DRAFT (Please Do Not Circulate)

Giant Panda and Mickey Mouse:

Transnational Objects of Fantasy in Post-1997 Hong Kong

Kwai-Cheung Lo

Humanities Program

Hong Kong Baptist University

I would like to begin this essay with a fantasy I wrote some time ago:

        Since the giant panda pair, An An and Jia Jia, became widely popular in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Chinese central government has decided to continuously export to the ex-colony the excessive amount of giant pandas. In the next five years, one million and sixty seven hundred thousand giant pandas from Sichuan would be given to Hong Kong for the historic commemoration and early celebration of the city’s complete integration with the Mainland in 2046.

        Although giant pandas are lovely cutie ambassadors, one million and sixty seven hundred thousand are not an insignificant figure that the tiny SAR could easily handle. Under such extraordinary circumstances, the SAR government has no choice but to establish an emergency unit to deal with the crisis. With the goodwill of the central government and the enthusiastic reactions of the SAR citizens, in addition to the fact that giant panda was upheld as national treasure, the Hong Kong government did not have the guts to openly categorize the imminent arrival of one million and sixty seven hundred thousand giant pandas as a “crisis.” Hence, the works of the emergency unit had been disguised as fervent preparations for the upcoming festive event.

        The SAR Chief Executive who was also the chairman of the emergency unit told the press that, “it is a very extraordinary, very complicated situation. We have to deal with it quickly. There is no time we can spare. Just think about the figure! Think about the panda shits left by one million and sixty seven hundred thousand giant pandas!”

        The report composed by the emergency unit stated that the most difficult problem brought by the advent of a million pandas was not necessarily the problem of limited space for their accommodation. Indeed, the SAR government had already planned many grand projects to build numbers of theme parks in order to settle these pandas. Those theme parks that have agreed to provide homes for the pandas included Disneyland, Cyberport, Chinese Medicine Hub, Oriental Hollywood Film City and others. Unexpectedly, the report pointed out, the area that would receive the greatest impact from the million pandas was actually the health problem of Hong Kong residents. Scientific research proved that watching pandas too much could make people develop “panda eye-patches” and damage normal vision. The food supply for the million pandas would also put a lot of pressure on the limited numbers of bamboo trees in the SAR. In the long run, the pandas would empty out all the greens in the city and create severe environmental problems. The report also called our attention to an issue that had rarely been discussed: the naming of the million pandas. Giant pandas had been traditionally called double names, such as “Gui Gui,” “Yan Yan,” etc. It was very likely that one million and sixty seven hundred thousand giant pandas could exhaust all the double names, constituting the legitimacy crisis of proper naming. If we were forced to follow the tradition of double names by calling the pandas “Ba Ba” (father), “Ma Ma” (mother), or “Ye Ye” (grandfather), it would definitely subvert our family hierarchy and value, blur the boundary between human and animal, and topple the Confucian ruling order of the post-colonial Hong Kong regime.

        From a reliable source that refused to disclose its identity, there was a classified item in the report, which had never been released to the public. It was said that the leaders of the central government revealed to the SAR that giving out the million pandas was not simply a handover present but also a warning to any hostile powers in the West. If they ever tried to disturb the peace of China and to intervene into Chinese internal affairs, millions of giant pandas would be released to all over the world. During that time, swarm of millions pandas would cross all the national borders, trample the sovereignty of every country, and cause severe ecological problems to the world. The SAR government did not want to get involved in this foreign affair issue that was outside the limits of its autonomy. Therefore, the issue of a million pandas was only casually categorized as the general issue of new immigrants from Mainland China (Lo, 1999).

In 1999, Beijing gave a pair of giant pandas to Hong Kong to commemorate the former British colony’s return to the Chinese rule. An An, a 14-year-old male panda, and Jia Jia, a 21-year-old female, made their public debut in May 1999 at Hong Kong Ocean Park, a private amusement theme park where many tourists from Mainland China frequent.

By the end of 1999, a HK$ 21 billion theme park deal has been signed by Hong Kong SAR government to provide money to Walt Disney Company to build the world’s first “Chinese Disneyland” which is due to open in 2005 at Penny’s Bay on Lantau Island of Hong Kong. When Hong Kong economy has been in doldrums for years after the Asian financial crisis, the Hong Kong Disneyland project is expected to spark off the city’s recovery and induce more investments. It is predicted that Hong Kong Disneyland would primarily attract visitors from Mainland China. [1]

The negative feelings of Hong Kong locals towards the new Mainland arrivals have been rising since 1997. In January 1999, the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal ruled that Mainland residents with at least one parent who was a legal resident of Hong Kong had a constitutional right to join their parent in Hong Kong. The ruling intensified Hong Kong people’s anti-immigrant emotion. The SAR government further provoked the hostility with the announcement that there could be one million and sixty seven hundred thousand Mainlanders moving to Hong Kong if their rights of abode had been granted. Later on, the Hong Kong government asked the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress to review the ruling and overthrow it. On the other hand, Mainland visitors are becoming the largest portions of the city’s tourist industry. Twelve million tourists are expected to visit Hong Kong per year and about one third will come from China.

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Panda, project of Disney theme park, and the continuous influx of people from China are interwoven into a fantasmatic scenario of the post-1997 Hong Kong Chinese community. The message of this fantasized picture is rather enigmatic. When many people expect the post-colonial Hong Kong to become more Chinese, the city, however, turns its back on Chinese cultural productions and opens its arms to the growing American influence. The presence of “aliens” from China is perceived by Hong Kong Chinese as a threat to their unique identity and a major cause of conflicts that divide the community, though many local residents also recognize that their economic fortunes are increasingly and inextricably tied to the Mainland. Indeed, post-1997 Hong Kong’s recourse to Chinese national identity or Chinese nationalism could emerge at any moment, not only pragmatically when the city needs to compete with other global opponents and to protect itself from the disorientation caused by the disruptive forces of globalization. But also when the decolonized Hong Kong people feel unbearable with the internal traumatic contradictions of their modernity and capitalist development, and unconsciously attempt to repress the very contradictions of that development, a unified sense of national belonging could cover up the tension. Hence, what I mean by fantasy in this context is never simply an illusion that cannot be sustained when confronted with a correct apprehension of reality. Rather, fantasy here is a construction or an imaginary scene in which the subject becomes the object of fantasy to support the reality of Hong Kong after 1997. The formula of a fantasy is essentially consisted of four elements. They are a subject, an object, a signifier, and images (Nasio, 1998). These elements are organized according to a scenario which is always expressed through a certain narrative. In short, fantasy operates as a narrative to resolve some fundamental contradictions and antagonism by rearranging their terms into some causes-and-effects sequential orders (Žižek, 1997).

The contingent occurrences before and after 1997 are therefore imposed upon with a diachronically fantasized historical narrative that functions to evoke, erase, and thereby to resolve the traumatic antagonism. The sequential relationship and the continuously progressive story in the fantasy scenario then replace the radical historical ruptures that usually defy the logic of narration and paradoxically generate the synchronicity of losses and gains. If “1997” is the signifier of the fantasmatic scene, it both separates and reunifies the subject and the object of fantasy. Having lost the object, the subject always becomes the object itself. We should recognize that the loss of the object occurs at the same moment of the identification of the subject with the object of desire. There will not be any loss without the subject’s identification with what it loses. In the fantasy picture of post-1997 Hong Kong, is the post-colonial city itself necessarily the fantasizing subject? Would it be possible that Hong Kong is only acting as a proxy to assume the fantasy of the other as its own? And what is the object that has been lost and for which the subject of fantasy mourns? Probably, we not only fail to measure what has been lost and what has been gained for Hong Kong after the 1997 historical break, we are also not able to determine the definite positions of the subject and the object in the scenario. However, if fantasy is the question itself, it could also provide an answer for the changed city that is puzzled by its constitutive position to the desires of the others. What does Mainland China want from a decolonized Hong Kong? What does the West see in a Hong Kong that has been integrated into the territory of China? What is the significance of post-1997 Hong Kong to others?

In the fantasmatic formation, a certain object is needed to offer some degree of consistency to the subject’s being. Through such object of fantasy, the subject is able to fill out the place of a response that is not given, to identify with the object that is seen as the extension of the subject, and, because of such identification, to perceive itself as worthy of the desire of others. While post-1997 Hong Kong is fantasizing itself being unique and luring to China by offering the Mainland visions of an alternative “Chinese” modernity, China also sees the repossessed city as a phantasmatic picture to conceal an antagonistic situation of its own capitalist development, and to showcase a kind of enjoyment to which only Hong Kong is allowed to have access. In a way, the fantasy is mutual. But a Hong Kong that hangs on to a fantasy is actually becoming fantasy itself -- becoming a fantasyland filled with cutie, fluffy cartoon and cartoon-like living beings. When post-1997 Hong Kong attempts to conceal the void of its new subjectivity and to erase the antagonism in its past experience of modernity with the fascinating effects of the new fantasy objects, it also unwittingly exposes the internal contradictions of the modernity within the Chinese nation-state. In a strange circularity, the fantasy of post-1997 Hong Kong fills the lack it itself opens up by creating and bearing witness to what it means to cover up.         

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The giant panda is one of the world’s most endangered species. Like all other endangered species, giant pandas confront the problems of human encroachment into their habitat and deforestation of their natural range. The rare population of the bear-like animals is also due to their very selective eating habits and extremely short mating seasons. But unlike any other endangered animals, giant pandas have a tremendous fascinating power on human psyche. No other animals, probably except those costumed figures of humanized ones like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, can be so appealing and favorable to different people and age groups. Panda’s worldwide popularity could be attributed to its large but cuddly and soft body, clumsy and clownish movement, child-like innocent look, and seemingly harmless and friendly character. Critics also point out that the bear-like animal with distinctive black and white markings and large eye-patches would not have won a significant place in human hearts were it not that the teddy-bear was already a popular toy when the first pandas began to arrive in the West. Rarity surely accounts for panda’s appeal. Found only in Sichuan, the black and white animals are considered national treasures in China. Only about 1,000 giant pandas are believed to survive in the wild of Southwestern China. The Chinese government is never shy of using the popularity of giant pandas to advance its diplomatic and political interest. Giving out pandas has become a very honorable gesture of China for befriending other nations. The first living pandas went to the U.S. as gifts from the Nationalist government in the 1930s. When the Communist government wanted to rebuild international relations with the world during the 1970s, pandas were presented to the heads of different nation-states, including the U.S. president Richard Nixon. Besides ping-pong, giant panda has become the symbol of friendship between China and other nations. Europe, Japan and Mexico also benefited from China’s panda diplomacy. But, beginning from the 1980s, China was no longer giving out giant pandas for free. The panda loan program started because the Chinese desperately needed money to help the animals survive. The bear-like beast could be leased on short-term loans by various zoos primarily in the West for about US$200,000 a month.    

The arrival of the pandas at the post-colonial Hong Kong was definitely seen as a generous act from the Chinese central government. But it was at first opposed by animal rights and environmental groups, because the humidity and sub-tropical climate of the port city has been regarded as unsuitable for the giant animals. So a US$10.2 million 2,000 square meter temperature-controlled facility, one of the biggest giant panda habitats in the world, was built at the Ocean Park as the new home for the special guests from China. The enclosed giant panda habitat is kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit all day long with humidity at 50 to 60 percent, while fresh and cool air will circulate freely in the winter. Hence, visitors of the Hong Kong’s giant pandas may need to wear jacket even in the hot summer. The panda habitat extends behind the back wall where there are four large sleeping dens for the VIP animals. In addition, at the back of the habitat, there found advanced medical and husbandry facilities to ensure the big bears’ health. Bushes are planted throughout the constructed habitat to play the role of barriers in case the pandas need some privacy. The giant pandas in the concrete-and-glass-made house constitute a certain representational signs that not only demonstrate the simulated wild life of a precious species in order to educate the visitors how they can help ensure the survival of the threatened animals. But also the pandas parachute a kind of heterogeneous quality which is not necessarily compatible with and even is foreign to the local environment of Hong Kong community.

The embassy of the giant pandas is revealing in terms of the China-Hong Kong relationship after 1997. Hong Kong does not ask for this national treasure, because, obviously, Hong Kong does not know what it can want from China. But with the generosity of the Chinese central government, Hong Kong has to accept the gift and see it as grace from the North. Despite of their impressively cute and friendly look, the giant pandas connote a meaning that might not be too much different from that of the garrison of the People’s Liberation Army in Hong Kong. As national symbols, they both convey the presence of a well-designed Chineseness overseeing and being seen in the post-colonial city. However, it is not necessarily true that the public authority of China maintains a gentle appearance while behind it there is the brutal exercise of power. Pandas and Liberation Army, however, are the double operation of the concept of Panopticon. In order to control and monitor the behaviors of people, power in modern society, on the one hand, is imposed through putting the people under surveillance without itself being seen. On the other hand, power also makes itself as transparent as possible to serve as a fetish that fascinates with its conspicuous presence. The more the Liberation Army becomes invisible, the stronger is their spectral effective control over the city. Whereas, the more the giant pandas from China can turn themselves into an attractive spectacle, the more they function as a powerful ideological call to address the viewing subject. Hong Kong people are thus reminded of the two faces of the Chinese sovereign: one is appeasing and seemingly harmless, another strict and potentially relentless.

However, the giant pandas are never simply an ideological interpellation targeted only at the wavering Hong Kong people who may have doubt about their new Chinese communist master. As the home of the giant pandas in Hong Kong is at the Ocean Park, a local theme park established by the Hong Kong Jockey Club, where is the designated spot for the visitors from Mainland, the Chineseness represented by the big bears also functions as a self-seeing or self-mirroring spectacle. It is the Mainland visitors, not necessarily the Hong Kong locals, who are assured with the visibility of the national symbol while travelling to this city that has been formerly a British colony and just lately returned to the Chinese motherland. [2] Hence, the gaze of China is always already included in the picture of panda watching. Unlike other giant pandas sent to overseas zoos, the pair at Hong Kong is staged not simply for the external eyes, but also posed as a fantasized setting in order to attract the Mainland Chinese gaze itself. Self-reflection in the making of Chinese national identity is definitely involved here. It is a narcissistic act of beholding and recognizing oneself in a mirror image. The significant meaning for Mainland tourists to visit Hong Kong after 1997 is never simply to travel just to another Chinese city, but is to come to reclaim a long lost territory where the truly essential dimension of national characteristics should be sighted. Giant panda precisely is the living master signifier (the “dead” but far more mythic and powerful one is of course the dragon, which the Hong Kong SAR government has recently appropriated as its “new” logo) that stands for such essential dimension about which the Chinese visitors need not make any other claim in order to feel like “home.” What Hong Kong means for China is that, under the withering-away of the traditional nation-state, the inner truth of Chineseness could seemingly reappear through a form of animal-externalization in the regained tiny post-colonial space. The return of Hong Kong precisely constitutes the needed re-emergence of Chinese nationalism to fill out the ideological void left by the dying communist doctrines. By giving the giant pandas to Hong Kong, China turns the bears into a fantasized setting in which China appears caught up as a participant in order to see itself in a likeable image as worthy of love. The subject of the fantasy hence becomes the signifier that marks the place of the object of desire. In other words, the presence of Chineseness relies on the assurance of self-seeing and the fantasmatic scene of turning itself into a desirable object for the other. In the fantasy scenario of panda watching, any alienation, contradictory elements and divisiveness between the recovered territory and the motherland would be minimized, masked and rearranged into a coherent narrative of identification that melds all differences into one totality.

As an object of fantasy that fills the lack in the Chinese subject constituted in the late twentieth century, giant panda is also elevated to the status of phallus that could promise an imaginary fullness among all Chinese either from Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan or elsewhere. It is reported that Mainland Chinese government is willing to offer Taiwan giant pandas as gift, since panda is a symbol of peace, and according to the Chinese officials, what Mainland has been relentlessly pursuing for is a peaceful unification with Taiwan. Offering giant pandas to Taiwan is thus a well-intended act from the Mainland. However, Taiwan is afraid that to let panda come to Taiwan may imply that the Taiwanese government has to accept the one China premises in the political negotiations for unification. Even though Shanghai is willing to give Taipei the giant pandas for free and the mayor of Taipei is eager to have them, the deal is still pending (“Dalu yuanzengtai daxiongmao,” 2001). Insofar as the giant pandas designate the agency of symbolic authority of China in Hong Kong, they also remind us of their fragile and endangered state. In fact, the presence of the phallus could be paradoxically the signifier of castration. From the Lacanian perspective, the assumption of the symbolic phallus by man is only possible with the prior assumption of his own castration. The imposed Chinese “reality” with which the recovered Hong Kong is pledged to merge, as it is regulated by a symbolic fiction, conceals or forecloses something that may return in an alien form. If the giant pandas denote the symbolic phallic presence of Chineseness planned and planted by China, it is not necessarily a dominant one that can be seen as the answer to any possible disintegration of imaginary unity. Rather, it is an endangered kind of Chineseness that might have difficulties to reproduce itself and could probably not survive by itself without tremendous care and protection. Perhaps, the rarity of giant pandas should not be simply attributed to the malfunction of their phallic organ. But panda’s phallus could hardly stand out as “most easily seized upon in the real of sexual copulation” and is difficult to be pictured as “the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation” (Lacan 1982: 82). The Chineseness manifested by the pandas is only something that has to be isolated and encircled (in the glass house of foreign zoo, in the conservation area at Sichuan, or in Hong Kong theme park) in order to make sure it can last. The phallus of panda is a negative idea of a particular vanishing being, a being that represents its own gradual disappearance.

The fantasy scenario staged by the giant pandas is not exactly used to cover the uneasy tension between Hong Kong and China so as to indulge the people of two places in the dream of a unified and harmonious Chinese nation held together by solidarity and cultural cohesiveness. On the contrary, the fantasy of panda watching in Hong Kong articulates a kind of ironic distance for the Hong Kong subject not to identify too much with the displayed Chineseness. However, far from suggesting the failure of ideological edifice, it is such a distance that functions as the positive condition of its performance. Although the resubjectivizing process of Hong Kong people into a unified Chinese identity may not be very smooth, the ideological interpellation always involves a certain “forced choice.” That is to say, when the subject recognizes himself as a member of the united China, he would freely choose the fact that he has always already been a member of the organic Chinese whole. An interpellated subject emerges out of the act of freely assuming the inevitable. For the majority of Hong Kong people, an inner distance is still firmly maintained in their consciousness to differentiate themselves from the Mainlanders and to assert their superiority complex. Mainlanders are continually subjected to slurs and discriminated against as unsophisticated country bumpkins from across the border by the Hong Kong locals even after 1997. New immigrants from China are generally seen uneducated, uncivilized, violent and lazy. There is looming prejudice against new Mainland arrivals especially after the 1998 Asian Financial Turmoil. Hong Kong people believe that Mainlanders will take away their jobs, worsen Hong Kong society, and destroy its prosperity and stability.

However, paradoxically, Hong Kong people also depend on the new immigrants from China to act as “proxy” to make them believe that the city is still an ideal place to live – it is still a great city that many aliens desperately want to come. The Hong Kong fantasy about the new immigrants’ fantasy of Hong Kong, in a way, can partly take care of Hong Kong’s confidence crisis. Hong Kong people believe that there are immigrants who are naïve enough to believe in the future of Hong Kong. This delegated belief can thus sustain the subjectivity of Hong Kong. Hence, the kernel of the fantasy is that China could be duped and China is kept at bay, so Hong Kong people can love the pandas while, at the same time, express their discontent toward the new immigrants from the Mainland, though both of them are the external existence of Chineseness. Such distancing of the Hong Kong self from the Mainland Chinese does not pose any threat to China. On the contrary, it is constitutive of the power of the nationalist ideology. Ideology can exert its hold over the subject precisely because of the very insistence that there is a gap between the innermost subjectivity and the ideological legitimization. Hong Kong’s belief that it is able to dupe and sometimes manipulate China is actually tolerated by China and is precisely what guarantees Hong Kong’s subservience to the nation.

Hong Kong’s anti-immigrant feeling, indeed, does not go against the interest of China and the ideological grip of national subjectivization. As a matter of fact, discrimination against the poor and the lazy has become the common value judgment of China and Hong Kong nowadays. In the process of extensive capitalization and economic reforms, China also projects the disavowed part of itself onto the figure of the “immigrants” (they are called “rural migrant” in Mainland). The hostility towards the “aliens” (the poor, the migrant, and other kinds of minority) bears witness to the fact that the experience of belonging to a well-defined social body that gives meaning to the individual is rapidly losing ground. The phantasmatic production of perceiving the presence of “aliens” as a threat to social identity only reveals that the subject is disoriented by the inherent antagonism within the meaning and logic of the capitalist development. In addition, it is even easier to assume that not only the social but also the national identity or cohesiveness is in jeopardy because it is menaced by the growing presence of other aliens coming from the outside. In post-1997 Hong Kong, the aliens that can compete with the popularity of giant pandas and their symbolic presence are of course the Western humanized animal-figures, such as Mickey Mouse or Goofy, from the American-owned multinational corporation Disney. [3]

However, the presumed opposition between real, natural panda that symbolizes inherent Chineseness and the artificial, fabricated American imperialist token of Mickey Mouse is only false and misleading. The giant pandas in Hong Kong are no less fictional and imperialistic than Mickey Mouse, whereas the Disney cartoon figures could also be regarded as a “natural” part of the growth of capitalism in Chinese community. It is not only Hong Kong but also China that love to embrace the advent of “Disneyfication” on the regained Chinese soil, because what Disney the corporation stands for is no longer simply American cultural imperialism or the omnipresence of American mass culture. Disney theme park is always connected to many other projects in urban planning, ecological development, product merchandising, technological innovation, construction of national character (Smoodin, 1994), as well as manifesting a vision of a utopia made possible by capitalism and technology (Prager and Richardson, 1997), or even a promise of social progress for the masses without revolution. Perhaps, what the Chinese leaders long for Disney to convey is also its emblem of family values and hyper-cleanliness, that is, a kind of “Singaporization” in the sense that economic integration with the global system is at full speed with the depoliticization of social life. Despite some local intellectuals expressing doubts and critiques against the future opening of Disneyland in Hong Kong (Sze and Ip, 1999), the general public in the port city as well as in Mainland China strongly support the project and anticipate to enjoy the cultural and economic benefits the theme park will bring. Hong Kong government and the local media are frank to admit that Disneyland project is expected to serve as a leading project to induce other investments and to resolve the confidence crisis after the Asian financial crash. So, right from the beginning, Hong Kong Disneyland is considered as a pure business or a money machine. Simultaneously, it is also perceived as a phantasmatic springboard for the ex-colony to project itself as the most cosmopolitan city in Asia and to imagine itself, in the words of the SAR Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, “enjoying status similar to that of New York in America and London in Europe” (though both New York and London have no Disneyland).

Very different from the French elite that treated the Euro Disneyland with strong disdain by calling it a “Cultural Chernobyl” or a “Tragic Kingdom” that infringes upon their community, Hong Kong people never conceive their city as a place of innocence that would be contaminated by the invading U.S. culture. If there is any discussion of the cultural impact of Disney theme park on Hong Kong, it merely functions as an ideological screen or a fantasmatic scene to rescue the domain of appearance. Appearance has to be maintained because it functions as a symbolic order to deter the world divided into racial and cultural differences from falling apart. It is tempting to follow Baudrillard’s idea that Disneyland as a simulacrum is used to cover up the loss of non-simulated reality in Los Angeles and the America surrounding it by arguing that the host city for the Chinese Disneyland is itself turning into a gigantic imaginary theme park. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has already said similar things about Tokyo Disneyland: it is a Disneyland in Tokyo and Tokyo as a Disneyland, since Tokyo has already become the largest theme park visited by people from all over Japan to have fun (Yoshimoto, 1994: 190). A Hong Kong-based journalist writes,  

Perhaps this is to be Hong Kong’s future: to peddle a fake Chinese style to the West, a user-friendly model China, complete with avuncular mandarins and miniature Great Walls -- while simultaneously peddling a fake version of the West to China, replete with smiling Mickeys and Minnies…the new Hong Kong will be a “virtual” city…Theme park Hong Kong is far too “virtual” to consider its actual location on the south China coast. It likes to project itself as everywhere and anywhere, a cyber-city, more notional than physical (Colvert, 2000).

Notwithstanding the good insights it offers, the major mistake the above comment has committed is that playing the middleman between China and the West and selling “fake” things to both parties are not the future of Hong Kong, but always already an old business that the ex-colony has been doing for a long time. Any easy historicization of a city by dividing into the past/old as something authentic/real and the future/new as virtual/imaginary only veils over the hard kernel that always returns as the same through different kinds of historical narratives. The so-called “fake” cultural styles that Hong Kong has been marketing to its clients is nothing but the mise-en-scéne of the fantasy to support the cultural reality itself. Hong Kong’s customers know what they consume is not the real thing, but still they are enjoying it. Indeed, many tourists come to Hong Kong precisely for the counterfeited brand names. [4] When everything turns into fake or virtual and when cities become cyber theme parks no longer located in particular places, then appearance remains the only magic to sustain the very fundamental structure of our world. The magic the city attempts to conjure is to turn invisible the fact that already many Chinese cities have built their own theme parks and the market economy has been changing the nation-space into a huge commodified virtual reality. The Disneyland project in Hong Kong is, in fact, a sleight of hand to gloss over the naked truth that virtual reality is already everywhere, though the appearance is still maintained as that Hong Kong is singled out as the one and only “theme park city” in China. [5]

Unlike many theme parks built in the post-Mao China that simulate and display the cultural history, national landscape and ethnic diversity of the Chinese nation as an eternal unity, Hong Kong Disneyland appears to introduce some foreign American monuments and landscapes to threaten the totality and integrity of the Chinese nationscape. Almost an exact copy of Disneyland in California’s Anaheim, Hong Kong Disneyland would easily make its predominantly Chinese visitors associate with the overwhelming presence of the U.S. as a hegemonic power in Asia especially during some occasional hard times between China and the States. [6] Although there would be remarkable cultural sensitivity, certain tactical adjustments (such as highlighting Chinese heroine Mulan in addition to some Chinese elements of attraction) and cautious removal of any apparent icons that may remind people of strong American nationalism, Hong Kong Disneyland still carries the mission of giving its Chinese guests a true sense of Americanness. The complex will definitely be a celebration of Americana seen through the eyes of Hollywood. According to surveys conducted by the SAR, Hong Kong locals and Mainland tourists want an American-style Disneyland with its classic characters and themes, rather than one with Chinese characteristics. The Chinese will find the Hong Kong Disneyland more appealing when it is an English-speaking venue, presenting programs and music in English and served by English-speaking staff. For the Chinese visitors, “only this would be the real thing,” remarked the chairwoman of Hong Kong Tourist Board. “If people want a Chinese theme park, they will go to China. People come here for a Disney theme park,” the Hong Kong commissioner for tourism has also commented.

As mentioned earlier, many Chinese amusement parks, cultural villages, historical museums and “fangujie” (reconstructed old towns), for instance Splendid China in Shenzhen and the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park in Beijing, have been built since the early 1990s. [7] These national parks are often jointly owned by the local Chinese government and overseas investors from Taiwan and Hong Kong. For a decade Chinese people have been used to consuming the commodified forms of the cultural past that their theme parks can provide in the rapid expansion of market economy. And the Chinese government obviously grasps the trick of manipulating the amusement park to demarcate “the space of representation, within which the nation can be rendered as a total concept, a timeless essence, ” and to narrativize “the nation as an eternal unity, made of an essence that does not change, that allows it to cohere together” (Anagnost, 1997: 162, 165). Hence, the Hong Kong Disneyland project could not be innocently assumed by the Chinese as a sheer spot of tourist attraction or a pure symbol of the age of global capitalism and advanced technology. The proper questions to be asked then are: why does the Chinese authority, with a keen awareness of the fact that Disneyland is an apparatus of the U.S. nationalism to reproduce America as an imagined community of the nation-state, still welcome the project in its special administrative zone? Would it be possible that by allowing Hong Kong’s very attempt of bringing in a gigantic token of possibly hostile foreign nationalism on Chinese soil, the Chinese authority can thus reconstruct the cultural particular root of its own in order to shroud its social reality of the reign of abstract capital?

The Hong Kong Disneyland project could help China to keep the balance between the pervasive commodification of everyday life by the mechanism of global capitalist economy and the continuous narrativization of Chinese nationalism in opposition to the looming Americanization. As all the various “lands” (for instance, Main Street USA, Fantasyland, or Adventureland) in Disney’s theme park are all displacements, the Hong Kong Disneyland is itself a “displaced fantasy.” That is to say, it is never simply a fantasmatic scenario of Hong Kong to continue its cosmopolitan dream of becoming one of the world’s top cities while duping the Chinese central government that the city is sufficiently patriotic enough to be left alone. What Hong Kong misidentifies itself as the subject in this displaced fantasy turns out to be merely a substitute to enable the Chinese subject to sustain its desire for a strong hold of national imaginary through its encounter with the conspicuous manifestation of American hegemony. It is displaced also in the sense that the Disneyland tailor-made for the Chinese consumers is located in the Hong Kong SAR that is a place both inside and outside the Chinese nation-space. In other words, the Hong Kong Disneyland is a place on the move. On the one hand, it is close enough to be effectively contained within the political territorial boundaries; and, on the other hand, it is far enough to be seen as a fetish to conceal the lack around which the symbolic logo of contemporary China is articulated. And, by means of which the Chinese subject can sustain itself at the level of its vanishing desire. Just as the Bush’s America needs an evil enemy to shore up the resurgence of its conservatism, China also relies on the Disneyland as one of the ways to cover up the inconsistency of its own ideological system. Being no longer a rival to capitalism, the “communist” China can at least recreate itself as a rival to the hegemonic Americanness to mask the fact that it is launching a tougher, harder and more inherently exploitative capitalist campaign within its own country. With the worldwide triumph of capitalism without communism, China has to look for a scene in which its position could be redefined.

The gigantic theme park Hong Kong is thus well designed for China to reposition itself in the new global scenario. The “fun” that theme park Hong Kong can offer ranges from cutie kiddy rides to terrifying thrill rides, from which the city is never able to stand aside. The retired Chief Secretary for Administration Anson Chan Fang On-sang has said, “We have forged a partnership between two of the world’s best-known brand names -- Hong Kong and Disney.” Perhaps, it is not a sheer wishful thinking of the Hong Kong official to see the city as just another transnational company and try to get the benefit from associating itself with the other big name. I do not simply suggest that, to an extent, both brand names are in decline and desperately seeking some helps to revitalize themselves in the twenty-first century. But, what I am trying to say is that, post-1997 Hong Kong endeavors to undergo the evolutionary transformation of Disney’s symbol, Mickey Mouse, has been through. When Mickey Mouse hit the theaters in the late 1920s, his behavior and appearance were not like what we are now familiar with. Instead of being a cute, inoffensive and well-behaved cartoon character as we see today, Mickey was mischievous, slightly sadistic and he even displayed a streak of cruelty at his early appearance. Soon Mickey’s personality has been softened with his look becoming more and more like a child. As a natural scientist Stephen Jay Gould points out, Mickey Mouse has been evolving over the last several decades toward the characteristics of a young child: his head size, eyes and cranium have been gradually and persistently growing larger to appeal to people as cute and friendly (Gould, 1980). These babyish features manage to elicit strong human affection and hold over us. [8] Wild animals with features mimicking those of human babies could also draw powerful emotional responses from us. Isn’t it true that the appealing power of giant panda precisely rests on our reaction to the same set of features in our own babies? Could we then say that the evolution of Mickey Mouse is indeed a process of “pandarization”? In this particular sense, the myth of East-meets/merges-West could continue in the ex-colony that always worries of losing its cosmopolitan flavor after the handover. These two cutie animals sharing some human baby features give body to the failure of the signifying representation of the post-1997 Hong Kong subject. They serve as fantasy-objects to fill out the lack in the signifying order of the decolonized Hong Kong.      

Instead of being programmed by a purposeful higher-order force such as globalization, Hong Kong as a well-designed screen for the emergence of any fantasy is only a side consequence of its own struggle for individual reproduction. To use the Heideggerian language, an ex-colonial community like Hong Kong is determined as “being thrown” into a contingent situation within which it has to assume its destiny. Instead of finding itself disoriented and lost during the 15 years of the transitional period to the handover, post-1997 Hong Kong is becoming more and more “freely assuming” the imposed historic destiny. Trying to be young or returning to childishness is a target the city chooses to hit and a selected means to shun from merely becoming too Chinese and from dangerously becoming too politicized. The child image embodied by the real and unreal babyish-look animals from afar forms a point of identification through which post-1997 Hong Kong attempts to reconstitute itself. The reverse route of juvenilization is accompanied with cleaning up one’s act and behaving properly at all times. To retrieve juvenile features and image implies not only a recovery of the bygone childhood but also a return to the state of subordination. Post-1997 Hong Kong thus understood is not a city at its end but in the nascent, newborn childlike state, and this state is going to be constant and will be carefully monitored. But a (youthful) “city of life,” a slogan used by the Tourism Board to promote the city to foreigners, is a representation that betrays the Hong Kong subject because it deforms what it is supposed to reveal. There is always a certain remnant in the childlike image that Hong Kong strives to fit in. The city that takes out its anger and frustration on the new immigrants may have difficulty to match a happy, angelic and submissive child image. The remnant that resists the subjectivization in the fantasy scenario, however, is the positive condition of the Hong Kong subject. Fantasy, indeed, could create multiple subject positions among which the fantasizing subject is free to choose its identification.

Post-1997 Hong Kong is always thinking of playing the game of miniaturization or minorization to China while dreaming of itself being big or major in the construction of the new meanings of Chineseness. Thinking big and simultaneously expanding the childlike image do not come together to form a clear picture that post-1997 Hong Kong is developing regressively from an adult city with growing demands for political reforms to a kiddy happy land that any totalitarian regime love to govern. The propensity for the infantile may not necessarily suggest that the post-colonial city is nostalgic for its colonial good old days. Hong Kong does need Disney to get out the child in it. Mickey Mouse is never a cultural intrusion, but somewhat a solution to China-Hong Kong relation. It is a solution that alleviates Hong Kong’s anxiety of directly confronting the desire of China. Constantly renewing links with childhood could be more a mode of becoming than a sort of remembering. A becoming-child, or even a becoming-baby, is an intense rupture for Hong Kong to remake itself for China. Deleuze states: “With a baby, one has nothing but affective, athletic, impersonal, vital relationship. The will to power certainly appears in an infinitely more exact manner in a baby than in a man of war. For the baby is combat, and the small is an irreducible locus of forces, the most revealing test of forces” (Deleuze, 1997: 133 emphasis in the original). The fantasy of Hong Kong is always to use its “smallness” to take hold of any larger force in order to make it its own.  

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