Abstract
Recent political upheavals in Hong Kong have prompted media outlets and scholars to make sense of the city’s contemporary social and political landscape. Contributing to this emergent body of work, Iam-chong Ip’s volume focuses on the city’s complex identity concerns by highlighting ‘the twisted temporalities, spatial disorientation, anxieties, and uncertainties of becoming a new kind of Hong Konger in the shadow of China’ (p. 8) after the 1997 handover, and the ramifications this has for how people in the city perceive and respond to their socio-economic and political realities. It does so by examining the city’s shifting political subjectivities, with emphasis on the nativist movement. Using social semiotic analysis and interviews to analyse government and local and non-local vernacular voices, Ip comprehensively illustrates changing governance approaches and societal sentiments in the post-handover city, and how these affect understandings of self and place.
The volume comprises an introduction, eight chapters, followed by an epilogue. The Introduction delivers an overview of Hong Kong’s positioning in relation to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and presents the city’s local identity as a product of colonial and global forces. It suggests that societal feelings of – and responses to – anxiety are the core mechanisms in producing the local subject in the post-handover city. Chapter 2 claims that these societal anxieties arise from the erosion of the ‘Hong Kong Myth’, described as a vestige of the ‘late-colonial urban imagination’ celebrating the city’s free market and ‘liberal-democratic prospects’ (p. 33). The chapter analyses the efforts of Hong Kong’s chief executives to enhance Hong Kong’s economic integration with the PRC, subjecting the city to what Ip terms as ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. Building upon this observation, Chapter 3 reviews deepening Hong Kong–China ties through the conceptual lens of ‘business opportunities’ (機遇), whereby the city and national governments encourage Hong Kong people to embrace a form of neoliberal citizenship by pursuing economic ventures afforded by the PRC. However, the growing presence of PRC capital and consumers in Hong Kong has fostered popular fears of the city’s ‘mainlandization’.
Subsequent chapters address societal responses to this transgression of Hong Kong–China borders, by assessing the processes surrounding the renegotiation of the Hong Kong identity. Chapter 4 traces the emergence of the Hong Kong nativist movement, claiming that its ‘ethnocratic’ bent prompts citizens to refashion themselves into ‘governing subject[s] with an imperative to control the city’s imagined and physical boundaries with China’ (p. 54). These nativists yearn to reclaim Hong Kong from the threat of the PRC Other, and they do so by launching populist attacks against mainland visitors, and by asserting the city’s cultural differences with the PRC. The reason for nativism’s momentum in Hong Kong politics is revealed in Chapter 5, which outlines the city’s gradual political deinstitutionalization, where political party and government negotiations are increasingly deemed irrelevant by the population, thus giving way to citizen-led ‘street politics’. This vacuum in institutional leadership has also allowed nativists to flourish, whose politics are described as being driven by issue-specific causes and individual figureheads, resulting in a fragmentary movement that exacerbates feelings of distrust between the government and Hong Kong society.
The volume then examines the experiences and positionings of different actors in Hong Kong’s sociopolitical landscape. Chapter 6 explores how nativists legitimize their movement by referring to neoliberal narratives of citizenship grounded in principles of fairness and competitive agency, in order to depict economically disadvantaged PRC immigrants as ‘ungovernable figure[s]’ (p. 91) exploiting Hong Kong’s resources and hindering the city’s democratic aspirations. Recognizing that nativists are not a homogenous group, Chapter 7 documents how individual nativist youths make sense of the city’s future, and the impact this has on their mobilization approaches. It provides an intimate glimpse into how nativist politics are malleable and complex (p. 115) and reveals the affective costs of this activism for youths. In turn, Chapter 8 features the views of the nativists’ Other, illustrating how PRC individuals studying and working in the city mediate between their desire for upward social mobility promised by Hong Kong’s urban lifestyle and their everyday feelings of displacement from local society and politics. The epilogue closes with Ip’s personal assessment that Hong Kong’s current political developments produce a cycle of government–society antagonisms, and he calls for a progressive way forward.
In analysing identity reconfigurations through the lens of nativism, the voices of lower-middle-class male youths are prominently represented here; however, a wider range of class, generational, and gendered attitudes towards Hong Kong’s identity politics warrants inclusion and elaboration. Furthermore, the volume could have expanded its scope to compare Hong Kong’s emergent nationalism with the nationalism of the PRC (as espoused by the Belt and Road Initiative), and how this potentially informs future regional dynamics. Nonetheless, these comments do not detract from the volume’s strength which is derived from its ability to clarify the deluge of political discourses and terminologies (e.g. 左膠, translated as ‘leftard’; 勇武, translated as ‘valiant’) circulating in contemporary Hong Kong, and its sensitive portrayal of the contradictions (e.g. between exclusion and cosmopolitanism) in the city’s political landscape. The book serves as a timely resource for scholars and students interested in Hong Kong society and politics, and more broadly, in identity constructs within citizen movements.