Moving forward: From the construction of Hong
Kong Cultural Identity in post-colonial context
to the north going
imagination
The starting of the Second European colonization wave in 19th
century has brought the European thought and influence over the world. With the
western imperialism and colonialism influence, the legacy of these “-ism” still
have influence in the 21st century, namely post-colonialism.
Many cultural critics, scholars and social scientists have worked on the study
of post-colonialism in various “colonized” places, paying attention on
economic, political, geographical ownership ramification and cultural aspects. Scholars
have found theories and meta-narrative worked well on many places after being
colonized, like African and Indo-European countries. However, when these
theories came to describe the post-colonial situation in East Asia, these
theories could not be easily generalized in describing the circumstances of China
and Taiwan,
etc. Short period of occupation, retaining original languages, influence of
communism and east-Asian imperialism were the main reasons[1]
account for the difference from some other countries in Africa.
Among those examples in East-Asia, two easily forgot places: Hong Kong and Macau, have been founded as a particular important and
abnormal place. The abnormality came from the returning of the territorial
sovereignty to the motherland- China,
instead of becoming an independent country or place. This abnormality added the
impotency and value of Hong Kong (this essay, I will only focus on Hong Kong
according to her global influence) in her special position between Britain’s colonialism and China’s up coming partial
totalitarianism governance. According Rey Chow’ s saying: “Between
Britain and China, Hong Kong’ s postcoloniality is marked by a double
impossibility—it will be impossible to submit to Chinese nationalist/ nativist
repossession as it has been impossible to submit to British colonialism.”[2]
However, when we compare the pre-handover period for Chow's essay,
and the period after handing over of Hong Kong to China
in 1997, her description on the emergent Hong Kong Identity and Hong Kong
culture can not simply meet current Hong Kong
situation on identity and culture. What I am going to do is to tease out the
ways and the ambivalence in constructing Hong Kong Identity and then to figure
out what is and what
lead to the current situation. In doing this, the two
main aspects coined in Chow’s essay: root searching and post-modern hybridities
will also be my starting
way in interpreting the current situation. Hence, I
will try to come up with a description for the current situation. Preference to nativism and its insufficiency
To recover the lost identity after colonial period, the must way to go is nativism[3]. Obviously, when going on with the way of nativism, the origin for Hong Kong to go must be mainland China. By the two definitions used by Stuart Hall in constructing cultural identity:
“The first definition defines “cultural identity” in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective “one true,” hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves,” which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. The second definition is similar to the first one by focusing on difference, which constitutes “what we really are,” or rather – since history has intervened – “what we have become.”[4]
Nativism is more likely to be within the scope of the first definition and with essentialism character. The first definition shows the common historical experience and shared cultural codes may be used in comparison of the sameness between Hong Kong and China. The Common history experience shared by Hong Kong and China has been started since the Opium Wars, through the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain. Next, cultural codes include language and tradition. The language used is both the same in using Chinese. Although people in northern part of China speak mainly Mandarin while people in Hong Kong speak the different dialect – Cantonese, we can still say same language is used. Further, people share lot of same festivals as a kind of tradition. Under this circumstance, there is no doubt for most people in Hong Kong having the blood of being Chinese, and there is no way to say Hong Kong people is not a Chinese. But then again, difficult for Hong Kong can not be easily solved purely in recognizing the nation identity, and thus the same in other colonized. (I use the term “nation” with the exact meaning for “race”, while Rey Chow used the term “folk” in distinguished from term “nation” in representing the multiracial condition of China.) With the same nation and with the same nativism, there seems a must way to go for defining the cultural identity of people in Hong Kong. However, if nativism directed adopted by people in Hong Kong, where does the effect of colonial history gone? Why people in Hong Kong were so anxious about the future handover? With these, there must be other factors, reasons and the insufficiency of nativism and is a particular importance of the second definition.
Imagine as the alternative road for Hong Kong cultural identity
The second definition by Hall states the difference between the origin and diaspora which can be applied in the case between Hong Kong and China for the subtle difference between the commonly shared tradition and culture. This subtle difference can be revealed by contrasting something that people in Hong Kong are not and really are. Hence, this can bring to a practical and reality difference with what people shared in common. In fact, Hong Kong share many things with China the same but different. This “the same” is deep rooted, like indistinguishable with China, but in different ways. By taking Cantonese used by people in Hong Kong, the language is always embedded with the mixing of English and Chinese. Of course, many languages have words of foreign origin, but Chinese has a very specially way in assimilating the foreign language, like the examples of the word “lift” and “taxi”. According to Leung Ping-kwan’s description on the difficult and contradiction of Hong Kong’s self invention:
A Hong Kong person may speak English or Putonghua, but it is not the language with which he is familiar since childhood; and yet what he knows best, Cantonese, is not convenient for writing. He recites the Chinese classics while at school, but in his eventual employment he would have to acquaint himself with forms of commercial correspondence… Such linguistic impurities are also a reflection of the impurities of Hong Kong’s cultural identity.[5]
From this perspective, a sense of awareness of self which differ from the origin was notable. This sense prevents one from going on with simply adapting the culture from the origin.
The second definition provide a deeper focused on the self, collective imagine aspect or the choice of categorizing oneself in different communities through the re-telling of the past. The imaginative rediscovery and imaginary reunification coined by Hall, have given out a clear relationship between the rediscovery, reunification and with the “hidden history”. This hidden history can be seen as the one or collective perception and social aspects in looking back in personal and social memory. These memories have been used in the imaginary process of rediscovering, reunification, hence in the production of identity. This production of identity contrasted with the tracing for root and identity in history, will lead to the different self-chosen root and then to the multiple meaning of Chinese identity. In this sense, this way of figuring out one’s identity is same as Edward Said’s two ways in modern cultural history: filiation and affiliation. The affiliation for the self-choice in the production of identity is homologous to Hall’s idea on constructing identity. Further, Said have also pointed the tendency of turning from filiation to affiliation in modern cultural process in "incessantly generates forms for itself"[6]. That is a rapid changing along history, historical change and the peoples’ psychology have made the cultural identity (or Chineseness inside nativism in Hong Kong context) with ambivalence and paradoxical. With this reason and with the ability of re-telling of the past in producing new identity, many people go on in the factor of political reason.
Identity with political history and the confrontation of center and marginality
Political history of China has pushed people in Hong Kong to a position of anti-Chinese identity in the pre-handover period. Rey Chow took this form of against attitude towards China’s upcoming imperialism on Hong Kong. Although Chow did not voice it out explicitly, but there was an aura of political history and issues inside Chow’s argument in order to construct the impossibility to submit to Chinese nativist repossession. This aura formed when the Communist party came into power after 1949. Later, leftists caused the 1967 riot in Hong Kong in respond to the Cultural Revolution in mainland and the particular important 1989 June Forth incident, had made people in Hong Kong in feeling anxiety about their future since the signing of Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. Some people were tended to be colonized by Britain instead of being a new ‘colonized’ place bounded by China. Or even, one after another waves of mass migration from Hong Kong had been found after 1967 riot, and the period of 1980s to 1990s. Even though lots of people were leaving Hong Kong, but were those people having no sense of belonging about the shared culture and tradition with China? In this way, there are a number of people considered as being “obsessed” with China in order to restore some particular traditions of China. With this political context, Tu Wei-ming is one of the people intended to restore Chinese tradition and come to a contour of a symbolic universe called ‘cultural China’.
Tu’s cultural China concept comes along with intellectuals’ obsession of China and the center, periphery ideology and cultural critique. The Communist party in governing China as the center and the periphery with the assertion of the diasporic periphery has been constructed. The project of cultural China is to decenter the cultural authority of geopolitical China, an intellectual effort to redefine ‘the periphery as the center’ in current reengagements with what it means to be Chinese[7]. This newly constructed meaning or criteria ‘that both encompasses and transcends the ethnic, territorial, linguistic, and religious boundaries that normally define Chineseness.’[8] This cultural China concept can be an access road for people in Hong Kong who are obsessed with China but anti-communist governance. Through the bringing up of the limited anti-essentialism, the elements of patriotic and loyalty to the Communist party can be reduced from a preset stereotype for people in Hong Kong with Chineseness. By giving a contrast of the periphery to the center, a new dialogic relation has been formulated. Indeed, the newly formed center can be understand as distanced people away from the old center, while the old center is the saying the norm of Chinese essentialism. In this way, the old center is being used as an other to point out the subjectivity of the new center as the new self. (I will focus more for the further concept of reversing self and other in the later part.) The distance from the old center has provided the new way for cultural interpretation (or with the term cultural space) for the imaginary possibility for what make Chinese Chineseness. This form of diasporic imagination of an imagined community is mainly characterized by the Chinese diaspora from their distance from the center, regarding themselves in a peripheral position to the old center. By being at a place of diaspora, the way of looking at China is in a relatively “objective” way through the representation of media. In this condition, what can these Chinese diaspora see is the whole picture of cultural, political and economic condition without the imposed ideology of the center by the Communist party.
The same distance situation happened in Hong Kong in terms of political separation and the rising economic importance of Hong Kong. The political difference and separation for Hong Kong from China is an ideal ground for the Chinese diaspora to develop a new imaginary community. In addition, the Chinese diaspora is in a condition: ‘emerging voice of some diasporic Chinese intellectuals with increasingly self-confidence voice has much to do with the historical and economic state of affairs in global modernity at the end of the twentieth century’[9]. Luckily, Hong Kong exists as a situation and a place of the advancement of economic state and showing the reality of tight relation between modernity and post-coloniality. As people in Hong Kong in an analogous condition as Chinese diaspora oversea, they are looking at themselves as a Chinese but not merely a pure Chinese and with imaginary space. This has enable Hong Kong as an ideal place for the Chinese diaspora to construct a new center for the confrontation with the old center.
Some critics criticizing there is a political implication for Tu in a position of neo-confucianist towards the anti-communist. However, this resort to intention may lead to an end of blurring of writer’s argument. Indeed, the concept of cultural China can pointed out Chineseness is not the innocent reflection of a natural reality that is passively waiting to be discovered[10], which is the same when applied to the cultural identity for people in Hong Kong. Similarly, it is very likely that Rey Chow has adopted the concept of cultural China in order to point out the insufficiency of nativism and nationalism.
Post-modern hybridities and the significant importance of the third space of liminality by capitalism power
With the insufficiency of nativism and nationalism, a new way of identifying self is necessary. The confrontation and opposing of centre and periphery mentioned prior can be applied to the liberation from the unity of domination and suppression through the using of the concept of post-modern hybridities. However, post-modern hybridities may tend to have tendency to forget and blurring of the subsidiary relation between colonizers and colonized. Post-modern hybridities can not indicate the cultural political power inside post-colonialism. In addition, the term post-colonialism is somehow likely to be considered as cosmopolitan and international. This way of comment gives rise to the world with the domination of capitalism. In another way, post-colonialism can be regarded as the covering of the neo-colonialism dominated by the United State as similar in globalization by shifting the focus by the act of violence of colonialism on cultural and consciousness[11]. Hence, Rey Chow also suggests the difficult in using post-modern hybridities. Together with the insufficiency of nativism and the difficult in post-modern hybridities, a new third space of liminality for the new self therefore exist.
The new emerging third space is having a larger portion of the element of capitalism power. As from the two insufficiencies for the formulation of the third space, nativism and post-modern hybridities still play a corresponding and important role for the building up of the third space. Hong Kong in having the anxiety for the searching for Chinese nativism and turning to international and cosmopolitan, there has been lot of overlap of these two and the emergent third space. This third space is native to Hong Kong, and specialized for Hong Kong including hybridizing and intermixing and liminal. This third space highlight Hong Kong has come to a new position. This new position in the wave of capitalism has even brought Hong Kong to a position out of the gap between Britain and China. Hong Kong has came into a place through going north in spreading commodity that is made in Hong Kong. Lots of trends and business have already been set up or even localized in China. With the support of the global capitalism trend, this emergent third space of Hong Kong has occupied for a position in as a cultural emergent in China.
Entering the North as the new meaning of Hong Kong Identity
Economic and power of capitalism has played a very important role between Hong Kong and China. As stated prior, Hong Kong was an important economic center before the handover period. However, Hong Kong can not be economically independent from China as the import of water, food and all other necessities in Hong Kong are all depend on China. In this sense, it is foreseeable to identify the economic state of Hong Kong can not sustainable without China. This aura further develops into a close interrelation between China, Hong Kong and neighboring places. With the slogan of “loyal to the nation, loyal to Hong Kong, and loyal to capital”, an emerging economic hegemony is revealed.[12] This new economic cultural colonialism has been a new form of anti-thesis of the imperialism of the center China. But this is not only in an imaginary and ideology, but with concrete existence. How can this be observed? Starting from the economic reform of the People’s Republic of China in the late 70s, there were already a numerous number of businessmen in Hong Kong started to enter and occupy a position in Guangdong and late throughout the whole China. For Corporation, the investments in China were even in a dominant place in the early reforming years. In fact, north going is a collective term for the flow of capital to Hong Kong from the north side, east from Taiwan, south from Malaysia or even west to Europe and United States. The relationship for Hong Kong and this origin of capital is in an intermixing mode, with penetration to each other in the form of trading. In this sense, north going imagination will be much similar to the hybridized, intermixing identity of colonized and erasing of the nation boundaries. With the transnational characteristic of capitalism, the north going imagination or colonialism is with same origin and homologous to each other with the identity of colonized
Together with the similarity of hybrid property, north going is the with the continuity relation with the previous mentioned marginal, hybridities and third space. However, is this Hong Kong’s new special: north going, really like what Rey Chow’s saying of an emergent third space? Chow did not point out. But Chow’s third space, similar to north going, is what Chow point out the problem of post-modern hybridities: “The enormous seductiveness of the post-modern hybriditie’s discourse lies, of course, in its invitation to join the power of global capitalism by flattening out past injustices.”[13] Indeed, the injustices are not things in the past, but for present and future. There are economic exploitation and injustice to the working class and the poor. Hence, there is an inseparable relation between the growing of the power of capitalism and post-modern hybridities. North going is an access road and the further development of Chow’s third space liminality. But what means by Chow’s emergent, is something already happening in the north going colonialism. The continuity relation in forming north going colonialism, can not be distinguished clearly from the post-modern hybridities and third space.
The north going and the way of third space liminality both construct mainland as the other, hence in contrasting and building up of the self for Hong Kong. This comes back to a similar way as Tu Wei-ming in treating the old center in periphery and diaspora as the center. So, can north going be a way in reconstructing self cultural identity for people in Hong Kong? Shifting of position for center and periphery appears all the way in the construction of identity in either way of north going or third space. Hong Kong and China are mutually changing and evolving with each other. As China is also having more and more with capitalism idea like Hong Kong, public in Hong Kong are also experiencing and enjoying north going. Anxiety and agitation in the pre-handover period has almost gone completely. What remains is the dominant and prevalent spreading of capitalism idea. From the third space of liminality to the north going colonialism and imagination, there is a strong inclination toward capitalism idea, even they are all concealing the underneath exploitation of the working class.
Conclude with the dynamic and meso cultural identity
Hong Kong has been a popular place in the studying of post-colonialism for its multicultural complexity and cosmopolitan characteristic. After going through Britain colonialism and China governance, people in Hong Kong face lot of ambivalence and hardship in finding who am I. Before the handover of Hong Kong, lots of people called themselves as “Hong Konger” in order to drawn out the special place for them in Hong Kong. Today, Hong Kong has already returned to China’s governance for more than ten years. People in Hong Kong are less likely in addressing themselves as Hong Kong people (or Hong Konger) but more likely calling themselves as Chinese. Searching for identity can not be absolutely in negating one standard, method, way or discourse other from another. If there is only the only duality opposing situation for identity oneself with China, or with Hong Kong, how can there be changing and crisis of identity? Discourses in identifying cultural identity are insufficient since there are limitations of situational and of period of validity being observed. Hence, I can say: cultural identity is originally in a dynamic situation. The Madhyamika’s concept of Buddhism has given me the inspiration on the meso form of identity by not persisting in the only two sides. At last, I try to raise two questions: the concept of nation has been considered as old way of fashion, why do people so obsessed with the fixation of nation identity? Do they really have to turn their identity on the way of nation, but not other?
Reference
Blanche Wing-ki Chu. “The Ambivalence of History: Nostalgia Films as Meta-Narratives in the Post-Colonial Context” in Esther M. K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wei eds., Between Home and World: a Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, 331-351.
Edward Said, “Introduction: Secular Criticism”, The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 1-30)
Ien Ang, “Can one say no to Chineseness?: Pushing the limits of the diasporic paradigm”, On Not Speaking Chinese, pp. 37-51.
Patricia Brett Erens, “Crossing Borders: Time, Memory, and the Construction of Identity in Song of the Exile” in Esther M. K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wei eds., Between Home and World: a Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, 177-195.
Rey Chow, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990”, Ethics after Idealism, pp. 149-167.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, Diaspora and visual culture: representing Africans and Jews, London ; New York : Routledge, 2000
Yang Guang, “In-Between”: On Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Writing, MPhil thesis. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2008.
陳清僑編. 文化想像與意識形態 :當代香港文化政治論評 1997
[1] Rey Chow, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990”, p. 150
[2] Ibid p.151
[3] Ibid p.152
[4] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Cultural, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), p.393.
[5] Leung Ping-kwan , “Urban Culture and Hong Kong Literature”, Contemporary, No. 38, p.17.
[6] Edward Said, “Introduction: Secular Criticism”, The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 18-19
[7] Ien Ang, “Can one say no to Chineseness?: Pushing the limits of the diasporic paradigm”, On Not Speaking Chinese, p. 40
[8] Ibid. p.40
[9] Ibid p.41
[10] Ibid p.39
[11] 史書美：〈「北進想象」的問題〉，載於《文化想像與意識形態 :當代香港文化政治論評》1997 ，頁152
[12] 郭少棠：〈無邊的論述〉，載於《文化想像與意識形態 :當代香港文化政治論評》1997 ，頁170
[13] Rey Chow, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990”, p. 156
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