Reconnecting Colonial Imagination?: Hong Kong People's Attitude Towards the London 2012 Olympics

Abstract

A number of Olympic studies focus on the relations of the Olympics with nationalism, globalism, cosmopolitism and Olympism. However, the majority of these ‘-ism’ studies focus on the impact of the Games on national integration in the host countries or cities; its transnational connections contribute to the creation of a transnational society and its global consciousness cultivates cosmopolitism. Most studies do not investigate the ‘colonial (re-)connectivity’ of the Olympic Games, which has the potential to affect people's attitude towards the Olympic Games and the host countries or cities. This study attempts to analyse the concept of ‘imagined community’ by measuring how people in Hong Kong (the colonised) display their awareness, motivation and expectation towards the British community (the coloniser) in hosting the London 2012 Olympic Games at the pre-game level. The results, based on a sample of 312 people in Hong Kong, highlight the multidimensionality of identity among different age groups. The London 2012 Olympics was not capable of creating the ‘imagined community’ to foster a coloniser–colonised reunion, but it somehow provided an identity-neutral platform for Hong Kong people to display situational, conditional or even pseudo-nostalgia for the colonial era.