Who needs strangers? Un-imagining Hong Kong Chineseness

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Notes

^1. This list should supplement the more “normalized” inventory of social and political dissenters also found in Hong Kong politics, such as women, racial minorities, immigrants, queers, and the “June 4” protestors.

^2. Along with my colleague Lisa Leung, I have been involved in an ongoing research project since 2008, which is uniquely situated in Hong Kong, concerning the active role played by Hong Kong's South Asian minority communities in shaping their own “creative survival” in the face of direct and subtle forms of racist discrimination experienced in the media, schooling, and the law. Not until we began this research did we discover the paucity of sustained cultural research on the subject. Lisa Leung and I are now preparing a book that attempts to cover the social, historical, cultural, and legal dimensions of South Asian lives in Hong Kong. I have also begun to offer an undergraduate course devoted exclusively to the study of ethnic minority culture and politics. The course, to my knowledge, is the only one in the territory to date.

^3. One such moment of social panic and moral indignation that arose in recent times was embedded in the outcry in Hong Kong toward the Philippines' mishandling of a hostage crisis in August 2010 that resulted in the death of eight Hong Kong people. My interest in bringing this up here is not to discuss the tragic consequence of the admittedly problematic episode of police rescue practice in the Philippines; instead, I wish to mark the difficulty of having a different conversation in Hong Kong about this hostage crisis, which confronts the racial hostility of many Hong Kong people toward the entire Filipino race that emerged from the crisis.

^4. As 1997 approached, a fervent discussion was sparked over future citizenship issues for Hong Kong's residents. While most of Hong Kong's Chinese residents would become citizens of China (via HKSAR citizenship) on 1 July 1997, what would be the fate of its non-Chinese residents? In itself, this problem was not an issue for the few thousand British and other foreign expatriates, since they could remain residents under Chinese rule, as foreigners whose right to continue to live in Hong Kong would be derived not through their foreign passports but through their Hong Kong identity card. However, considerable insecurity arose among the unprivileged ethnic minority population whose right of abode would lapse on 30 June 1997 without being replaced by Chinese nationality. In other words, these several thousand people of different ethnic backgrounds would effectively become stateless at the time of the transfer. This critical issue finally attracted the attention of the legal community, the press, and local scholars. Finally, it was realized that this group of residents had been experiencing all forms of inequitable and discriminatory treatment. Britain denied that it had abandoned them, claiming that such persons remained “British nationals” through the conferment of British Overseas Nationals (BNO) status on them. However, this new BNO status did not carry with it the right of abode in Britain; it only promised British consular protection, and there had already been problems over its recognition by other countries. On the other hand, China showed no inclination to expel the ethnic minorities, nor did it take positive measures to guarantee their right of abode. For instance, China refused to recognize the BNO passports; it saw them merely as travel documents. As a result, the mid-1990s saw the rise of racial consciousness among a small group of legal scholars. For more discussion, see Menski (1995) and Sautman (1995).

^5. See, for example, Lilley (2001) for a discussion of rampant ignorance and racism in the anthropology class she taught in a liberal arts university in Hong Kong.

^6. The exceptions are the works of Lo Kwai-cheung, Ku Hok-bun, Barry Sautman, Nicole Constables, Lisa Leung, and myself.