1 of 1 DOCUMENT 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 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 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. Page 1 Of course, it's not as if there weren't efforts to gal ...

1. 1 of 1 DOCUMENT
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

2. 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 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

3. less ambivalent, or even absent, in the past.
Page 1
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
things like popular culture, for example," he said. "Now,
the mass media have helped in refracting the energy of the mass

4. 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

5. 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 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
$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
Page 2
Who are we? South China Morning Post June 11, 2007 Monday
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

6. 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 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.
LOAD-DATE: June 11, 2007

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