Protests in Hong Kong: A Case of Identity Crisis
The relative decline of Hong Kong’s economic status
The recent protests in Hong Kong over the extradition bill are not just about the “fear and anger over the erosion of civil liberties”, as reported by the international media. If one argues for the rights of dissidents, it must be done for both Chinese and non-Chinese political dissidents. Hong Kong has always been known as a safe haven for the former but not for dissidents like Edward Snowden, an American whistle blower who exposed the mass surveillance program of the US government. Sometimes the rhetoric of democracy and liberties used by Western observers can obscure other factors.
I argue that the “fear and anger” of the protests stems more from the relative decline of economic status of Hong Kong Chinese compared to their mainland counterparts. Until the 1997 handover, the city’s fortune was tied to that of Britain. The British Empire made Hong Kong as her main place for the exchange of capital in Asia. The legacy of imperialism is evident in the number of British multinational financial service firms like HSBC that still have a major presence in the city.
But Britain’s decline was apparent when she joined the European Economic Community in 1973, an acknowledgement that trade with continental Europe was more important that trade with the Commonwealth. Furthermore, Britain was forced to sign an agreement in 1984 to handover political control of the island to China in 1997. The recent Brexit crisis is perhaps another sign of British decline, as the center of global economy shifts from Atlantic Europe to Asia Pacific. Since the 1997 handover and China’s economic boom of the 1990s, Hong Kong’s GDP relative to China’s has decreased from 27 percent in 1993 to only 3 percent in 2017.
While the citizens of Hong Kong enjoy the freedom of speech not available to those living in mainland China, the economic situation for them, in recent decades, has become more precarious. The city’s powerful real estate developers push prices up by holding onto land. And the housing crisis is exacerbated by the growing number of wealthy Chinese moving from mainland to Hong Kong.
The decline of Hong Kong began with the economic and trade liberalization of the Chinese economy in the 1980s. The opening reforms were welcomed by many Western democracies, particularly for manufacturers as cheap land and labor were made available. They wanted to make cheap goods in China and sell them back in the American market. For the citizens of these democratic states to accept this reversal of politics, their leaders sold to them the idea that as China gets richer it would adopt democratic practices such as free and fair elections and freedom of speech.
Besides the US, Hong Kong also that found the economic liberalization of China to be an opportunity to maximize profits. The city’s manufacturers moved their factories to Shenzhen, initiating the beginning of Hong Kong’s deindustrialization, which reduced the share of manufacturing industry to total employment from almost 50 percent in 1981 to 30 percent in 1989. Just as deindustrialization severely weakened the American middle class in the Midwest, it had the same effect on Hong Kong’s. Unlike the frenzied media coverage of the 2014 Umbrella Movement and recent extradition protests, liberal media outlets were quite silent when Hong Kong factories moved to mainland China.
Thus, the rise of China through economic liberalization and her role in the deindustrialization and housing crisis of Hong Kong have shifted the status of the city’s citizens closer to those from mainland Chinese.
In the imaginary of the Hong Kong people, the city is a model of the urbane and wealth. Mainland China, however, represents the poor and uncivilized. This dichotomy was what differentiated Hong Kongers from mainland Chinese for many decades.
Although this binary opposition places Hong Kongers above mainland Chinese, it also imagines the latter as the savior of the former. While Hong Kong, the city, represents greed and manipulation, mainland China frugality and innocence. The idealized mainlander, untouched by capitalism, embodies the values of hardworking, tradition and honesty.
The caricature of a mainland country person as poor but good-hearted is often employed by Hong Kong’s most popular comedian, actor and director, Stephen Chow. In the film Shaolin Soccer, Chow plays a monk from the Shaolin Temple, which is located in the mainland. Mainland China, then, represents a place of spirituality and tradition, which the city apparently lacks. Spirituality overcomes greed, as it is understood. The monk, the film’s protagonist, guides his soccer team consisted of other monks to defeat the evil team funded by a rich Hong Kong business man, who also assumes the film’s main villain.
However, this binary opposition has become less true, particularly for those in the city with modest income and wealth. Furthermore, this Hong Kong identity, so intertwined with China, has been challenged in recent decades by the influx of rich Chinese into the city. The visitors coming from mainland China are no longer poor and innocent. They are often richer and more capitalist than those from the city. China no longer assumes the dual roles, as the poor and savior. So, perhaps the recent and past protests by Hong Kongers are stemming from a profound identity crisis, which forces them to take on a more equal status or worse — in the long run, a subordinate role, turning Hong Kong into “just another Chinese city.”
