[URBAN NOTE] "After the Umbrella movement, Hong Kong now faces an identity crisis"
At Open Democracy, En Liang Khong writes about how younger Hong Kongers are starting to stop identifying as Chinese. Much may come of this in the longer run.
When I finally arrive back in Hong Kong in the early hours of a September morning, two years after the 2014 pro-democracy protests, it’s in the middle of a storm. Walking through the rain-splattered city, I see that the highways running across the heart of the finance district have been restored. It’s utterly unrecognizable from when I was last here, when activists led mass occupations, in a bold claim to redefine popular power, using umbrellas to shield themselves from waves of tear gas fired by police, and turning the heart of Hong Kong into a untamed tent city. But although public space in the city-state has been resanitised, we still need to understand the ways in which Hong Kong is entering an unprecedented identity crisis.
This has been a process. We are used to speaking of threats to the Chinese state emerging from the centre. But while that was true in the 1980s, China scholar Sebastian Veg argues that in recent years, such contestation “has increasingly come from the margins.” I went to meet one of the original founders of the 2014 Occupy protests, sociologist Chan Kinman, who is a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “For the younger generation,” Chan tells me, “there has been a very obvious trend of seeing themselves purely as Hong Kong people, not as Chinese.” This is a crucial identity shift. Hong Kongers have long enjoyed a hybrid identity, of being both Chinese and Hong Kongers.
But not this time. Chan thinks the age of dual identity is over, as Hong Kong’s millennials begin to treat it as abnormal, “as something in conflict, not something that can coexist”. The Umbrella movement, in particular, accelerated those contradictions. The failure of a strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, and the exhaustion of attempts to initiate dialogue with Beijing, have drawn a line in the sand for Hong Kong’s youth, Chan tells me. Ironically, the Hong Kong government itself has been an unwitting driver of the ideology of Hong Kong independence, by publicly targeting and cracking down on the idea in the wake of the 2014 protests. But this strategy of tarring a wide spectrum of pro-democracy activists as separatists, when the discourse of independence was previously a fringe ideology and never central to the Umbrella movement, has been double-edged. After that, Chan “watched as the idea of independence spread massively through Hong Kong”.
What is happening in Hong Kong defies our normal political understanding. “Now you have around 40% of young people supporting Hong Kong independence,” Chan tells me. This crisis of identity is not only fuelling a political vision of Hong Kong as an independent state, but also exists on a cultural level, against Chineseness itself.
Beijing has long been dependent on a traditional sense of ‘Chinese identity’ in Hong Kong to maintain political loyalty. But the Chinese state’s enforcement of patriotism alongside a disavowal of democratic politics has come at a price. It has done little more than alienate, rather than draw closer, a whole swathe of Hong Kong youth. While the older working-class population are still bound to lines of patronage that link them to pro-mainland groups, and the elites support economic symbiosis with the mainland, a young, middle-class, educated ‘generation with no future’ are in full rebellion against both the traditions of their elders, and the state-driven popular nationalism that is rampant in mainland China.
When I finally arrive back in Hong Kong in the early hours of a September morning, two years after the 2014 pro-democracy protests, it’s in the middle of a storm. Walking through the rain-splattered city, I see that the highways running across the heart of the finance district have been restored. It’s utterly unrecognizable from when I was last here, when activists led mass occupations, in a bold claim to redefine popular power, using umbrellas to shield themselves from waves of tear gas fired by police, and turning the heart of Hong Kong into a untamed tent city. But although public space in the city-state has been resanitised, we still need to understand the ways in which Hong Kong is entering an unprecedented identity crisis.
This has been a process. We are used to speaking of threats to the Chinese state emerging from the centre. But while that was true in the 1980s, China scholar Sebastian Veg argues that in recent years, such contestation “has increasingly come from the margins.” I went to meet one of the original founders of the 2014 Occupy protests, sociologist Chan Kinman, who is a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “For the younger generation,” Chan tells me, “there has been a very obvious trend of seeing themselves purely as Hong Kong people, not as Chinese.” This is a crucial identity shift. Hong Kongers have long enjoyed a hybrid identity, of being both Chinese and Hong Kongers.
But not this time. Chan thinks the age of dual identity is over, as Hong Kong’s millennials begin to treat it as abnormal, “as something in conflict, not something that can coexist”. The Umbrella movement, in particular, accelerated those contradictions. The failure of a strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, and the exhaustion of attempts to initiate dialogue with Beijing, have drawn a line in the sand for Hong Kong’s youth, Chan tells me. Ironically, the Hong Kong government itself has been an unwitting driver of the ideology of Hong Kong independence, by publicly targeting and cracking down on the idea in the wake of the 2014 protests. But this strategy of tarring a wide spectrum of pro-democracy activists as separatists, when the discourse of independence was previously a fringe ideology and never central to the Umbrella movement, has been double-edged. After that, Chan “watched as the idea of independence spread massively through Hong Kong”.
What is happening in Hong Kong defies our normal political understanding. “Now you have around 40% of young people supporting Hong Kong independence,” Chan tells me. This crisis of identity is not only fuelling a political vision of Hong Kong as an independent state, but also exists on a cultural level, against Chineseness itself.
Beijing has long been dependent on a traditional sense of ‘Chinese identity’ in Hong Kong to maintain political loyalty. But the Chinese state’s enforcement of patriotism alongside a disavowal of democratic politics has come at a price. It has done little more than alienate, rather than draw closer, a whole swathe of Hong Kong youth. While the older working-class population are still bound to lines of patronage that link them to pro-mainland groups, and the elites support economic symbiosis with the mainland, a young, middle-class, educated ‘generation with no future’ are in full rebellion against both the traditions of their elders, and the state-driven popular nationalism that is rampant in mainland China.