Compressed modernity in South China

Abstract

This article examines the changing role of Hong Kong in what I propose as the formation of a compressed modernity in South China. In the 1980s through the 1990s, the Hong Kong liberal mediascape was over-spilling onto many developing cities in south China, fueling the desire for modernity among the people in the region. Since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the Greater Pearl River Delta, in which Hong Kong is a small but influential city, has become increasingly interconnected socially, culturally and in terms of infrastructure. The formation of this ‘compressed modernity’ is illustrated by four case studies. In case one, a magazine had become the site of imagining modernity via the representations of Hong Kong society in the 1980s. In case two, a television drama in the 1990s vividly expressed the longing for knowledge of the capitalistic market. Case three is an ethnographic study of a toy factory in South China, which, in the 2000s, was managed by Hong Kong managers equipped with modern skills of marketing, logistics, and international trade. Case four is another ethnographic study, this time of a disco bar, which demonstrates the juxtaposition of the lifeworlds of the working class and the consumerist lifestyle of the rising middle class in the region. The ‘compressed modernity’, as illustrated by these cases and theorized in this article, has multiple socio-cultural layers juxtaposed against each other, rendering it a social formation very different from popular versions of modernity in developed countries.