Iam-chong Ip - Hong Kongs New Identity Politics

Should an underdog give up the fight? Lets put aside the talk of international politics favoring China rather than Hong Kong. While the police had guns and already fired (in the Mongkok riot in February 2016), why didnt the rioters run away? As a Chinese saying goes, The commander of the forces of a large state may be taken down, but the will of a man cannot be taken from him. Fighting requires the will to live. This could not be taken away by guns and bullets. One would not give up resistance even in a one-sided game.

(Lu, 2016, my translation)

Lu, a Hong Kong pro-nativist critic, explained why people engaged in the Mong Kok riot in 2016. He portrayed the rioters as fighters in the name of Hong Kong against the rule of China. The remarks above help paint a picture of an angry young man hurling bricks to police on the street of Mong Kok. But Lu admitted that it is a struggle doomed to failure. My question is: Why was he so keen to do something in vain or self-defeating? What Lu believes and the politico-economic setting confronting Hong Kong are not even a loose fit. They are contradictory. His words, rather than prompting me to challenge his argument or advocacy, remind me of something at odds with his seemingly unrealistic account of Hong Kong.

The early attention to Hong Kong identity was unanimously informed by a sociological conception of identity, described by Stuart Hall (1996) as a somewhat old-fashioned idea, in one way or another. It is an alignment of subjective feelings with the city in its post-war era. For example, Tai-lok Lui (2002[1997]), Eric Ma (1999), and others focus on the economic changes in the 1970s and delineate the late colonial contexts in which we derived our sense of belonging to this city from popular culture and project ourselves into a cultural identity. Murray Maclehose, who became the Governor of Hong Kong at the time, rolled out social policies, launched a massive public housing program, and set up the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Hereafter, his legacy has defined Hong Kongers self-understanding. Stephen Chan (1995: 24) conceptualizes Hong Kong identity, rather than as an ideology engineered by the state, as a tacit popular acceptance of the existing regime of power in its final years and subsequently perpetuated by the Beijing government and its proxies in Hong Kong. Other critics, despite their post-colonial and postmodern rhetorics, portray a Hong Kong identity implicit in the broader socio-cultural contexts. Rey Chow (1992: 158), focusing on an image of Hong Kong as being doubly victimized by the two dominating states, Britain and China, renders Hong Kongs coloniality/post-coloniality a third space, serving as the forefront of Chinese modernity. Ackbar Abbas (1997) positions Hong Kong as a non-space or a culture of disappearance within the global cultural economy. In a more recent study, Hong Kong is posited as an object of desire functioning as a satellite city of modernity between highly developed areas and developing countries in the world (Ma, 2012). The accounts above, despite their different concerns and conceptual tools, share a discursive impetus to locate Hong Kong in an institutional or geopolitical context.