Hong Kong is more Chinese than China’, an intellectual friend from mainland China insisted. He considered it his prized insight after being stationed in Hong Kong for more than 10 year and it is a complete reversal of his earlier preconception about the former British colony. Of course my friend would not voice his strident if not politically incorrect view publicly. Publicly, Hong Kong is a place where east meets west, which to a cynical mind is not too different from saying it is a culturally degenerated Chinese frontier town and an enclave of ersatz westernizaion -- that is, neither here nor there.

Of course, the conventional view of most Chinese, including the local people, is that Hong Kong is modernized, urbanized and developed：three putative goals of present-day China, and therefore culturally it could only be more westernized but not more Chinese than mainland China.

The British colonizers were not burdened with the choice of conversion or assimilation in its seaport colony. Rather, there were policies of residential and social segregations in the early days. The culture of the colonized people – natives and subsequent waves of settlers from the mainland – was not strenuously remolded by the colonial power. Customs were preserved and festivals celebrated. English was the only official language until 1974 but Chinese was prently used and properly taught at schools. The popular dialect remained Cantonese. Some colonial high officials were admirers of the Chinese literati tradition. When traditional culture was disrupted in China in the early decades of the last century, sinophile colonial administrators joined hands with local mandarins in an obscurantist effort trying to oppose the introduction of a vernacular language in written Chinese. After 1949, traditional Chinese culture was further debased by historical materialist re-interpretation in the mainland. For nearly four decades, teachings by Confucius, the Daoists and many ‘sages’ of antiquity, together with classical poetry and essays, were seldom taught at schools in the mainland except as objects of criticism. But in Hong Kong, elementary and secondary school students were fed a fair dose of canonical classical texts.

This is not to say that the local elites did not try to imitate their colonial masters, or that ideas, artifacts and the systems of the colonizers did not leave their imprint on Hong Kong as in other generic colonies. It only indicates that it is not difficult to identify some salient features of Hong Kong to prove it has out-Chinesed contemporary mainland China, rendering the idea of Chineseness problematic. The reverse can also easily be true. Few Hong Kong residents could name the capitols of all the mainland provinces, for example. That tells us something: residents of Hong Kong probably know much less about contemporary China than mainlanders, especially in reference to the ‘state culture’ that has become embedded in China only after 1949, the year the People’s Republic of China was established. The state culture started out as a party culture of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as it was modeled after its Leninist counterpart in Soviet Union. Its inchoate form was developed at the Communist-controlled revolutionary bases in China. After the Communists seized power of the entire mainland in 1949, party culture through state power became state culture. It was a willing copycat in many ways, inspired by and borrowed heavily from its Soviet ‘big brother’, it eventually developed its local characteristics while remaining recognizably different from traditional, autochthonous, ethnic Chinese culture. It should not be confused with the nation-building or nation-rejuvenating cultures – also substantially based on appropriating Eurocentric notions which were often mediated by modern Japanese renditions --  propagated much earlier, albeit unevenly, by loyalists, reformists, nationalists, socialists and other cultural harbingers of all political persuasions. The state culture in mainland China was peculiarly a Communist phenomenon but had now been an indispensable part of hybridized national culture. In its post-totalitarian stage, with the CCP-led state apparatus largely intact, the state culture of China had shown tenacity while undergoing incremental changes. Sometimes mainlanders just referred to its embodiment as ‘the system’ (ti zhi) and its ramifications as ‘national condition’ (guo qing), comprising a huge repository of unspoken ‘hidden rules’ (qian gui ze) – tacit rules of the game for insiders and the initiated, in contrast to written rules for the consumption of outsiders. This state culture was not familiar to most Hong Kong residents before 1997 but had become more discernable and even ubiquitous in certain circles after that.

When high officials and elites of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) now routinely called upon local residents to learn about China, they inadvertently were speaking on two levels: the laudable explicit level that the locals should learn Mandarin and know more about Chinese geography, history and customs, and the implicit level that they should grasp and learn to work with the CCP-initiated state culture. For pragmatic reasons, locals may need to know both cultures as closer encounters with mainland China are ineluctable and even desirable.