IDENTITY POLITICS AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Abstract

This essay examines an ironic situation in the use of postcolonial identity politics in contemporary Hong Kong cultural studies, in which the postcolonial cultural politics that criticizes the marginalization of Hong Kong people by Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism has also allowed newly empowered Hong Kong constituencies to use the same cultural politics as a strategy to assert dominance in ethnocentric and racist terms. Postcolonialism has so far focused on the poststructuralist critique of cultural misrepresentations while neglecting most of the structural inequalities beyond the cultural realm. What we need from postcolonialism is not just a differential identity politics useful in subverting cultural hegemonies ad infinitum. We also need an effective engagement with the quotidian effects of colonial legacies affecting people in and beyond the cultural realm. As one such attempt, this essay evaluates the critical potency of four prominent and contesting analytical frames in Hong Kong cultural studies by contextualizing their operations in a translocal context. I discuss Rey Chow's postulation of Hong Kong as the marginalized entity in between two colonizers, Britain and China. Posed against this discourse is what I call a petit-grandiose Hong Kongism, a kind of inferiority-superiority response to Hong Kong's multiple colonial experiences, both British and Chinese. The notion of Hong Kong's relation to China in terms of Hong Kong's ‘Northbound Cultural Imaginary’ is then examined. This refers to Hong Kong's mainstream cultural imaginary that posits its claim to cosmopolitanism as a justification for an implied economic and cultural expansion towards China. This cultural imaginary is justified by another Hong Kong mainstream cultural imaginary, one which sees China as a national, economic and cultural threat expanding towards Hong Kong to the south. I call this Hong Kong's imagined China ‘Southbound Cultural Imaginary’.

Keywords:

• Hong Kong
• cultural studies
• identity politics
• Hong Kongism
• Rey Chow
• postcolonialism

Notes

¹Information on Hong Kong Basic Law article 23 is available from: <http://againstarticle23.org> and <http://www.mingpaonews.com>, 13 August 2003. Related surveys and analyses are available from: http://hkupop.hku.hk.

²Hegemony here is taken to mean ruling by persuasion and consent rather than by coercion (Guha 1997: 20–5). See also Arif Dirlik's important note of caution about the use of the term hegemony (Dirlik 1997: 20, n. 19).

³Hong Kong's transition from British to Chinese sovereignty is a kind of dominant localization and re-nationalization project imposed and streamlined by Britain and China, which is little more than a smooth façade of submission or self-simulation. This has not been adopted without strong resistance.

⁴A non-exhuastive list of examples in Chinese would included the book by Leung (1995); Cultural Criticism (February 1993 to February 1995); Transit: A Journal of Hong Kong Arts and Culture March and May 1995; Jintian (1995); Dushuren ( 1995 ); the special supplement on ‘Hong Kong Culture’ in the City Magazine ( 1995 ).

⁵For the proponents and propositions of this discourse, see Hong Kong Cultural Studies Bulletin 1995: 2–50), Wong et al. (1997: 229–240) and Law (2000: 229–61).

⁶One might wonder if this cultural imaginary sees Shanghai as a symbol of competition and threat in the way foreign media might understand the relation among Chinese cities. However, for the bourgeois and professional classes of Hong Kong, Shanghai is another heaven of opportunities and a familiar milieu they can identify with. It is only for the salaried people losing their jobs that capitalist China seems both attractive and threatening. If one must name a symbolic city in this southbound cultural imaginary, it is Beijing.

⁷A term borrowed from Chen Kuan-Hsing's critique of Taiwan's mainstream nation-building expansionism against Southeast Asia for my application in the context of China vis-à-vis Hong Kong. See Chen (1994a, 1994b).

⁸See, for example, his article in Chinese, Leung (1997: 1–22).

⁹Chow's term ‘in-between-ness’ is generally translated into Chinese in Hong Kong as jiafeng. () The Hong Kong civil servants demonstrated in July 2002 due to frustrations over the role and the stakes of the service. See the documentary broadcast on 28 April 2002: Jiafeng zhong de jiafeng (), dir. Liang Qinghua (Hong Kong: RTHK).

This is how he spells his name in English. Also, in this essay where the original text uses the Taiwanese or Cantonese formats of pinyin rather than China's Putonghua pinyin, I will follow the original usage.

¹¹This claim involves a lot of ethnographic discussion. I can focus on only one example here: Chow's reading of Lo Ta-yu's music. The essays by Rey Chow that I am referring to in this claim also include Chow (1997a, Chow 1997b).

¹²According to Taiwanese linguistic demography, approximately 80 per cent of the population speaks Minnanhua. Those who speak only Mandarin Chinese constitute only 15 per cent of the population. Guoyu is what the ‘pro-unification of China’ constituency in Taiwan would call Mandarin Chinese.

¹³Information is available at <www.loudayou.net>. The books include, but are not restricted to, Li Guangping and Lin Jing (2000) and Conference Proceedings on the Works of Luo Dayou and Huang Shujin (1992), also available at <www.luodayou.net/db/prints/ldy-hsj.pdf>. His 27 May 2001 concert in China was close to the twelve-year commemoration of the 4 June Tiananmen Massacre.

¹⁴See the 10 May 2001 interview available at: <http://ent.sina.com.cn/s/h/42812.html>.

¹⁵See the 11 November 2003 interview available at: <http://lotayu.myrice.com/dycq/union.html>.

¹⁶ Asia Magazine, China, 18–24 February 2002. The special issue is quoted in part at <www.luodayou.net>.

¹⁷The work of Lo Ta-yu consulted here includes almost all his music. See the list of references.

¹⁸Lo added a footnote in the lyrics specifying that it is a Cantonese idiom but that he could not sing it as such.

¹⁹‘150,000 children in China born of Hong Kong parents: legislators insist that the government wrongly assessed the numbers’, Mingpao, Hong Kong, 17 March 2004, p. A15. The government admits there are around 270,000 such children plus spouses with Hong Kong residency rights in China.

²⁰Among many of its kind, read Gong Fan (1995), Yang Dongping (1995) and Wu Guoguang (1994).

²¹One irony shows how both the Hong Kong and the Chinese mainstream imagine the other as the ‘native’ to be civilized. Hong Kong used to look down upon people in China as country bumpkins they call Ah Tsan in Cantonese (Ah Can () in Putonghua romanization). Ah Tsan was a Hong Kong TV soap opera character who crystallized the stereotype of Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong. Nowadays, people in China turn the idiom around to call Hong Kong people Kong Tsan (Hong Kong bumpkins, Gang Can in () Putonghua romanization) as Hong Kong people go north in search of work.

²²The word ‘neo’ is used as a catachresis that refers not to specific new ways in which colonialism is conceived, but rather simply points our attention to the simulations that have made colonialism more and more obscure, and traditional forms of cultural critiques quite beside the point. It also points to the dislocation of the sites in which the intricacies of cultural politics are now most intensely played out.