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40 of 999 DOCUMENTS

South China Morning Post

June 11, 2007 Monday

Who are we?

BYLINE: An evolving sense of identity is changing the socio-political scene, writes Clarence Tsui

SECTION: NEWS; Behind the News; Pg. 12

LENGTH: 1478 words

Having appeared at the forefront of ill-fated campaigns to save Queen's Pier and Wan Chai's Wedding Card Street

- not to mention the fame he attained four years ago as the youngest-ever candidate in district council elections - Chan

King-fai is a veteran in fielding media questions these days. However polished as he might be, he recalls one

particular question that really annoyed him a month ago.

"It was this television journalist who was interviewing me for, well, one of those handover anniversary specials,"

he said. "And after all the deliberate questions, he said he had one final question he had to ask me: whether I feel I'm

Chinese now. So after all the discussion that went on about our work, it boils down, again, to such a simplified view of

things."

It's easy to see the source of his ire: for someone who fronts a group called Local Action - comprising activists

whose major objective is to salvage Hong Kong's heritage from the relentless claws of urban renewal - the old chestnut

of taking sides on the Sino-British divide is akin to a swipe at his efforts in cultivate an organic cultural identity for

Hong Kong.

"It's always been such a rigid framework - either you choose to be an Anglophile, or you consider yourself Chi-

nese. But it's so ridiculous: it's like when somebody said to me that since I admired Queen's Pier so much I must have

feelings for the colonial era, and not for China," Mr Chan said.

Fellow Local Action activist, Chow Sze-chung, agreed, saying: "When we talk about Queen's Pier, it's not just

about British monarchs having landed here. What we wanted to remember is how more than 30 local social movements

had begun and happened right here."

Their view embodies a popular sentiment that bubbled among intellectuals before the handover on July 1, 1997,

and has soared to the forefront in the past few years: that beneath all the focus of Hong Kong as an incidental success

story that resulted from the political manoeuvres between two political powers, there's also a Hong Kong story to be

written. In this story a Hong Kong-specific cultural identity - an indigenous mix of the city's history, from its social

upheavals and heritage to its popular culture - plays a central role.

And it's a mass social movement which basically propelled Mr Chan, his fellow activists and probably even more

of the city's residents in acknowledging that there is a society out there and not just a co-existence of cynical,

get-rich-quick individuals. Hackneyed this might sound, but the demonstration on July 1, 2003, instilled into many a

Hongkonger a communal spirit and local consciousness that had been more or less ambivalent, or even absent, in the

past.

Of course, it's not as if there weren't efforts to galvanise a "Hong Kong spirit" before that - who could forget the

government's ill-fated "Hong Kong for Sure" campaign in 1999 to secure the hosting rights to the 2006 Asian Games, or

former financial secretary Antony Leung Kam-chung's cringe-worthy rendition of Below the Lion Rock in his budget

speech in March 2002 to conjure public sympathy for his initiatives?

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Who are we? South China Morning Post June 11, 2007 Monday

The swathes of people who filled Victoria Park, Hennessy Road and then Queensway en route to the Central Gov-

ernment Offices four years ago, generated a spirit of a different kind: that being a Hongkonger does not engender mere-

ly nostalgia and sentimentality, but also a base for social action.

"The July 1 marches were certainly a watershed for the development of a cultural identity for Hongkongers as for

the first time the participants saw themselves in a subjective role," said Eric Ma Kit-wai, an associate professor in

journalism and communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He saw something new to the construction of a

new Hong Kong-specific identity this time, compared with similar events decades ago, whether it be the movement for

the legitimisation of the Chinese language or the birth of indigenous Canto-pop in the late 1970s.

"Back then, the advocacy of local culture was more rooted in things like popular culture, for example," he said.

"Now, the mass media have helped in refracting the energy of the mass movements into a higher political realm, with

the evolution of a local consciousness producing public initiatives about government policy, such as in conservation."

Having conducted surveys on local and national identities in Hong Kong since 1996, Professor Ma admitted he

had imagined a decade ago that Hongkongers would have a "more ambiguous and diluted" affiliation with their local

identity as the years rolled by. "It was certainly true during the first few years, as people tried to come to terms with

their position [in the Chinese social framework]," he said.

And the numbers did tally up to that effect. In the polls he conducted with colleague Anthony Fung Ying-him,

people who identified themselves only as Hongkongers dropped from 25.2 per cent in 1996 to 21.5 per cent in 2006;

meanwhile, nearly 60 per cent claimed a mixed Hong Kong-Chinese identity last year, compared to just 47 per cent in

1996.

Beyond the opinion polls lies a different story, Professor Ma said, with advocacy groups for local culture going

from strength to strength - as shown by the vocal antagonism against reclamation, the removal of Queen's Pier and the

government's forced postponement of the West Kowloon Cultural District, a project which ran into strident opposition

from a united front of artists, politicians and grass-roots activists.

Collective strength is nearly always born out of harsh circumstances - and Hong Kong has certainly been a hotbed

for the nurturing of its own cultural identity, given the economic and social winters the city has battled through in

the past decade.

The sharp recession brought about by the Asian economic crisis in 1998, for example, gave rise to an officially

orchestrated campaign to pull ourselves together - products of which include the "Hong Kong For Sure" project, and the

Flying Dragon logo that was meant to be a confidence-booster for a city in dire straits.

Then there were former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa's ever-changing attempts to position Hong Kong: a com-

petitor against London and New York one year, an aspiring major Chinese city the next. And finally there was the Sars

outbreak. As Hong Kong plunged further into desolation and misery, popular culture - under the aegis of a government

desperate to deflate public antipathy - produced relics such as 1:99, a collection of 12 short films from Hong Kong di-

rectors (each of which received government subsidies of $500HK,000) with the common theme of raising post-Sars

public morale.

Many might question whether such an aspiration for a Hong Kong-specific cultural identity has anything to do

with the handover at all. Certainly, the circumstances which drew the local population together in pursuit of a common

lineage of collective memory might not seem directly linked to the change of guards on July 1, 1997. But the transfer

of sovereignty has spawned many of the situations which forced people to vocalise their concerns en masse.

The most explicit example, of course, is the July 1 demonstration, spurred by discontent towards the flawed deci-

sions made by a Tung administration. The Sars epidemic, meanwhile, could be partly blamed on ramshackle communi-

cations between Hong Kong and the mainland.

Not that the traditional mainland-Hong Kong chasm has disappeared altogether, however. The differentiation

which shaped how Hongkongers saw themselves in the 1980s - with television series and films separating the civilised,

affluent "us" from the uncouth, impoverished "them" across the Lo Wu River - has remained, and it is something that

both the government and the general population have used for their own ends.

The most glaring example was in April 1999, when the then Secretary for Security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee de-

clared that up to 1.67 million mainlanders would come to Hong Kong if a court ruling giving right of abode to main-

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Who are we? South China Morning Post June 11, 2007 Monday

land-born children of Hong Kong residents was not overturned. Branded by human rights activists as a "scare tactic",

Mrs Ip's remarks inadvertently shaped mainlanders as a marauding mass hovering at the gates.

The transformation of mainland arrivals to Hong Kong in the past two years - from poor cousins to moneyed tour-

ists - reveals the conflicting sentiments Hongkongers have in terms of how they see the "other" and themselves. "On the

one hand we want to earn their money, but on the other we still want to see them as backward people who couldn't

compare to our sophisticated selves," says Sze Lai-shan, a social worker with the Society for Community Organisation

who has worked since 1996 for the rights of mainland immigrants. And in this lies the schism within the Hongkonger:

an identity that remains in flux, whether Queen's Pier remains or not.

LOAD-DATE: June 11, 2007

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 South China Morning Post Ltd.

All Rights Reserved