HONG KONG “IDENTITY” AFTER THE END OF HISTORY

Allen Chun
Institute of Ethnology
Academia Sinica
Taipei, Taiwan 11529

1)     1997: A Year of No Significance

2)     “Post-Colonial” Hong Kong: What's Culture Got to Do with It?

3)     The Public Sphere in Search of a “Structural” Transformation

4)     Countdown to the Next 46 Years

Abstract: This paper is a preliminary attempt to reassess the relevance of “identity” for understanding various currents in Hong Kong culture and society.  At issue are not just the relative influences of “nationalism”, “colonialism” and the “public” in the construction of cultural conscience but more importantly their embeddedness in the changing global economy, ongoing institutional practices and political policy-at-large.

History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention.  But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force.

Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act

 

1997: A Year of No Significance

        The respected sociologist Wong Siu-lun (1999:181) opened his essay, “Changing Hong Kong Identities”, by stating, “the year 1997 is a year of significance for Hong Kong.  The long anticipated rite of passage is over.  With the change of flag at the handover ceremony on 1 July of that year, Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony.  It acquired the new status of a Special Administrative Region [SAR] of China”.  As if to point to the subjective complexities of an objective reality, he then cited remarks made by Chief Secretary Anson Chan, who in reflecting upon personal experiences gained in the first year after the handover said, “[the] real transition has been much more complex, subtle and profound ... That is because the real transition is about identity and not sovereignty”. [1]   Thus, real diverse identities lurk below the surface.

        I argue on the contrary that history is in the first instance more about fictions than realities.  The historical irony of Hong Kong’s handover to China on July 1, 1997 (or “return to the motherland”, depending on one’s point of view) was that the future of Hong Kong, which was a cession in perpetuity, was made to coincide with the end of the 99-year lease of the New Territories.  Few people remember that the New Territories was supposed to be administered as an extension of the colony with due respect to native (presumably unchanging) tradition, even though the reality of modern expansion has effectively incorporated it into the larger colonial history of Hong Kong.  One might add to this the mystery of why the Chinese government on the other hand continued to play along with the reality of the lease, while denying all the while the validity of Hong Kong’s status as a ceded colony (being the result of a treaty signed under duress).  It not only made Handover Day a Chinese national holiday, whose media hype became an industry in itself, but the coincidence of Hong Kong’s celebration of the Queen’s birthday on the eve of the handover canonized the five-day weekend into an event of unreal proportions many times over.  The reality of Hong Kong’s colonial existence, without doubt already mystified by its official “disappearance”, was suddenly resurrected by the fiction of a lease that had already been meaningless if not dead.  If rooted in such fictions, how unreal can identity be?

        Most people who write about identity speak as though we are supposed to have one; if not one, then many.  Life is then a process through which we negotiate on the basis of our identity(ies).  Yet fewer people can systematically say when and why we should invoke our identity(ies), if at all.  Identity is, strictly speaking, a conscious articulation of one’s cultural positionality (among other things), which may in turn be rooted in ethnic traits (or fictions).  Despite our uncertainty as to whether we are really invoking facts or fictions, we are, if anything, almost certainly dealing with selective meanings and purposive strategies.  The fact that identities have changed and continue to change suggests then that they are either a response to changing realities or the basis upon which we actively shape and, in the process of it, change our world.  I think there is a bit of truth in both positions, but I argue that the role of facts and fictions is grossly misunderstood, and this is the reason why the very process of identity formation (as imagination and practice) is in essence a struggle to define, while at the same time being subverted by inherent conflicts of interests and interpretations.  To the confusion of what is fact and fiction, one may add the ongoing dialectic between the conscious articulation of identity (however grounded in fact or fiction) and the unconscious socio-political processes that make possible and delimit the boundaries of identity.  We think we are who we are, when in fact our situatedness within the larger geopolitical order of things demarcates our scope of choices and strategies rather than vice versa.  Unlike history, we can apprehend identity only through its reified forces, while being transformed by its effects.

        Identities can be easily driven by illusions, and postwar Hong Kong is an ideal example of how identities are constantly made and remade.  With ties to a culture industry and other institutions of author-ity, the history of Hong Kong identity(ies) can be seen in some instances more fittingly as a history of hype.  As we all know, public sentiment in Hong Kong has always been prone to what Gustav Le Bon once called “the psychology of the crowd” (la psychologie de la foule), which in French can be perhaps be distorted into a mean pun on mass mentality.  The stock market has been known to plunge drastically on moments of mass hysteria, and the slightest rumors of scandal have been known to cause a run on banks, with nervous clients lining up for days to withdraw their savings deposits.  Sentiments can swing from one extreme to another.  Anti-PRC sentiment was, of course, strongest in reaction to the June 4 Tienanmen Incident of 1989, but it has been countered by the wave of nationalistic fervor, judging at least from the euphoria created by Beijing’s almost successful bid, in 1994, for the (Sydney) Olympics.  In the long run, these moments are precisely that; they come and go.  But more importantly, the volatile and fragile nature that seems to characterize Hong Kong public sentiment (of which identity is a specific politicized manifestation) is as much a reflection of its arbitrariness and unpredictability at a surface level as it is a function of an institutional system that appears to make real the collective ramifications of individual desires or fears.  The market has made what Hong Kong is today, where utilitarian rationality is not only an economic logic that drives the value of commodities and property but also a kind of ethos that dictates entire lifestyles, even though we tend to forget that the global politics of the 1960s was what really transformed Hong Kong into a market society.  In this sense, the fear of capital flight that often epitomizes the seeming fragility or ephemerality of Hong Kong’s economy is really a function more of the lack of a place based rural or industrial infrastructure that is indicative of most other economies.  In other respects, microeconomic laissez-faire is tempered by macroeconomic state intervention.  The volatility of the HK dollar in 1984 led eventually to its currency peg to the US dollar, while the colonial government’s regulation of land policy was an important aspect of Hong Kong’s planned urban and industrial modernization.

        In short, the more one is led to believe that identity in Hong Kong is a product of inherently individual desires and rational intents, the more it actually takes on a fictive character.  In the pre-1997 era, one has been led to believe that a Hong Kong identity exists or is important in some respect, even though we all know that this identity is an invention that is less than 50 years old.  Its distinctiveness is less a product of its unique inventive quality than, in the first instance, of the changing sociopolitical landscape that has defined its parameters and cultivated its meaning.  Moreover, in order to ask what post-1997 identity is or whether it exists at all, one must first ask whether 1997 marks a significant change in sociopolitical terms.

        1997 is a year of no significance, it can be argued.  Or to put it in another way, it is one that marks a potentially significant transition but at an underlying level masks sociopolitical processes whose nature is still unclear or in the midst of being played out, in my opinion.  In actuality, the hype of 1997 did not begin in 1997 or in the immediate madness that led to its ritual handover on July 1.  It was 13 years in the making.  Some of the changes in mindset that predicated this new identity had been put into place during the “formative” years and to some extent have continued into the post-1997 years.  But the sociopolitical circumstances of the transition itself in the larger flow of things have been unpredictable and are worth careful scrutiny.

        Not surprisingly, the most heated debates and crises over identity took place in the mid-1980s, then in the year leading up to the handover itself.  Nonetheless, in the entire transitional era, one can detect a subtle shift of sentiment with regard to definitions of the self that have been ramified and reproduced in different domains of subjective identification and cultural representation.  This has been the subject of endless surveys as well as symbolic analysis of various kinds.  It is not my intent to review the literature in this regard, except to say that all of these discourses and analyses focus too much on deconstructing in a literal sense the semiotic definitions of Hong Kongness vis-à-vis China and the West in order to uncover the underlying substance of these identities.  In the final analysis, the existence of colonialism and nationalism is always inferred but never directly confronted as a regime of practice.  In what senses do the facts of colonialism depend on its fictions, and vice versa?  In what sense is nationalism dualistically opposed to colonialism, and in what sense is it really a kind of neo-colonialism?  The transition signified by “1997” invokes many possible sociopolitical processes, but to understand colonialism and nationalism it is necessary to unpack their ongoing discourses and practices in a Hong Kong context.

        The ethos of utilitarian familism and the myth of apolitical man tend to be the most often cited metaphors to characterize the culture and lifestyle of people living in postwar Hong Kong.  Their “actuality” is a function of the degree to which people behave or think they behave in such ways, superficially speaking. [2]   Stereotypes are less useful for being generally recognized matters of fact than for underscoring the historical peculiarity of socio-political processes that give rise to such phenomena.  In this case, the discursive fictions serve conveniently to mask the real relations of power that are constitutive of the socio-political system.  It goes without saying that the utilitarian lifestyle for which Hong Kong is so famous is largely the product of the 1970s.  However, the free market economy that gave rise to such a lifestyle was itself the consequence of a complex political struggle to transcend the nationalist strife that enveloped Hong Kong as well as a moment in the evolution of the modern world system.  The fact that we view this utilitarian ethos largely as a progressive manifestation of the modern lifestyle is at the same time a fiction that has neatly disguised the exploitative aspects of the capitalist system.  Eugene Cooper (1982:25) perhaps phrased it best, when he said that free market development in Hong Kong was “a veritable proving ground for Marxist theory, where the enterprising student of Marxist political economy can literally watch chapters of Capital unfold before his eyes”.  The notion of the typical Hong Konger as apolitical is also without doubt a product of that modern, materialistic era, but few people note that this apolitical façade was strictly enforced by a colonial government bent on deflecting nationalist conflict from the territory to the extent of suppressing all forms of political dissent.  It is also during this era that the Hong Kong government officially disavowed use of the word colony to depict Hong Kong, while preferring instead to call it a territory, an undoubtedly more value-free term.  Names in themselves may not mean much, but the maintenance of an apolitical façade has more than just a matter-of-fact tone to it.  The institutionalization of an apolitical mentality and lifestyle ultimately has the goal of deflecting the very violence of colonial power that maintains the system, much like the way the virtues of utilitarian progress have obscured the exploitative dimensions of capitalism.  Whether Hong Kong’s political system or social lifestyle has remained colonial, despite names to the contrary, is a matter of interpretation, but the discursive fictions are an important aspect of understanding the nature of the underlying institutional reality.  In this regard, one cannot easily separate the regime of colonialism from nationalism or even modernity.  Their mutually collusive relationships form precisely the socio-political ground that engenders “identity”. [3]

 

“Post-Colonial” Hong Kong: What's Culture Got to Do with It?

        In the year leading up to the handover, after years of official disavowal by the government of Hong Kong’s existence as a colony, a large stream of publications in both the English and Chinese scholarly literature appeared, dealing precisely with topics related to colonialism.  Whether this explosion of interest was an attempt to cash in on a trendy topic in the wake of colonialism’s demise or the result of other more serious intellectual concerns is anyone’s speculation, but it was without doubt fueled to some extent by corresponding or ongoing expressions of cultural difference.  I hesitate to say that such expressions of difference are sentiments of nationalism, but it is clear that the appearance of an explicit positionality about colonialism as a real (or discursive) other indicates a subjective distance or removal from its object, as though the latter can now be gazed, both in light of the impending transition and people’s attachment or identification to it.  It is as if one said, “colonialism has now become history”.  The end of history marks the arrival of a different future, while at the same time relegating colonialism to its destined fate in the evolution of things.

        The plethora of retrospective publications that appeared in anticipation of the handover actually covers a wide range of critical perspectives.  In addition to books dealing with issues of sovereignty, the one country-two systems framework, Basic Law and calls for democracy, there has been no shortage of publications in English alone ruminating on the legacy of colonialism in Hong Kong, positive and negative. [4]

        Colonial difference aside, it is important to note that the inevitability of 1997 in the years leading up to it did indeed invoke attempts by China, at least rhetorically, to cultivate nationalist sentiment at a local level as well as attempts by institutions in Hong Kong to cultivate favor with Chinese counterparts, in the interest of future constructive engagement.  Needless to say, the resurgence of cultural nationalism in China in the past decade has often become the source of the government’s appeal to popular support among its masses.  While sometimes seen as a heavy-handed tactic in a Hong Kong context, the rhetoric of nationalism must also be viewed in the way it overlaps with the discourse of democracy and the collusion of business interests.  As constructive engagement, conformity to nationalist pressures (imagined or real) has not only taken the form of positive initiatives, as evidenced by the fast-growing numbers of PRC scholars invited to and students enrolled by universities in Hong Kong prior to the handover, but has also taken the form of negative sanctions, as evidenced by the increasing prevalence of self-censorship that was imposed during the same period in media, political and intellectual circles.  In this sense, increasing pressure to conform, whether one called it explicit or implicit nationalism, already began to be firmly rooted in pre-handover Hong Kong, and this trend corresponded simultaneously to a phase of overt anti-colonialism or impending post-colonialism.

        Thus, nationalizing sentiments in the transitional era leading up to 1997 had as its goal the objectification of colonialism as a real other as well as the inculcation of a different kind of identity.  In effect, some sense of identity had to be heightened, not only in reference to a newly objectified other but also in contrast to an apolitical other of the previous era, which became a source of cultural ambiguity during this transitional era. [5]   More importantly, however, with these nationalizing sentiments came the fiction that identity was somehow necessary for survival in the inevitable future.  There are no hard and fast rules that dictate that identity is necessary for the survival of anything; it is largely a function of “the system”.  Western identity was not necessary for people’s survival under a colonial system that tried in fact to maintain the separations of social hierarchy.  Similarly, the lack of a higher abstract identity in the apolitical 1970s may have been the cause of what some perceive to be the source of Hong Kong’s cultural and intellectual desert, but in another sense it served as the perfect vehicle for institutionalizing a different kind of social system driven by divisions of class and differential access to cultural resources.  Impending nationalism played on the resurrection of a colonial other and the deprivations of a cultural identity, not because political transition was inevitable but rather because it viewed shared identity as a necessary foundation for that new political order.

        Yet the question is not why or if identity is really necessary, but rather what is it for?  One might also add, who is it for and to what extent do alternative notions of culture provide the basis for effective counter-identities?  I think the developments leading up to 1997 that invoked a nationalistic mindset were enough to presage the order of things to come.  In the waning years of the transition, different rhetorical contests were being played out on different levels that continued well into the post-1997 era.  Aside from the debate over how and to what extent the one country-two systems rule would be implemented, the other debate that invoked much discussion involved the rule of democracy.  The notion of identity impinged on both debates but in different ways.  Seen from the perspective of “one country-two systems”, culture seemed to enjoy a certain autonomy, in the sense that it only seemed to be a matter of political affiliation and not a matter of social and economic lifestyle.  However, in the context of the democracy debates, culture seemed to a subdued element relative to the criterion of political participation that became relevant when considered as a defining characteristic in relation to the nature and importance of local autonomy.

        One can debate at great lengths as to whether the principle of “one country-two systems” actually guarantees autonomy of the political sphere from the economic.  However, the great tide of nationalism that continued to swell in the waning years leading up to 1997, manifested in overt discourse as well as implicit action (through constructive engagement of various kinds and imposition of self-censorship), should have indicated that, if anything, the post-1997 years would see more of the same.  In light of the resurrected anti-colonialism, the label “Royal” had already begun to be removed from government and other affiliated institutions, sometimes amidst the clamor of protest to replace all icons of colonial legacy with Chinese ones.  In the aftermath of the “glorious restoration” of Taiwan by China, the KMT government promptly renamed all the major streets with ones extolling Confucian virtues, such as Renai (benevolence) and Zhongxiao (loyalty) Road, or with ones memorializing Chinese places and people.  It happened everywhere else transformed by nationalist revolutions, routinely, one might add.  This systematic swelling of nationalist fervor that was being cultivated in the transition years should have easily spilled over into the educational sphere, with increased emphasis on learning Chinese language and history. [6]   Given popular acceptance of the handover’s inevitability and the change of political sovereignty, the mood should have been ripe for the imposition of a new, if not different, “identity”.  Indeed, several writers have gone further by predicting the imposition of radical penetration of Party, military and other bureaucratic presence after the handover. [7]   Jamie Allen (1997) perhaps put forward the most pessimistic view, when he predicted that, after the Party sets up shop, the party would be over.

        Despite the inevitability of the handover and presumed public acceptance of the change of sovereignty, if not identity as well, one might wonder why, to the contrary, so little has changed in post-1997 Hong Kong.  The People’s Liberation Army, under the intense scrutiny of the handover media, entered Hong Kong, but little else to signal the threat of military or Party domination seemed to materialize. [8]   Despite the fears of political oppression that prompted the media to adopt self-censorship, the relative freedom of the press in airing critical views of government and official policy after the establishment of the S.A.R. regime seemed to run counter to a trend anticipated by heightened nationalism, which was then supposed to be the point of departure for other all institutional changes. [9]   If all these changes predicated by the end of colonial history and advent of a new cultural identity failed to materialize in the end, then one might ask, what does culture have to do with “post-colonial” Hong Kong, if anything?  Even the nationalizing rhetoric seemed to diminish accordingly.

        Culture is never a politically neutral entity, and identity is even less so.  Rising nationalist sentiment in China has often served an important function in providing necessary popular support for the government’s actions and policies.  As in the case of Hong Kong, it could have effectively served to facilitate political integration. [10]

 

The Public Sphere in Search of a “Structural” Transformation

        One can easily speculate on the reasons why so little has changed in the socio-political order of things, especially in light of various indicators to the contrary.  The Chinese government did indeed make several official proclamations, in countering fears of anticipated suppression of press freedom, that it would adopt a position of non-interference in local affairs.  In light of assorted events that have taken place in Hong Kong after 1997, there will always be disagreement on the degree to which Beijing is perceived to have or has actually interfered in the running of Hong Kong.  It is not my intent to offer any opinion on or interpretation of these events; instead I merely wish to point out that things could have radically changed just on the basis of the critical mass that had been building up to disassemble the legacy of colonial culture, establish new beginnings by reorienting Hong Kong back to its sinocentric roots and institutionalize the means through which a newly emerging identity could be fostered and put into practice.  All of these things had already been successfully inculcated into individual thought and behavior long before the handover.  Why did the government then kill the momentum that would have facilitated integration?

        In support of Beijing’s non-interference policy, observers have also suggested that the insistence on keeping a good face on the “one-country two-systems” rule has to do instead with the PRC’s attempt to woo the confidence of people in Taiwan to return to the motherland under the same kind of setup.  I find this rather dubious, since Hong Kong is the not the first or only example where the PRC has claimed to guarantee local “autonomy” (Tibet being the other) and because its hard line tactics to threaten Taiwan militarily in the event of independence are largely inconsistent with the soft-sell talk.  Besides, politics can always change China’s view or policy on anything, as it has already done so several times in the past few decades.

        In all of this, the democratization movement in Hong Kong government seems to have an uncertain future.  Thanks to the long colonial legacy of autocratic rule in Hong Kong, the post-1997 administration has found it more convenient to maintain the status quo, while championing the rule of Hong Kong by Hong Kongers.  Efforts to increase direct democratic participation in the election of legislators and running of government continue to be fought for and frustrated, and such efforts have mostly been pursued without regard to culture and identity issues.  In other words, unlike Taiwan, where the national independence movement has derived much energy from efforts to demonstrate the existence of a native Taiwanese cultural consciousness or the separateness of Taiwanese ethnicity vis-à-vis Chinese ethnicity, the democracy campaign in Hong Kong has largely been a political or legal issue, devoid of cultural content.  This has also colored the way in which issues regarding the public sphere have developed, in contrast to Taiwan.  In Hong Kong, there is a sharper contrast between the state (with its functional interests) and elements of a public effectively excluded from democratic participation.  In Taiwan, the ethnic coloration of political issues is largely a survival of the cultural nationalist policy of a former KMT regime and will without doubt diminish, as ideological differences between various parties become articulated in increasingly political terms.  Moreover in Hong Kong, there is no firm indication that local identity can or will ever have useful political leverage.

        I deliberately point to the question of identity, the principle of local autonomy and issues of democratization to show that, in discussions of the Hong Kong public sphere, they are and have been seen largely as mutually distinct factors.  They tend to represent different struggles and have not been mobilized to influence each other, whereas in other venues, such as Taiwan, it can be argued that these factors have always been mutually intertwined (if not hopelessly entangled).  Moreover, I would argue that the cultural arbitrariness of Hong Kong’s situation is a discursive fiction that obscures other facets of institutional reality that are relevant to the emergence of a very different kind of structural transformation in the public sphere.

        First of all, whatever role a “new” national identity was meant to play or could have played in post-1997 was effectively undermined by the Asian financial crisis of fall 1997 that continued well into 1998.  At least in a political arena, identity issues receded far into the background with the onset and deepening of economic recession that made societal survival the prime substance of public discourse.  In the face of international attacks on the local currency that threatened to destabilize the Asian economy, Beijing allied with the Hong Kong government but primarily to present a unified political front that was based solely on economic considerations (defending the currency peg).  The pivotal position of Hong Kong in insulating mainland China from the Asian recession strengthened, if anything, the autonomy of the Hong Kong government in defining policy and controlling the fiscal crisis.  The Tung Chee-hwa administration suffered a loss of confidence during the crisis, but it had more to do with his performance in handling political affairs than attacks on the nature of his autocratic rule.  In other words, issues of identity, local autonomy and democratic rule may appear to be distinct, discursively speaking, but their significance in any political context can and does in fact change vis-à-vis other issues.

        Official non-interference in the media has also seemed to enhance the existence of Hong Kong autonomy, but this is actually only a partial reality that disguises the changing nature of Hong Kong’s “public” sphere.  The fiction that contributes to the notion that Hong Kong is an autonomous “region” is reflective to some extent of the PRC’s position that, at least in some functional respects, Hong Kong can be seen as separate from China.  Economically China is linked integrally to the global economy through Hong Kong, and the most recent fiscal crisis has demonstrated that Hong Kong still plays a seminal role in this regard.  In social and local political matters, Hong Kong’s autonomy impacts less on developments on the mainland.  As long as the political scheme of things favors the appointment of Beijing-sympathetic cliques in power, media opposition is a matter for local government to handle and does not directly impact on Beijing.  However, freedom of the press is curiously enough only restricted to “local” affairs.  As Frank Ching (1999:50) keenly notes, the Hong Kong media has tread more cautiously in news pertaining to China, or to be more precise, news involving access to information requiring the cooperation of Chinese agencies and China-backed companies.  Some topics are too sensitive or seen as totally taboo, such as the activities of official agencies that front for the Communist Party.  As Michael Curtin (1998:288) has also observed, the boundaries of media openness and closeness is a function of the fact that the Hong Kong media is not just a local entity but one whose market thrives on expansion into China.  As he puts it, “this strategy of expansion into the mainland market thus requires the cooperation of government officials, if the industry is going to reap the benefits of its popularity”.  The principle of media freedom is thus often compromised to satisfy the reality of market control.

        In short, business interests have in fact always been intertwined with politics in ways that influence at an underlying level support for or compromising of certain ideological principles (whether it be identity or democracy).  This complicit relation of power (and guanxi) is in the final analysis the biggest threat to the emergence of a truly democratic public sphere.  This is the real face of post-1997 Hong Kong.

 

Countdown to the Next 46 Years?

        One of the surprising aspects of a short visit I made to Hong Kong in November 1994 during the intense bidding for the 2000 Olympics (which was eventually won by Sydney, Australia) was not so much the fact that once “apolitical” Hong Kongers now seemed to be awash in a euphoric patriotic fervor but rather how all this came about.  It surprised me even more that a politically neutral Hong Kong friend, who also happened to be a long term Australian resident, was swept up by the prevailing current of opinion and media hype to admit as well that Beijing would almost surely win the Olympic bid.  Of course, the intensity of “nationalistic” sentiments had its roots in an increasing and ongoing renaissance of Chinese consciousness that covers the transition period that ranges from a resurgence of interest in lost historical and intellectual roots to overt expressions of political solidarity.  Yet, one should not lose track of the fact that this sudden outpouring of nationalist sentiment is as much the product of an inherent Chinese consciousness that Hong Kongers have always had (even during the colonial era) as it is the machination of sophisticated media hype.  Hong Kong business interests have the most to gain from a successful bid by Beijing to hold the Olympics, and it is basically the same kind of interest that drives them to seek guanxi alliances with important officials and entrepreneurs in the PRC.  In other words, they are not only motivated more by profit motives than nationalistic feelings per se but more importantly are quite able and often willing to manipulate such sentiments (up and down) purely for the sake of self-interested economic gain.

        Thus, it is not really surprising, in retrospect, that the first people who ardently supported reunification of Hong Kong with China or at least expressed confidence in the future of a post-colonial Hong Kong were rich capitalists.  At the same time they were the same people who were most likely to steer away from conflict with Beijing, especially in face of democratization movements and campaigns for increased local autonomy.  In this context, unlike the “apolitical” capitalism that was characteristic of the 1970s, capitalist interests of the post-colonial era may have been driven by the same pure self-interested profit motives of capitalists found elsewhere, but on the other hand in a Hong Kong context it is clear that such capitalists would easily, if not knowingly, sacrifice democratic ideals and manipulate nationalist sentiments in order to protect their own interests, if necessary.  This unholy alliance between business and the new regime was not only designed to be the foundation of the new order, but its success was dependent to a great extent on suppressing those (mostly democratizing) forces that represented a challenge to this power relationship.

Quite clearly, the structural transformation that is required in order to give rise to a democratic public sphere in post-1997 Hong Kong involves not only the advent of open, rational communication but more importantly a challenge to the various forces that have resulted in the institutional collusion of big business and political bureaucratic interests.  The predominance of commercial interests in government is nothing new to Hong Kong, given its founding in the history of trade and the strong representation of major corporate interests in the colonial government, but policies of the S.A.R. government to divide legislative representation according to functional constituencies at the expense of direct democracy have insured corporate interests a direct and omnipresent role.  In the era leading up to 1997, nationalistic fervor was a useful mode of representation to promote their own interests as well as to curry favor with counterparts in the PRC.  In the Asian recession that followed, the mood of societal survivalism forced the government to prioritize purely economic interests at the expense of other values but in a way that made identity among other things secondary concerns.  Moreover, not unlike the market sensibilities that have forced the media to mute its criticism when transcending local boundaries, the expansion of Hong Kong corporate interests into China that has co-opted them into toeing the line in Hong Kong also shows that the domain of the public “sphere” has effectively gone beyond a local Hong Kong context.  Despite its fictional autonomy (under the one-country, two systems scheme), the reality of its post-1997 existence has thrust Hong Kong society into a mutually dependent economic and political relationship with the PRC.  The Hong Kong media (and film industry) must expand its market into the PRC just to survive locally, and Hong Kong corporate interests view control of the PRC market as a larger priority than the local Hong Kong one.  The reality of that larger sphere of economic and political interaction is in the end the bottom line that often forces compromises made at the local level.  In the end, who cares about identity, as long as everyone gets what he/she seeks, despite the various façades?

Ultimately, the biggest fiction is that of one-country, two systems.  The ritual façade of the handover has prompted the fictive significance of 1997, and the fiction of Hong Kong’s autonomy within a meaningless ideological framework has reset the clock on its ultimate integration with the mainland.  In the PRC, it is rather ironic to note that so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has in fact led among other things to the abolition of the term class (shehui jieji).  In Hong Kong, embrace of the motherland has instead refined institutional capitalism to new heights.

 

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