This document discusses the evolving identity of Hong Kong residents as "Hongkongers" with a distinct local culture and identity, rather than solely identifying as Chinese. It describes how events like the July 1st 2003 protest and SARS outbreak helped foster a sense of communal spirit and local consciousness among Hong Kong residents. It also notes that while a Hong Kong identity has grown stronger in recent years, the relationship with mainland China remains complex, with Hong Kong residents still viewing mainlanders as different from themselves at times.

1. Who are we? An evolving sense of identity is changing the
socio- political scene, writes Clarence Tsui
Abstract
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
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?
The most glaring example was in April 1999, when the then
Secretary for Security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee declared that up
to 1.67 million mainlanders would come to Hong Kong if a
court ruling giving right of abode to mainland-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 tourists - 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.Full Text

2. Top of Form
Bottom of Form
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 Chinese. 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

3. 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?
The swathes of people who filled Victoria Park, Hennessy Road
and then Queensway en route to the Central Government Offices
four years ago, generated a spirit of a different kind: that being
a Hongkonger does not engender merely 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

4. 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.

5. Then there were former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa's ever-
changing attempts to position Hong Kong: a competitor 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 directors (each of which
received government subsidies of HK$500,000) 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
decisions made by a Tung administration. The Sars epidemic,
meanwhile, could be partly blamed on ramshackle
communications 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 declared that up
to 1.67 million mainlanders would come to Hong Kong if a
court ruling giving right of abode to mainland-born children of
Hong Kong residents was not overturned. Branded by human
rights activists as a "scare tactic", Mrs Ip's remarks

6. 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 tourists - 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.
Copyright South China Morning Post Ltd. Jun 11, 2007