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Abstract
Localism has become dominant in mainstream Hong Kong identity politics after the occupation period of the Umbrella Movement. This localism demonstrates the will of Hong Kong people to reclaim their own destiny, to reject the authoritarian rule of Beijing and to reclaim unique local cultural identities as different from China, e.g. uphold universal values and cosmopolitanism. However, this localism neither shares a unified cultural imaginary and symbolic order nor a single operational logic. There are at least two major kinds of localism in Hong Kong, i.e. one whose logic is based on anti-China blaming of the immigrant (i.e. xenophobia and exclusionary politics), and one whose modus operandi is to rebuild local communities (i.e. based on progressive, participatory, democratic values of inclusion, diversity and empowerment of the weak). These two polarized localisms often coexist. The question is which one takes the lead or even becomes hegemonic in a situation or context. This article re-examines the emergence and transformation of localism in the last decade through participant observation in Hong Kong urban social movements. Instead of explaining why xenophobic localism (blaming the immigrant) becomes a dominant political power, we will take a closer look at the transformation of the progressive and recalcitrant “localism through community rebuilding movement,” or simply New Preservation Movement as the actually existing alternative.
Notes
1. The two free broadcast TV channels, TVB and ATV and most newspapers in Hong Kong are increasingly pro-Beijing, with the exception of Apple Daily and online media.
2. People over 50 years old tend to rely mainly on mainstream media. Thus, they tend to mostly side with the government. Younger generations, especially those aged 30 or below—the majority in the Umbrella Movement—rely mostly on the more diverse views of online new media platforms, and thus have greater access to the messiness of what is actually happening. The inter-generation gap caused by the digital divide has deepened during and after the Umbrella Movement, as online media continue to blossom while mainstream media self-censorship leads to their intensified loss of a younger readership and audience.
3. The yellow ribbon is the symbol of the pro-democracy protestors during the Umbrella Movement. The blue ribbon is the symbol of the pro-Beijing camp, whose main objective is to physically confront the yellow ribbon people on the streets, sabotage the Umbrella Movement and create disturbance, nuisance and smear campaigns.
4. Star Ferry was a popular pier and main transportation between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island before the tunnel was built in 1978.
5. Queen's Pier was a less well-known pier to Hong Kong people. It is a dual purpose pier. It has been used around 20 times as a ceremonial pier by the British colonial government for the reception of governors and the royalties. The rest of time, it is a public pier for people bound for the outlying islands and tourists cruising Victoria Harbor.
6. “本土號” in Chinese.
7. Most Local Action participants believe that the colonial powers refers to both Britain and China.
8. Chinese from mainland China are labelled as “locust” because of their moral and cultural inferiority to the Hong Kong “human.”
9. Due to inexperienced organizing, HKNP ceased to operate due to internal conflicts. In May 2015 however, they re-emerged to protest against the police's decision to grant temporary residency to an illegal immigrant boy from China who had been hiding in Hong Kong for 12 years. They also protested against the primary school that agreed to accept the child based on education rights under the United Nations convention. They ignored all humanitarian concerns and argued for the boy's immediate deportation to China despite the fact that his parents abandoned him and disappeared. They insisted that this is China's problem and Hong Kong should not foot the bill.
10. See the post on its Facebook page in Chinese “反對內地孕婦來港產子！10 萬人 Like 俾政府睇！” at https://www.facebook.com/itstimetosayno/
11. The music video “蝗蟲天下” [Locust world] viewed by 1,424,981 up to 30 May 2015, could be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWZFgkJNxDM&list=PLD8E7D0EA0918C8E4
12. Its Facebook page can be found at https://www.facebook.com/events/574631195936103/
13. Its analogy is “waste reduction at the source,” implying that new immigrants are waste-matter.
14. See the article on South China Morning Post, 18 December 2013, “Top court dismissed seven-year residency requirement for CSSA benefits.”
15. The major opinion leader is Wan Chin, the author of 香港城邦論 [On the Hong Kong City-State], published in 2011.
16. Legco members from functional constituencies predominately represent the interest of the business sectors. They contribute to half of the 60 (later 70) seats in the Legco. Only 30 (later 35) seats in Legco come from direct election.
17. Hong Kong finally passed its minimum wage ordinance in May 2011, which is very late compared with Taiwan (passed in 1968), and China (passed in 2003).
18. Hong Kong's mini constitution, the Basic Law, states that the rental level of public housing should not go over 10% of the median income level of the tenants. In reality, the rental level set by the government has already exceeded 10% and is usually around 25 to 30%.
19. 1URA—Urban Renewal Authority. A government sponsored semi-public agency that has been heavily criticized for its slash-and-burn urban renewal tactics.
20. Lee Tung Street, which is better known as Wedding Card Street, is a cultural cluster specializing in customized printing serving the central business district and diverse local and global clientele. It is famous for its iconic wedding card production chain, including design, production, retail and service functions. The cluster was formed in the 1950s, when the British government concentrated all printing shops together for censorship and monitoring purposes against the printing and distribution of anti-British publications. Since the 1970s, the cluster slowly evolved into a specialized cultural district targeting the wedding business. There were as many as 27 specialized printing companies clustered in the two rows of six-storey tenement housings built in the early 1960s on the 100 meter long Lee Tong Street, with intense networks of producers clustered together for external economies of scale.
21. H15 is the code for the Urban Renewal Authority's 15th urban renewal outline zoning plan on Hong Kong Island. H stands for Hong Kong Island.
22. See the entry of “囍歡里” (The Avenue Walk) at https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%8D%E6%AD%A1%E9%87%8C
23. See the news clip on i-Cable, 11 April 2014, at http://cablenews.i-cable.com/webapps/news_video/index.php?news_id=430447
24. Whenever URA announces an urban renewal project, it will dispatch a group of social workers to assist the affected residents to move out. This is a newly added humanistic approach to eviction as compared with the forced eviction using gangsters in the LDC era (1988–1999).
25. The government appointed board members are carefully selected to reflect government and developer interests and usually include a token scholar. They have been heavily criticized by the NPM for undemocratic black-box operation and pro-government decisions at all costs.
26. AAB is a government appointed, highly selective consultative committee responsible for grading archaeological sites and historical buildings in Hong Kong. However, their grading does not have statutory status. Only the Development Bureau can decide whether to preserve (even if it is not graded by AAB) or demolish (even if is graded “grade 1” by AAB) a structure.
27. The official name for the urban renewal plan of Lee Tung Street was announced by URA in 2003.
28. It was called the “Housing, planning, lands and works bureau” before 1 July, 2007.
29. Ironically, the government's purpose for setting up the AAB is to justify the tearing down of old buildings that are in the way of development. Therefore, it is designed to fail. Nevertheless, preservation activists want AAB to be a real autonomous organization that can spearhead the preservation of historical buildings, sites and landscapes.
30. Stories of retired government officials sitting on the boards of large developer corporations is a norm that is seldom challenged in Hong Kong.
31. Since 2006, a few rights-based NGOs targeted the capitalists directly. Among them are the anti-sweatshop NGOs. See for example the anti-sweatshop NGO called SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) and the anti-privatization NGO called Link Watch (Chen and Pun Citation2007). These NGOs engage in direct confrontation with businesses.
32. In terms of the privatization of land resources, the deregulation of the real estate market, and the state's “aidez faire” (Purcell Citation2008) and corporate subsidy policies to aid capital accumulation (Szeto and Chen Citation2011, Citation2015; Szeto Citation2014).
33. Hegemony here is taken to mean ruling by persuasion and consent rather than by coercion (Guha Citation1997, 20–25). Arif Dirlik makes an important note of caution about the use of the term “hegemony,” which has been the subject of considerable manipulation in postcolonial criticism. In Antonio Gramsci's original formulation, hegemony was intended to supplement materialist with cultural analysis, not to substitute culture for material analysis (or even to suggest that they could be separated), which is the way in which hegemony appears in much contemporary analysis. This has its counterpart in social relations in the use of the idea of subalternity. Gramsci, as a Marxist, was searching for ways out of subalternity, to enable the working class to achieve power. This, of course, appears presently as a celebration of subalternity, which may be fairly revealing of the obliviousness to (or maybe even mystification of) questions of power (Dirlik Citation1997, 20, note 19).
34. Hong 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.
35. Pro-growth coalition refers to the neoliberal government, developers and their propaganda machine (including mass media, scholars and professionals).
36. Hong Kong Native Power (HKNP, 本土力量) formed in 2011 and Hong Kong Indigenous (本土民主前線) formed in 2014, both emphasize only locally born Hong Kongers as genuinely loyal subjects of the Hong Kong city-state. All outsiders, especially mainlanders/Chinese new immigrants, are essentialized as disloyal and suspicious elements coming to exploit welfare resources, infiltrate local politics and “mainlandize/communize” local culture.
37. At the time of writing (June 2015), the “back to the community” stage of the Umbrella Movement has given birth to a new movement, called the “Community Citizen Charter” movement, a participatory democracy movement that combines the strength of the NPM and the political democracy movements to urge residents in every community to continue the fight for democratization and reform of the District Council in the District Council election in November 2015.
Additional information
CHEN Yun Chung was born in Malaysia, trained as community planner and urban studies scholar (MPhil in Planning, Taiwan National University; PhD in Urban Planning, UCLA). He is currently an associate professor in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, interested in innovation studies and critical urban studies. He actively participates in urban preservation and community building movements in Hong Kong.
Mirana May Szeto did her PhD in Comparative Literature, UCLA and is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She publishes in critical theory journals such as Interventions and Concentric, writes on China, Hong Kong, Taiwan cinema, literature, coloniality, urban cultural politics and policy in journals such as Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Jump Cut and volumes such as Hong Kong Screenscapes (HKU Press, 2011), Neoliberalism and Global Cinema (Routledge, 2011), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), Sinophone Cinemas (Palgrave, 2014), A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema (Blackwell, 2015). Her current book is on Hong Kong SAR New Wave Cinema in the Age of Mainlandization and Neoliberalization.