Hong Kong

Abstract

Abstract Modern-day Hong Kong is a territory of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which has undergone a quite extraordinary development in its recent history, from being a small fishing port in the early nineteenth century to becoming one of the most high profile, cosmopolitan, and economically successful cities in Asia during the last forty years. Having functioned as a British colony from 1842 until 1997, Hong Kong is now (once again) an integral part of ‘mainland China’, where it currently enjoys the status of ‘Special Administrative Region’ (SAR) and the opportunity to continue with its pre-hand-over economic and social systems for a fifty-year period following 1997, the Chinese government in Beijing having pledged not to interfere in the internal a fairs of the territory during this time. Because Hong Kong is therefore now a component part of the PRC, an examination of language and national identity issues in Hong Kong could have been included as a section within this volume’s chapter 7 on mainland China. However, due to the special complexity of Hong Kong’s past and present circumstances, there are good reasons for deciding to devote an independent chapter to the study of Hong Kong here. First of all, what is commonly characterized as the basic identity of Hong Kong and its inhabitants was formed during a period when Hong Kong was largely isolated from mainland China due to twentieth-century political developments in China and Hong Kong’s status as a British colony. Secondly, Hong Kong currently functions with a socio-economic system which is significantly different from that of the rest of China, as part of the Chinese government’s promise of ‘One Country, Two Systems’; constraints on life in Hong Kong are therefore markedly different from those further north in the rest of the PRC. Thirdly, the level of post-industrial economic development present in Hong Kong is greater than that in most areas of mainland China, as is the degree with which Hong Kong maintains regular international connections with other countries in the rest of Asia and the West.