Heunggongyahn [Hong Kongers] may soon be dead; but from
the ashes of that identity . . . a resurgent, independentjunggwokyahn [Chinese] may emerge.
—Gordon Mathews, “Heunggongyahn”
The characters in Hui Gui constantly struggle with the conflicts in national identity and gender relations. Though born in China and in Hong Kong each, both Tak Sing and Serena undergo struggle with national identity, a reality Hong Kong people have to tackle with in their everyday life before 1997. Because of the British rule and the dissemination of the British ideology, eventually Lily, Ah Lan and Mimi are all rendered mad. Has the situation changed after the handover?
Gordon Mathews’ prognostication made in 1997 is accurate in the sense that Hong Kong people have increasingly identified themselves as Chinese, which is true at least from 1997 to 2008. From 1997 to 1998, Hong Kong was doubly swept by the Asian Financial Crisis and avian influenza resulting in economical recession and social trepidation. In 2003, the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) caused hundreds of casualties. Nevertheless, Hong Kong people have been optimistic about the economic co-operation with prosperous China, and the number of those identifying themselves as Chinese has gradually escalated and reached the climax in 2008, the year when Beijing Olympics took place.44 By reference to Victor
44 The percentage of Hong Kong people identifying themselves as Chinese increased from 18.6% in 1997 to over 30% after 2001 and reached the highest point of 38.6% in 2008. For more graphic
Zheng and Shao-lun Huang, Hong Kong people had the greatest confidence in Hong Kong’s future in 1997 (75). In their essay written in 2011, Sik Hung Ng and Julian C.
L. Lai conclude: “Historically the national Chinese identity has been fluctuating and . . . clearly on the rise in recent years” (100). Yet, they have always been uncertain about whether or not China would conform to the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984 and keep the “one country, two systems” policy in practice proposed by Deng Xiaoping.45
Unfortunately “[t]he creeping spread of state interventionism,” as Stephen Wing-kai Chui puts it, in political, social, and economical aspects proves that the nightmare of breaking the promise is about to come true (2). In terms of political intervention, the Chief Executives in Hong Kong since 1997 have been “appointed”
by Beijing, not by genuine election by Hong Kong citizens. And the advisory board and the statutory bodies in the post-1997 government mainly consist of pro-Beijing leaders, executives, and professionals. In “Eclectic Corporatism and State
Interventions in Post-colonial Hong Kong,” Ngok Ma notices that Hong Kong
capitalists generally have an affinity to “political conservatism, loyalty to Beijing, and a pro-business mindset” and stresses their political influence both in China and Hong Kong: “With access to central or mainland institutions, these Hong Kong capitalists could wield more influence on Chinese officials, sometimes bypassing the Hong Kong government” (79-80, 74). In addition, Beijing intended to urge Hong Kong government to enact the National Security Ordinance, simply called Article 23,46 in
data of Hong Kong people’s national identity, see “People’s Ethnic Identity.” HKU POP SITE.
HKU POP, n.d. Web. 9 Jun. 2016.
<https://www.hkupop.hku.hk/english/popexpress/ethnic/index.html>.
45 See Chapter 2 for more details about the declaration and Deng’s proposal.
46 The Article 23 states: “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's
Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies.” See “Hong Kong
2003 so as to constrain people’s freedom of assembly and consequently to facilitate the Chinese governance of Hong Kong. Resisting Beijing’s intervention and
upholding the autonomy of Hong Kong, Hong Kongers, mostly the young generation, held the Umbrella Movement in 2014 to demand universal suffrage in the election of 2017 Chief Executive. In “Hong Kong Identity on the Rise,” Chiew Ping Yew and Kin-ming Kwong predict the effect of Beijing’s interventionism on the rise of Hong Kong identity in the future: “If Beijing persists in its interventionist approach, it is foreseeable that the rise of the Hong Kong identity vis-à-vis the Chinese identity will continue unabated” (1110).
Besides intervening in governmental institutions, Beijing attempted to arouse Hong Kong people’s patriotism and loyalty to China through education, which has annoyed Hong Kong citizens. As Yew and Kwong remark, “Civic education was reintroduced as an elective school subject. School syllabuses and curriculum guidelines were revised to emphasize students’ Chinese identity; instruction in
putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) was instituted, whereas English was downplayed as a
medium of instruction” (1089-90). The institutionalization of Putonghua to slowly substitute Cantonese and English and the introduction of national education had agitated the majority in Hong Kong that they held a protest against this brain-washing educational proposal in 2012.In view of the economic recession after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, Hong Kong government opened the door for Chinese tourists and businessmen, which speeds up Hong Kong’s economical reliance on China. In 2001, Hong Kong
government emphasized the need for economic co-operation with China in order to take advantage of the economic opportunities from the Mainland. In 2003, Beijing
Basic Law Article 23.”
embarked on plans such as Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) and free tours to Hong Kong so that Chinese tourists could cross the Hong Kong border more easily for shopping and sightseeing (Chu 9). Since then, Hong Kong’s tourism and business transaction have heavily relied on China.
Hong Kong government, with the appointed Chief Executive and the majority of pro-Beijing and pro-business advisory committees, has subsidized many
non-governmental organizations or owned majority shares of public corporations and private oligopolies. The private-public boundary has thus been blurred with the indirect state interventionism in economical aspect. As Ngok Ma terms it, Hong Kong has become a “business-dominated and corporatist” regime (88).
Hong Kong’s heavy economical reliance on China has engendered disturbance in the society and discontent of Hong Kong people. The influx of Chinese tourists has led to extremely congested and overly clamorous environments all over Hong Kong.
More significantly, a lot of Chinese tourists were in fact parallel traders (水貨客) who made good use of the multiple entry visa policy to import consumer goods, such as milk powder and diapers, from Hong Kong to China for sale. This mass consumption has been so severe that many districts have suffered from shortage of daily necessities, sparking off anti-parallel trading protests, such as the Restoration of Tuen Mun and of Yuen Long in 2015, and stimulating the advocacy of localism or even separatism from China such as Hong Kongers First and the Hong Kong Independence Movement.
Another problem causing social revulsion is related to a special type of
tourism—birth tourism. It means tourism boosted by Chinese women who come to Hong Kong to give birth of infants, who are called anchor babies (雙非嬰兒). Even though neither parent of the babies is Hong Kong permanent residents, the parent can get the right of abode in Hong Kong after the birth. Over 170,000 anchor babies were
born between 2001 to 2011. These Chinese expectant mothers have exhausted social resources, used up local expenses and exacerbated animosity towards the Chinese.
Owing to the state interventionism in many aspects, Hong Kong people are once again prone to identify themselves as Hong Kongers rather than Chinese after 2010 and implore for British re-colonialization of Hong Kong. Yew and Kwong make a hypothesis that “the ‘Mainlandization of Hong Kong’ . . . has led more people to gravitate toward the Hong Kong identity predicated on a distinctive set of values and norms” (1095). Their hypothesis is proven to be true in the sense that the number of people identifying as Chinese has plummeted and of whom identifying as Hong Kongers have skyrocketed since 2010.47 In a more extreme case, some Hong Kongers even vote for the return of Britain to re-colonize Hong Kong.48 Verna Yu, a freelance writer in Hong Kong, confesses that: “Perhaps, it [hanging on to a coin with the queen’s head] was just nostalgia. But more likely I was trying to hold on to something that linked me to the pre-handover way of life” (par. 6). It is evident that Hong Kong people have forgotten about the exploitation of the British rule and are looking forward to the British re-colonization in order to sustain freedom and democracy.
Resorting to British re-colonization should not be a wise remedy. Clinging to British (re)colonization would only make Britain a God-like figure who transforms Hong Kong into the Tower of Babel (different significations in political, societal, economical, and cultural contexts assigned by Britain), the Ivory Tower (British ideology spreading all over Hong Kong), and the Crystal Palace (highly capitalized Hong Kong). These three metaphorical hypotheses seem to be conflicting but in fact dialogical: the Ivory Tower is more like a closed circuit of ideology than the Crystal
47 See note 47.
48 The survey was conducted in 2013 by South China Morning Post, a newspaper in Hong Kong, and asked a question: “Would Hongkongers vote to return to a British overseas territory, given the option?”. Over 90% of the interviewees were affirmative to the question.
Palace that opens the door for investments and speculations and the Tower of Babel that is constituted with multiple cultures and spatial forms. But remarkably, Britain has the supreme power to select its guests and expel the unwelcome intruders; in a similar vein, God-like Britain is the one who designates the spatial forms and
diversifies the cultures in Hong Kong, just as the Tower of Babel in the Bible. People living under these circumstances would be easily turned into madmen and madwomen in the attic (people blindly following British and capitalist ideologies).
Instead, to demonstrate Hong Kongers’ distinctive features, the development of Hong Kong local culture should be a better method. On 1 February 2016, I
interviewed a friend of mine in Hong Kong, Irene Sin, asking about her attitude towards Chinese immigrants. She made a good remark on why the Chinese immigrants in the past could assimilate themselves to Hong Kong society, but the current immigrants cannot: “In the past, they were willing to follow the rules [set by Britain]. But nowadays, they cling to their Chinese custom and refuse to follow those rules.” In other words, the past Chinese immigrants were willing to be westernized.
But what we need now is not just the assimilation to the Hong Kong society but the cultivation of a distinctive identity for the Hong Kongers: the Hong Kongness, pertinently defined by Mathews as being the people “who Hong Kong’s people believe themselves to be,” possessing “their senses of who they most deeply are in their lives and in their community” (Mathews 4). In “Like a Postcolonial Culture:
Hong Kong Re-imagined,” John Nguyet Erni notices that “writing about Hong Kong involves a triangular articulation of Chinese nationalism, British colonialism, and globalism” (391), but none of which is a distinctive feature of Hong Kong. Hong Kongers are always wandering between Britain and China and losing themselves in the labyrinth of complex national and cultural identities. Therefore, they should strive
for developing its own local culture in order to pursue its distinctive features and have a unified identity. In recent years, they have been more politically involved than before by showing concerns for Beijing’s interventionism and taking part in political upheavals; but what is in urgent need is to be culturally conscious about the
development of Hong Kong local culture. Heunggongyahn would never die but are waiting to be discovered. I would apply Yiu-Wai Chu’s conclusion to end this thesis:
“It is not possible to reclaim the past, but . . . to look back and reconsider the core values of Hong Kong and how they got lost (and found) in transition is a way to take back the future” (165).
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