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Hong Kong’s Edward Snowden/Edward Snowden’s Hong Kong

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Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong

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Abstract

Edward Snowden’s passage through Hong Kong in June 2013 offered commentators, filmmakers, and journalists an uncanny repetition of the longstanding tropes of “cyberpunk,” which staged dramas of surveillance, paranoia, and information within Asian urban spaces. Clapp shows that accounts of Snowden’s actions persistently reproduced that techno-orientalist gesture. Yet in rereading cyberpunk with Snowden’s quest for asylum in mind, Clapp also discovers that while these texts often framed Hong Kong as a glitzy simulacrum or anarchic redoubt, they also described the city as a site of legalistic, bureaucratic modernity. In this way, it becomes possible to read the rhetoric of diplomats, lawyers, and law enforcement agencies around the Snowden affair alongside canonical postmodern texts to reveal a surprisingly uniform, if paradoxical, image of Hong Kong.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Chan, “Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema,” np.

  2. 2.

    Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 79.

  3. 3.

    Edwin Lee & Shawn Tse, “Edward Snowden’s Journey to Hong Kong dramatized in Chinese Film—video.” The Guardian, 5 July 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jul/05/edward-snowden-hong-kong-film-video-verax

  4. 4.

    Even Glenn Greenwald succumbed to the temptation: “the situation seemed so bizarre, so extreme and improbable. This is a surreal international thriller set in Hong Kong, I thought” (2014, 33).

  5. 5.

    Patke and Holden, The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English, 162.

  6. 6.

    Lee, City Between Worlds, 150.

  7. 7.

    Quoted in Lana Lam, “Hong Kong Still Without Answers One Year After Snowden Saga.” South China Morning Post. no date. http://multimedia.scmp.com/snowden

  8. 8.

    Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 11.

  9. 9.

    “Hong Kong Directors Make First Snowden Film,” South China Morning Post, 30 June 2013.

  10. 10.

    Verax, video, directed by Edwin Lee, Jeff Floro, Shawn Tse, & Marcus Tsoi (Hong Kong: J. Shot Media, 2013). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWVGDBeR42I

  11. 11.

    See comments by Caitlin Hayden, National Security Council spokesperson, quoted in Zeke J. Miller, “U.S. Government ‘Disappointed’ Hong Kong Let Snowden Leave, Asks Russia to Extradite Him,” Time Magazine, 23 June 2013, http://swampland.time.com/2013/06/23/u-s-government-disappointed-hong-kong-let-snowden-leave-country

  12. 12.

    Fang, Arresting Cinema, 76.

  13. 13.

    For Yu, such works clearly stand in the tradition of postmodernism but sacrifice any anarchic energies to their oriental tropes. See “Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures” (2008). A recent revisionist approach to Idoru is Tran’s “Thinking about Bodies, Souls, and Race in Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy” (2015).

  14. 14.

    See “Mapping the History of Land Reclamation in Hong Kong.” http://www.oldhkphoto.com/coast/Map.html

  15. 15.

    Salisbury, “Back to the Future,” 96.

  16. 16.

    The film has overshadowed its source, a Japanese manga comic by Masamune Shirow.

  17. 17.

    Chun, Control and Freedom, 201.

  18. 18.

    The 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell persists in presenting a story set in Japan within the cityscape of Hong Kong. But the film’s villain can no longer be reconciled with the city via the body of Major M, nor is it plausible to offer urban space as a metonym of cyberspace. Ghost in the Shell, 2017 film directed by Rupert Sanders.

  19. 19.

    Reiji Yoshida, “Snowden Web Manga Profile Still Online,” Japan Times, 15 June 2013, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/06/15/national/02-profile-paints-snowden-as-manga-anime-gun-girlish-geek-with-list-of-likes

  20. 20.

    Stephenson, Snow Crash, 83.

  21. 21.

    See, for example, Wong, “On the Edge of Spaces,” 18.

  22. 22.

    The show is officially titled “A Symphony of Lights.” See: http://www.discoverhongkong.com/eng/see-do/highlight-attractions/harbour-view/a-symphony-of-lights.jsp

  23. 23.

    Harding, The Snowden Files, 113; 251.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 83.

  25. 25.

    Greenwald, No Place to Hide, 49.

  26. 26.

    This is the “ICC Light and Music Show.” See http://icclightshow.com.hk

  27. 27.

    Axiom Images, “Bird’s Eye View of City Streets and Skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island in China Aerial Stock Footage SS01_0019,” http://www.axiomimages.com/aerial-stock-footage/view/SS01_0019

  28. 28.

    Derrida, Of Hospitality, 77ff.

  29. 29.

    Statement by Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, released 15 June 2013, documented at http://archive.news.gov.hk/en/categories/admin/html/2013/06/20130615_195120.shtml

  30. 30.

    “HK Says US Got Snowden’s Middle Name Wrong,” South China Morning Post, 27 June 2013, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1270242/hk-says-us-got-snowdens-middle-name-wrong

  31. 31.

    “Hong Kong Silent over Edward Snowden Extradition,” The Guardian, 13 June 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/22/hong-kong-silent-edward-snowden-extradition-video

  32. 32.

    Statement by Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, 24 June 2013, documented on news.gov.hk, http://archive.news.gov.hk/en/categories/law_order/html/2013/06/20130624_163906.shtml

  33. 33.

    Ng, Paradigm City, 9. Emphasis added.

  34. 34.

    Robert Tibbo, speaking at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club, 5 April 2017, video at https://www.fcchk.org/event/club-lunch-the-inside-story-of-edward-snowden-in-hong-kong/

  35. 35.

    Theresa Tedesco, “How Snowden Escaped,” National Post Online 2017, http://news.nationalpost.com/features/how-edward-snowden-escaped-hong-kong

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong

    Jeffrey Clapp

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  1. Jeffrey Clapp
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  1. Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Jason S. Polley

  2. Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Vinton W.K. Poon

  3. Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Lian-Hee Wee

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Clapp, J. (2018). Hong Kong’s Edward Snowden/Edward Snowden’s Hong Kong. In: Polley, J., Poon, V., Wee, LH. (eds) Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7766-1_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7766-1_8

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