Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation , and: Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation, and the Global City (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation, and: Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation, and the Global City Lisa Fischler (bio) Gordon Mathews, Eric Kit-wai Ma, and Tai-lok Lui. Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation. London: Routledge, 2008. xiv, 197 pp. Hardcover $160.00, ISBN 0-415-42654-5. Agnes S. Ku and Ngai Pun, eds. Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation, and the Global City. London: Routledge, 2006. xxiii, 256 pp. Paperback $39.95, ISBN 0-415-33209-5. Amidst emerging national projects designed to produce global cities in East Asia, richly multifaceted research reveals reinvigorated debates over whether the nation, the state, or the community functions as the primary locus of citizens' identities. Drawing on highly diverse sources of data from contemporary Hong Kong, the edited volume Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong, by Agnes S. Ku and Ngai Pun, and the co-authored book Hong Kong, China, by Gordon Mathews, Eric Kit-wai Ma, and Tai-lok Lui, successfully capture the complex issues arising from these renewed debates. While both works trace the profound changes in the political status of Hong Kong citizens that have accompanied the shift in Hong Kong's post-1997 status to a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), they reach very different conclusions about individual and group identities in contemporary Hong Kong. The authors in Ku and Pun's collection (hereafter Ku) argue for a diversity of identities across various social sectors; however, Mathews, Ma, and Lui (hereafter Mathews) claim an emerging market-based, rather than a state-based, national identity for Hong Kong's citizens. In light of these divergent conclusions, the two books' major contributions reside in the evidence they present of the unfinished, incomplete status of citizenship as a political identity in the SAR. The question of citizenship in contemporary Hong Kong needs to be situated both globally and historically. The forward of the Ku and Pun volume situates the citizenship issues of postcolonial Hong Kong against the failure of Britain to deal successfully with the challenges of globalization and migration amidst the neoliberal revolution that began in the 1970s. The result was a citizen who was "a passive member of consumer society," the "homo economicus," which the prologue in the Mathews book suggests as "a new form of 'belonging to a nation,' one based on the discourse not of the state but of the market, that might serve as the harbinger of the future of national identity throughout the world" (Ku and Pun, pp. xviii–xx; Mathews, Ma, and Lui, p. xiv). In addition, Mathews, Ma, and Lui set the nascent transformation in Hong Kong citizens' sense of belonging within the subtle shift occurring for many SAR residents as they accept that they now emotionally belong to the "Chinese nation, if not necessarily the Chinese state" (p. xiii). [End Page 281] Despite the global scope of Mathews' claims for Hong Kong's broader significance, however, Ku and Pun argue for a "flexible" or "provisional" citizenship emerging from the shift in political status for Hong Kong residents as the former colony has morphed into an SAR. The discrepancies between the two volumes in their claims over the future direction for citizenship in Hong Kong can be partly linked to whether their analytical framework has a global or a local emphasis. In the introduction to their collection, Ku and Pun convey the idea that colonial Hong Kong served as the source for discursive notions of both government-desired "law-abiding subjects" and a civil society–inspired local Hong Kong identity. These notions continue to shape the "ethic of citizenry" in the post-1997 SAR, albeit under the competing auspices of the government's program to develop Hong Kong as a global city and of the deepening social fissures and eugenic-like hierarchies of class, ethnicity, and gender that have lead to more civil society activism. Resistance politics also plays a role in chapter 1 of the Mathews, Ma, and Lui volume, which documents the contestations among Hong Kong people over accepting or resisting their belonging to the Chinese nation as defined by the PRC...