published in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 10, No.4, December 2007 1
‘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.
2
It was said pre-colonial Hong Kong was an island of barren rocks. That was a half-truth. There were pockets of natives living on boats or in various walled communities, some complete with their own sophisticated classical education institutions, long before there were colonialists. But the natives were soon out-numbered by settlers, mostly Han Chinese from the mainland and particularly from the Guangdong area: Cantonese, Hakkas, Hoklos and Tankas, who for motley reasons preferred to live in the free port. Their dialects were almost incomprehensible to each other. On the eve of the Pacific War, the population reached one and a half million. Most fled the colony to the mainland during the Japanese imperialist occupation. Only half a million people remained in 1945. It soon ballooned to over 2 million in 1951. The year 1949 alone witnessed an influx of nearly 900,000 people from the mainland. Some were returnees from Guangdong, but there were also phalanxes of new migrants, refugees fleeing communism from every part of China. To them Hong Kong was a safe haven, a sojourn that protected them until they could return to China, or a jumping-board for migration to other countries. Many of them became settlers eventually. The word ‘local’ did not have a coherent meaning until the post-war local-born baby boomers came of age in the 1970s, when the identity of Hongkongers, in contrast to the mainlanders, was minted.
Culturally it makes no sense to say the end of the colonial rule will facilitate the re-emergence of local culture. It could not possibly be referring to a pristine, pre-colonial culture. It is also senseless to presume an essentialist Chinese
5
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.
6
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..
7
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.
culture, traditional or contemporary. As for locally generated culture that could be conveniently called Hong Kong’s indigenous culture – a mongrel culture, it had always existed and flourished during colonial times.
3
The colonial authority’s pragmatic ‘benign neglect’ resulted in a de facto multicultural condition that had allowed local culture to subsist largely untrammeled since early colonial days. Before 1949, local mongrel culture and Guangdong indigenous culture nourished each other. Hong Kong-made movies in Cantonese or Hoklo dialects were watched in Guangdong, while Cantonese opera troupes routinely travelled back and forth between Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau and other parts of Guangdong. After 1949, immigrants from other parts of China brought their own eclectic indigenous cultures to Hong Kong. Among the new immigrants were filmmakers, singers, writers and scholars from various provinces but particularly from Shanghai, then the centre of Chinese national cultural industries. They might speak Shanghainese in private, but their artistic outputs were in Mandarin, already the official national language. Mandarin songs became Hong Kong’s pop songs; Mandarin-speaking movies out-performed Cantonese-speaking productions at the local box office, and the prolific ‘south-bound’ writers penned most of the newspaper columns and serialized novels. Meanwhile, there were English newspapers, radio, television and Hollywood movies for the consumption of the expatriate communities and the growing population of English-speaking bilingual locals. Anglo-American pop songs, fashion and youth culture captured the imagination of the post-1949 boomer generation, especially after The Beatles’ visit to Hong Kong during its first world tour in 1964. English, Mandarin and Cantonese pop and elite cultures together formed a trans-cultural space where the locals, especially educated young people, could cross-over and exercise cultural sampling without much difficulty.
When the boomers came of age, their regurgitated cultural curds were mongrelized beyond salvage. With all its impurity, excess and misappropriation, a Hong Kong style appeared on the horizon, not meant to be admired but to be enjoyed by the locals – and it was eventually consumed in other parts of the world. Hong Kong movies, TV series and Cantopop music, all in Cantonese this time, not only dominated the local market as substitutes for imported English and Mandarin products, but were also exported to neighboring areas, including mainland China, so much so that they constituted what one radical Taiwanese critic called a ‘sub-imperialist’ condition. This all happened in the late 1970s and the 1980s, long before the end of the colonial rule in 1997.
4
Local writers have also been trying out different strategies of Chinese writings in the colony. In the 1950s and the 1960s, Hong Kong was called ‘the fortunate land’ (fu di) or ‘heaven’ (tian tang) by those who fled Communism. The pro-government mainstream press routinely pleaded to the discontented masses not to ‘rock the boat’ – the logic of the lesser evil, colonialism or Communism, prevailed here. Left-leaning or anti-colonial writers however were more inclined to adopt realist narratives, in an often tendentious attempt to show the plight of the colonial under-class, though in the Communist mainland, it was agitprop revolutionary romanticism rather than European high realism that was officially promoted or tolerated.
Some of the less partisan writers understandably wanted none of the above and turned to other genres. Closely following trends of the West, a small group of ‘serious’ Hong Kong writers freely experimented with the writing styles of stream of consciousness, existentialism, magical realism and meta-fiction, before similar techniques were attempted by their contemporaries in Taiwan and the mainland. These works were later canonized not only for their early use of modernist or post-modernist techniques but also for their penetrating portrayals of the otherwise ineffable Hong Kong. It would be therefore unfair to regard these modernist writings as ‘co-authors’ of colonialism, as non-Western modernist literature was sometimes accused of in postcolonial literary criticism. Serious literary works in Hong Kong were rare and marginalized. The very act of writing serious literature – realist or modernist – was itself a conscious resistance to the mainstream market-oriented value which was also the core value of late colonialism in Hong Kong. Some of the modernist attempts, with their uncanny narratives and stylistic pastiche, were prescient in depicting the fledgling local identity, which was a product of hybridization.
Middle-brow literature also exhibited distinctively Hong Kong characteristics. Popular ‘women’s’ novels often wrote about the romantic vicissitudes of career women, together with their consumerist lifestyle. They had been instrumental in defining what an educated and often affluent, urbane and independent Hong Kong woman should be like. Coloniality was seldom the subject matter. Characters in the novels often considered themselves sophisticated denizens of a cosmopolitan city called Hong Kong.
Even more widely read were serialized fable writings – martial arts novels. In its early days of the 1950s and 1960s, this genre was simply read as entertainment. Now the best of the martial-arts novels are considered literary classics. Their setting was pre-modern China. Though they were not about Hong Kong, some of them made allegorical reference to the political situation of contemporary China. The martial art genre allowed its writers greater freedom to talk about traditional Chinese culture and history, the literati class’ strategy of resistance to the westernizing colony and the tradition-trashing of Communist China. These novels were scribed in a polished form of written Chinese that added to their prestige. As a result, many local readers’ perception of Chinese history and culture was heavily mediated by the narratives of martial art novels.
Though there were some literary works using vernacular Cantonese, or a combination of Cantonese dialect and formal written Chinese, they were often looked down upon by the local elites. For a long time, only satirical short essays and serialized low-brow fictions on contemporary plebian subject matters were written in hybrid Cantonese-Chinese. The more ambitious literary works were in formal written Chinese, at most inserting a few Cantonese words to enhance local colour. Even the dialogues in the realist novels about Hong Kong were mostly in formal written Chinese, instead of the popular Cantonese dialect. Cantonese-speaking local writers were known for their anxiety of inadequacy over mastering formal written Chinese largely based on Mandarin and northern dialects. Though the inclusion of Cantonese dialect in published works has been more common in recent years, hybrid Cantonese-Chinese could not hope to replace formal written Chinese. A hybrid Cantonese-Chinese work will be almost impossible for easy reading even to the Cantonese-speaking locals, since reading habits have been built on formal written Chinese for generations. Whether this could be considered a handicap – a discursive stuttering - for the locals who tried to articulate in its own tongue needs further exploration.
5
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.
6
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..
7
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.
8
Close to half of the Hong Kong populace once lived in government-built and subsidized houses. Publicly funded medical premises not only had the best facilities and expertise but were also open to the public, with nominal charges. Elementary and secondary education was compulsory and free. Public money was used to support symphony, theatre , ballet troupes, film, arts festivals, and many tertiary educational institutions. It was a far cry from laissez-faire and the Lockean limited government agenda of the free-market fundamentalists.
Murray MacLehose, governor from 1971 to 1982, initiated or completed most of the reformist projects that made acceptable governance possible, including designating Chinese as an official language alongside English, and the all-important establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption in 1974, without which the claim of rule of law would be a sham. MacLehose was not without opposition from the local civil society. Take the case of seven-day annual paid leave for employees for example: he was fiercely contested by both local business interests and the pro-Beijing “leftists”, but he pushed the legislation through nonetheless. As a matter of fact, most legislations on labor and social welfare were opposed by local business groups, to the point that in a published paper by the Fabian Society calling for reforms in Hong Kong in 1976, it began sarcastically by saying: ‘Of course, there would be an outcry. No-one in the world over-reacts to such matters as does the Hong Kong businessmen’.
From the year 1970 when a majority of laborers worked seven days a week without any paid leave to the passing of more than 100 welfare and social protection legislations in the subsequent decade, the MacLehose government showed great autonomy against the lobby of entrenched interest groups and managed to usher in what could be called the infra-structure of tolerable social justice and acceptable governance. By the early 1980s, Hong Kong was a transformed colony, a showcase of late coloniality:
Economically, it developed from a manufacturing town to a finance-and-service world city;
Socially, it evolved from an enclave of refugees, floating passers-by and migrants into a society of permanent settlers with a shared identity;
Culturally, it changed from a cultural backwater dominated by imported
and non-vernacular products to a regional centre with impressive cultural outputs for both internal consumption and exports.
It was this ‘new’ Hong Kong that MacLehose and Margaret Thatcher took to Beijing in 1982. The state of the colony so impressed China’s patriarch Deng Xiaoping he averred that its capitalist system should remain unchanged for 50 years after 1997.
9
The irony was that as Hongkongers fervently tried to protect the status quo in the 1980s, they took a neo-liberal turn in summing up its success formula. Not only were the contributions of local activists and progressives not acknowledged, even MacLehose‘s reformist legacy of strong governance was sidelined, as if the colonial government had taken a backseat while Hong Kong transformed itself miraculously into a well-managed world city. Instead, most of the credit went to the long-standing rule of law that guaranteed prosperity and stability, and a free-enterprising market economy where ‘businessman knows best’. Milton Friedman’s oft-quoted praise of Hong Kong as a free economy par excellence was taken as proof of its merits. Hong Kong did not have to learn from other Asian Tigers; it was exceptional.
Hong Kong was soon offered another golden opportunity: the opening-up of China. The de-industrialization experience in British and North American cities was often painful, but for Hong Kong it was mostly pleasant, at least in the initial decade. Labor-intensive manufacturing industries moved over to the neighboring Pearl River Delta area in Guangdong, where cheap labor guaranteed the Hong Kong-owned enterprises’ profitability without re-investment and technological innovation. Hong Kong workers were sent to the Guangdong factories as foremen and managers. The industrial lands in the colony were re-zoned and thrown into the property game. Local capital were directed to invest in real estate and the stock market, where the main board index was dominated by seven listed real estate companies and local banks, whose major business was housing mortgage. With proceeds from land sales often amounting to more than 20% of public revenue, the government felt complacent with leaving the economy alone. By mid-1990s GDP per capita was higher than the UK and second only to Japan in Asia. The colony’s future competitiveness was not seriously discussed by the insouciant local elites. Industrial policy remained a non-starter. As a textbook case of free economy, Hong Kong could not go wrong as long as the world economy, meaning the American economy, was going strong.
The Asian financial crisis was a wake-up call. Hong Kong went down after Thailand imploded, while American economy remained largely unscathed. Korea under a proactive government soon recovered from the crisis and became stronger than before, but Hong Kong performed poorly for seven consecutive years. Meanwhile, China enjoyed stellar growth, thus debunking the newly conceived platitude that if China grows, Hong Kong will grow. Obviously there could be a long time lag. Hubris was replaced by self-doubt. Worries about Guangdong and Shanghai overtaking Hong Kong on logistics, producer services and finance instilled a sense of urgency and even a gloomy mood in the locals. How could all this have happened to Hong Kong?
To make things worse, household median income dropped substantially below that of 1996. Unlike before 1997 when real income had increased for all sectors of society, Hong Kong became a generic global city where the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. The Gini co-efficiency of over 0.52 topped all developed countries and was also the highest in Hong Kong’s history. Other affluent Asia countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and even Singapore, all facing the same pressure from globalization, have witnessed far less severe polarization of wealth.
Hong Kong could no longer blame all its woes on the natural cycles of world economy and other external factors. Some of the problems must have been internal. Obviously, neo-liberal dogmas had their limitations.
If the 1970s was the progressive decade, the 1980s until 1997 was the gilded age, and the ten years after 1997 could be called the decade of uncertainty. Hardly recovered from the hangover of the pre-1997 apogee, the SAR government has spent these 10 years trying to figure out the causes of the post-1997 vagaries and could not find a consensus among its ruling elites, let alone formulating a coherent economic policy. All palliatives have been proved inadequate. The neighboring areas are catching up fast while Hong Kong procrastinates. The ruling elites have been enthralled by neo-liberal promises and other faulty assumptions for too long that they could not see Hong Kong through its own eyes. The fact that the head of the SAR government is not popularly elected certainly does not help the situation.
10
Now we are back to the colonized mind: in spite of having a strong identity and a vibrant local culture, Hong Kong has not developed its own theoretical language of self-articulation and that has impeded its self-understanding. Some commentators went so far as to say that Hong Kong is a city of disappearance or amnesia, and Hong Kong’s story is always presented through other people’s stories.
Without falling into the trap of ontologizing the authentic, one could say that mini-narratives and non-reductionist forms of hybridized visceral writings were often more interesting and reliable guides to Hong Kong than theoretical writings, including discourses informed by usually helpful postcolonial theories from elsewhere.
In the past two decades, local intellectuals armed with critical and postcolonial theories have been increasingly effective in deconstructing or demystifying many received ideas, but their arguments were often shrouded in borrowed and opaque languages, limiting their appeal to the general public.
The decolonization of the Hong Kong mentality has been slow. This leads one to suspect that many Hong Kongers may find a modicum of the colonized mind innocuous or even a boon to their comfort level.
Hong Kong’s postcolonial conundrum partly seems to be this:
A decolonized mind entails, simultaneously, dampening Hong Kong’s enthusiasm to think in terms of received ideas that have either been flattering or humiliating; broadening its cosmopolitan outlook to be more inclusive and trans-cultural; deconstructing or critically canvassing all pre-packaged discourses that have been mobilized to describe Hong Kong from the outside; casting a wider net for new and alternative thinking to feed its changing needs, and from its mongrel viscera constructing its own problematics and language of alterity. That could be messy. It challenges the neat neo-liberal self-understanding that has purported to explain its past successes, and it piques the jealously guarded nationalist discourse of an overwhelming sovereign power. It is a contestation Hong Kongers may feel hesitant to commit.
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育津貼；一九九七年招聘的，待遇低了一等，許多是短期合約，沒有長俸，津貼也少了許多。「梁展文事件」是舊時代的公務員在新時代又享受了一切好處，連新一代的政務官也大感不公，公務員士氣受打擊，行政主導又如何維持？
到另一方。它不單只會束縛我們，而是也可限制反對我們的人。全面否定規範與秩序，大家都要付出很大代價。」
