Abstract
If any space in the world today illustrates the powers and limits of liberalism, classical (which is to say: colonial), as well as contemporary or neo-, it is Hong Kong, the would-be city-state and, like Macau, a ‘special administrative region’ of southern China. (Two useful and widely read historical texts on Hong Kong are Steven Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), and John M. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). An excellent overall study of the SAR’s recent politics up through 2004 is the collection, Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, nation and the global city, Agnes S. Ku and Ngai Pun, eds. (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). For the true basis of power and domination in Hong Kong, namely by capital and a cartel-like property market (and it overlaps clearly with mainland capitalists), see Leo F. Goodstadt, Poverty in the Midst of Affluence: How Hong Kong Mismanaged its Prosperity (Hong Kong University Press, 2013) and Alice Poon’s classic, surveying the system from the British onward, Land And The Ruling Class In Hong Kong (Second Edition. Hong Kong: Enrich Publishing, 2011).) While tiny by mainland standards at a mere seven million, and certainly not a major part of the bloody British Empire in the manner of South Asia, the city has a remarkably large, global footprint for its size, including within China. It must also be said that it is often poorly understood across the Lo Wu border on the one hand, and is ill-served by the academic and English media adulation of the territory’s ‘importance’ for the mainland as a ‘free’ and ‘open’ space on the other. The exceptional global presence of the city is due to many reasons—its influential movie industry, its unique landscapes (the most skyscrapers in the world by far), its particular culture and language, its food, and so on. But perhaps the strongest muscle for its footprint, its greatest leverage, has been its special status as an ‘autonomous’ city even after its handover/return to the mainland. This is thought to be written into the Basic Law or mini-constitution of the city as well as the ‘one country, two systems’ principle, as worked out by the Deng Xiaoping-led CCP and the local British and Chinese colonials. (Chapter 1, Article 5 of the Basic Law text notes that Hong Kong will keep its ‘capitalist system and way of life unchanged for 50 years,’ and China will not impose its ‘socialist’ one. This is the clearest, explicit legal statement backing up Deng’s 1c, 2s remark. If China was not fully capitalist in the 1980s—and certainly the breaking up of the commune system in 1983 marks the end of Maoist economics—it is much closer to it now, which radically undercuts the very idea that there are two systems, in political-economic terms. The absence of Marxism in Hong Kong intellectual political culture is felt acutely here. See the city government’s website for The Basic Law full text: http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/chapter_1.html. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.) As we will see that Basic document turns out to be highly contestable in a battle over interpretations offered by the local democratic, that is, politically liberal politicians/activists on the one hand, and who are not powerless given their hegemony in educational and media institutions, and on the other hand by the obviously still more powerful sovereign, Beijing. More on the law and movement later. But so far what I am saying points to one thing: Hong Kong’s global footprint and highly favorable image in at least the English language media and political world has to do with its difference—a hierarchical, normalized difference—from the mainland. And this very much stems from its colonial past. It is better, more free, ‘special,’ and—in a rather condescending but popular phrase used in Hong Kong – ‘not just another mainland city.’ For much of that media and for the many who claim to want full autonomy or de facto independence from the mainland, it as if the SAR stood for Semi-Autonomous Region and not a Special Administrative Region.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Two useful and widely read historical texts on Hong Kong are Steven Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), and John M. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). An excellent overall study of the SAR’s recent politics up through 2004 is the collection, Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, nation and the global city, Agnes S. Ku and Ngai Pun, eds. (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). For the true basis of power and domination in Hong Kong, namely, by capital and a cartel-like property market (and it overlaps clearly with mainland capitalists), see Leo F. Goodstadt, Poverty in the Midst of Affluence: How Hong Kong Mismanaged its Prosperity (Hong Kong University Press, 2013) and Alice Poon’s classic, surveying the system from the British onwards, Land And The Ruling Class In Hong Kong (Second Edition. Hong Kong: Enrich Publishing, 2011).
- 2.
Chapter 1, Article 5 of the Basic Law text notes that Hong Kong will keep its ‘capitalist system and way of life unchanged for 50 years,’ and China will not impose its ‘socialist’ one. This is the clearest, explicit legal statement backing up Deng’s 1c, 2s remark. If China was not fully capitalist in the 1980s—and certainly the breaking up of the commune system in 1983 marks the end of Maoist economics—it is much closer to it now, which radically undercuts the very idea that there are two systems, in political-economic terms. The absence of Marxism in Hong Kong’s intellectual political culture is felt acutely here. See the city government’s website for The Basic Law full text: http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/chapter_1.html. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.
- 3.
Though this too may be fading, and there are no doubt more English speakers in, say, Zhejiang or Guangdong province than in Hong Kong. For fears of English slipping in Hong Kong, see, for example, Victor Fung Keung, ‘Declining English standard hurts HK,’ in The China Daily. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/2012-11/01/content_15862375.htm. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.
- 4.
See John M Carroll’s history of collaborative colonialism, Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong, 6. (Harvard University Press, 2009).
- 5.
As the noted Hong Kong studies professor Lui Tai-lok aptly asks in the July 15, 2015, Hong Kong Economic Journal: ‘What is the use of the pro-establishment camp?.’ http://www.ejinsight.com/20150715-what-is-use-pro-establishment-camp/. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017. Lui’s work on the middle class of Hong Kong is also germane here, though as I try to argue the complicity of the more politically liberal and active voices of the opposition—also overwhelmingly middle class or above—also helps produce the de-politicized present in Hong Kong. See Lui, ‘Rear-guard Politics: Hong Kong’s Middle-class’(The Developing Economies, XLI-2 (June 2003): 161–183).
- 6.
I have not yet had a chance to read the promising but forthcoming collection edited by Wai-man Lam and Luke Cooper, Citizenship, Identity and Social Movements in the New Hong Kong: Localism after the Umbrella Movement, which includes an afterword by movement leader and law professor Benny Benny Tai Yiu Ting (London: Routledge, 2018).
- 7.
See, for example, the failed attempts to work the Tiananmen 1989 and May 4, 1919, analogies in America’s liberal magazine, The Nation, in a notably superficial 2014 piece by historians Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Denise Ho, ‘What Occupy Can Learn from History.’ https://www.thenation.com/article/what-hong-kongs-occupy-movement-can-learn-history/. Accessed Nov. 21, 2017.
- 8.
See in particular the essay by Pang Laikwan, ‘Civil Disobedience and the Rule of Law: Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement’ (Verge: Studies in Global Asias 2.1 2016: 170–192), which analyzes a putative, highly promising turning point in Hong Kong’s history marked by Occupy, due to the ‘emotive embedding’ and ‘intersubjective factors’ clearly displayed in the sites of the occupy movement. One can certainly agree with the emotional importance of the movement for most involved, and with the importance of emotion and affect in general. But as will be obvious I am here working with a different understanding of what the political and politics are, and presumably ‘democracy.’ Imagined communities are important but are not the same thing as actual, institutionalized communities who can deploy organized power or act in the political sphere. Similarly, nationalism and the nation-state are different entities.
- 9.
This is also the place to note that there was a much, much smaller yet long-lasting Occupy Central movement in 2011, that was clearly anti-capitalist and more along the lines of the Occupy Wall Street movement. See the essay by Liu Shih Ding, ‘The new contentious sequence since Tiananmen,’ (Third World Quarterly 36.11 2015: 2148–2166).
- 10.
In my own view that analysis is still all about liberalism and the law, since democracy on my account (e.g. following Rousseau and Marx) has to be about mass rule, economic equality, and the general will.
- 11.
See the brief article, ‘Legalistic and Utopian: Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement,’ by Sebastian Veg in the erstwhile, self-professed ‘flagship journal of the Western left’ (The New Left Review 92 March–April 2015). https://newleftreview.org/II/92/sebastian-veg-legalistic-and-utopian. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017. Rather than being pejoratives, ‘legalistic’ and ‘formal democracy’ are published without comment or counter-balance.
- 12.
See their Labor Of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
- 13.
Subsequent months and years have seen arrests and jail terms (circa 2017) for some former protesters and organizers (e.g. Joshua Wong) though also the convictions of several police who beat one 2014 activist. There have been several, much smaller protests since (as there were before), and even a notable and violent riot, aka the ‘Fishball Revolution’ in Mongkok during the 2016 lunar new year. The violence was one way and absorbed by the police, it must be said. As of 2018 one ‘fishball’ rebel and founder of a local nativist independence party, Edward Leung, has received a seven year jail sentence for violence. The rise of localism as against the mainland, as noted earlier, has escalated since the Occupy/Umbrella protests. But nativism and localism have been unmistakable mainstream features of Hong Kong for decades, and the more xenophobic outburts have also to do with rapdily expanding mainland tourism, pressure on local social services, and so on. There is no question that Hong Kong is suffering under a hyper-capitalist and poorly managed integration with the mainland, though this is less about the lack of voting and some vague ‘freedom’ than people’s livelihood being endangered by local as well as mainland and foreign elites, i.e. capital. The nostalgic romanticization of 2014 is well underway, as if pre-ordained.
- 14.
See his March 24, 2017, article in the South China Post, ‘The chief executive election Hong Kong could have had.’ http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2081575/chief-executive-election-hong-kong-could-have-had. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.
- 15.
For updates on the 2018 election cycles, see the South China Morning Post. http://www.scmp.com/topics/legislative-council-election-2018. Accessed April 1, 2018.
- 16.
See, for example, Chan Shun-hing, ‘The Protestant community and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong’ (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 16.3 2015: 380–395).
- 17.
See the ‘Voice of America’ report to this effect, ‘Hong Kong Protest Leaders Recall Spiritual Motivation’ http://www.voanews.com/a/hong-kong-protest-leaders-recall-spiritual-motivation/3027178.html. Accessed Nov. 21, 2017. See also Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, eds. Justin K. H. Tse and Jonathan Y. Tan (New York Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- 18.
The statistical question here is important and yet I know of no data or polls that address it in a substantial way. Most surveys done by, for example, HKU’s ‘public opinion program’ duck this question by dwelling obsessively on identity crises around Chineseness or Hong Kongness. Both the establishment and the opposition may not want to really know, for different reasons, how much the majority of people really care about suffrage as opposed to financial precarity. Compounding the majority opinion question are, of course, the British functional constituencies and the absence of a direct one-person, one-vote system for what is, after all, still just a small city by Chinese standards.
- 19.
See the NED’s own admission by way of denying a connection to the Umbrella protests. https://www.ned.org/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-and-support-for-democracy-in-hong-kong/. Accessed Dec. 1, 2017.
- 20.
Deng’s speeches on Hong Kong are readily available online, and a great insight into his mentality in general. This one from 1984 is ‘Maintain Prosperity and Stability in Hong Kong.’ http://en.people.cn/dengxp/vol3/text/c1250.html
- 21.
For an extremely well detailed analysis, see Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, Localists and ‘Locusts’ in Hong Kong: Creating a Yellow-Red Peril Discourse (Maryland Monograph Series in Contemporary Asian Studies, no. 2. 2015).
- 22.
See the group’s statement on popular sovereignty and referenda here: https://www.demosisto.hk/article/details/46. Accessed Nov. 28, 2017.
- 23.
On the riots see Gary Ka-wai Cheung, Hong Kong’s Watershed: the 1967 Riots (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and Robert Bickers and Ray Yep, May Days in Hong Kong: Riot and Emergency in 1967 (Hong Kong University Press, 2009).
- 24.
See his Xianggang Chengbanglun. (City-State Theory of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Enrich Publishing, 2011). For an excellent review of Chin’s ideas, see Tommy Cheung’s ‘Father of Hong Kong Nationalism? A Critical Review of Wan Chin’s City-state Theory’ (Asian Education and Development Studies 4.4 2015: 460–470). Chin Wan works primarily in Chinese, but his writings are frequently translated in part by his followers, often by Mr. Chapman Chen, and are readily available on Facebook and other fora on the Internet. One should also note that Chin’s views seem to be changing in light of even more extreme nativism, and he insists that he does not call for Hong Kong independence, just its more or less full/complete autonomy. As noted earlier, this is a distinction that makes no difference. But see Alex Lo’s column in the April 28, 2017, South China Post, ‘Horace Chin, ‘father of localism,’ draws red line against secession.’ http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2091282/horace-chin-father-localism-draws-red-line-against-secession. Accessed Dec. 1, 2017.
- 25.
See the works by Tsang and Carroll, note 1 above.
- 26.
For an argument that China deliberately stopped the British from granting Hong Kong independence a la Singapore (and which assumes British good intentions), see the discussion of recent archival documents by Gwynn Guilford, ‘The secret history of Hong Kong’s stillborn democracy’ (at the news outlet Quartz, 2014). https://qz.com/279013/the-secret-history-of-hong-kongs-stillborn-democracy/. Accessed Dec. 1, 2017.
- 27.
This may seem rather counter-intuitive to anyone following the recent arrests of tabloidesque (and, again, virulently anti-communist) publishers who were based in Hong Kong. See the South China Post—a Hong Kong newspaper—for background (http://www.scmp.com/topics/hong-kong-bookseller-disappearances). But it must also be said that the accused are accused of violating mainland law on or in the mainland (e.g. selling their books there, via Hong Kong post). The point here is not that Hong Kong has free speech in any case (which strictly speaking exists nowhere), but that it is markedly freer, including on campuses and in political fora online or in various buildings. One of the most rational fears in the city is that such relative freedom or autonomy will be squandered by deeply tendentious and implausible calls for independence.
- 28.
See the report and interviews with then-C.E. during the initial weeks of the Occupy/Umbrella movement, ‘CY Leung: “Democracy would see poorer people dominate Hong Kong vote.”’ October 21, 2014, South China Morning Post. The quote here from mainland official and lawyer Wang Zhemin dates from the weeks prior to the movement. http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1621103/cy-leung-democracy-would-see-poor-people-dominate-hong-kong-vote. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017.
- 29.
I return to this question of realism and politics in the concluding chapter. For a contrasting view to mine, one that draws on Vaclav Havel, see Hui Po-Keung and Lau Kin-Chi, ‘“Living in truth” versus realpolitik: limitations and potentials of the Umbrella Movement’ (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 16.3 2015: 348–366).
- 30.
As this book goes to press I must also note again that in recent by-elections for the empty seats from those disbarred localist candidates (who won in the aftermath of the umbrellas), the democratic bloc has lost their veto power. This may spell the end of the democracy-as-filibustering mode of politics for the liberals/opposition, which in the long run can only be a good thing as Hong Kong attempts to transition away from being a failed city-state.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vukovich, D.F. (2019). No Country, No System: Liberalism, Autonomy, and De-politicization in Hong Kong. In: Illiberal China. China in Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-0540-5
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-0541-2
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)