City Society - 2008 - Smart - Hong Kong S Twenty First Century Seen From 1997

ALAN SMART
University of Calgary
Hong Kong's Twenty-First Century Seen

From 1997
DURING THE TRANSITION to its new status as a Special

Administrative Region of China, the future of Hong Kong was the
focus of the world's attention. This paper looks at the futures that
were projected at the time of the transition, frequently on the basis of
reference to the need to preserve some special key to the successes that
the city had accomplished in the past Much of this future is already
imminent in the infrastructural projects that are in already in
progress, and which are based on expectations about the role of Hong
Kong in China and the world. Finally, the essay explores how
ordinary citizens have been living the transition. [Hong Kong, China,
future, planning, transition]
DURING THE SUMMER of 1997, the world's attention, and that of

those local citizens who did not succumb to "handover fatigue" (South
China Morning Post [hereafter SCMP] 21/6/1997:R2) was focused at the
end of June on what the future would hold for that small territory as it
returned to Chinese sovereignty with a promise of "unchanged social and
economic systems" for fifty years, until nearly the midpoint of the twenty-
first century. Simon Murray sums up the problem for any analyst of these
processes: "There is nothing new that can be written on the subject of what
may happen to Hong Kong after next year. The pundits have predicted
every possible scenario, and the permutations of every eventuality have
been run and re-run to exhaustion." (SCMP 23/6/1997:D 14). One
postmodern response, of course, is instead to attend to what 'the pundits"
and others have said, rather than to offer prognostications or assessments
oneself. But as Sum (1995:68) argues, the political struggle for
representing the transition in Hong Kong is more than a war of words, and
to understand the discourse, the analyst should "contextualize the politics
97
98 City & Society
1548744x, 1997, 1, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/ciso.1997.9.1.97 by <Shibboleth>-member@soas.ac.uk, Wiley Online Library on [12/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
of identities by situating it structurally, strategically and in relation to the
actions of specific forces/agents."
Imagining Hong Kong's twenty-first century is not something that is
just done in words: It is also bound up with the practical choices of its
citizens to stay or to leave, to invest in Hong Kong or offshore, to save or
to consume. Even more fundamentally, the future becomes immanent in
the city's plans and commitments to concrete infrastructure such as land
reclamation, airports, roads, railway projects and container ports. In this
paper, I will explore some of the ways in which this future has been
imagined, and the stakes that are involved in the various futures that are
projected, feared and desired. First, I will consider important contributions
in general to discussing how urban futures are imagined; then, I will
concentrate on how the handover and the future in Hong Kong have been
discussed in the public realm of speeches, formal agreements and media
accounts; following that, I will examine the more mundane and concrete
invocation of the future in the planning of infrastructure. Finally, I will
examine how without voices in the public realm (except as respondents to
interviewers or surveys) Hong Kong people are living the handover and
how their fears and hopes for the future are expressed in their choices and
actions.
Imagining Cities and the Future

Throgmorton (1996) has suggested that planning might best be
examined as persuasive and constitutive story-telling. From this
viewpoint, planners are "authors who write persuasive stories about the
future" (p. 50). But the stories told in urban and other plans do not just
persuade people about the future and the means necessary to get to desired
future states and avoid feared possibilities, they also serve to constitute
that future (p. 53). The story-telling that preceded and enveloped the
handover fits very well into this framework. There was a basic narrative
structure that was common to a large number of the stories told about
Hong Kong's future: Hong Kong's surprising rise to prosperity and
influence beyond its size in the world-economy occurred because of t4x";
so "x" must be preserved in the future as a Special Administrative Region
if these desirable features are to be retained, and various undesirable future
possibilities are to be avoided. The desired future generally involves a
straight-line projection of the post-1949 past—more and more of what
has already been accomplished. The feared future takes various forms:
Becoming "just another Chinese city," or decline from a position of
prominence and relative wealth as Shanghai did after 1949 (Wu
1997:425), or corruption and censorship that will undermine its potential
Hong Kong 99
to serve as a nodal centre of the global flow of capital and information
(Yahuda 1995). However, there are also feared futures that are attached to
the simple straight-line projection of the past: More and more people in
too-scarce space, resulting in environmental degradation and serious
deterioration of the quality of life.
Rotenberg (1996) has discussed the importance of metropolitan
projects. These are goals set by city leaders which are produced (and
transformed) through a "combination of experiences of historical crisis,
the ideological predilections of certain key leaders of the past, and hard-
knuckled analyses of economic growth and the projection of cultural
power" (1996:82). 1997 is precisely a period of historical crisis in which
conflicting ideologies held by key leaders are debated, treated to the
"vision thing" but mostly glossed over in rhetorical statements offering
formulae by which the contradictions and conflicts can be resolved or at
least pushed out of view. Hong Kong was being offered a variety of
metropolitan projects during the handover: Financial centre for China
and/or southeast Asia, twin capital (along with Singapore) for Overseas
Chinese capital (Wu and Duk 1995), exemplar of a non-Western route to
modernity (Friedman 1994),1 China's window on the world, bridge
between China and the world, patriotic contributor to China's New Long
March to modernization. Despite some of the rhetorical flourishes, Hong
Kong's metropolitan project is not just supported by economic growth, but
is primarily focused on it. Since its project cannot be a political one—
Beijing's greatest fear is that Hong Kong will become a base for the
political subversion of China (Yahuda 1995:4)—nor can it concentrate on
its projection of cultural power since what is distinct about Hong Kong
culture is perceived by the Chinese Communist Party as the "sugar-coated
bullets" of bourgeois spiritual pollution that must be combatted by
socialist spiritual civilization (Smart 1997), the question becomes one of
what kind of economic power will it become, and how will that economic
influence be coordinated with the continuing transformation of China's
"socialist market economy."
The limitation of Hong Kong's metropolitan project to one that is
essentially economic seems less restrictive in the 90s that it might have at
another time, when the demands of the economic seem overwhelming
anywhere in the world, and projects that cannot be shown to have a
bottom-line that improves a city's competitive advantage or improves its
cultural standing in the global economy of urban centers—as do bids for
Olympics (Rutheiser 1996) or World Expositions—are likely to be
rejected as wastefully Utopian. Hong Kong's cultural power is precisely
the knowledge and institutions that allow its people to be masters of
economic opportunism and remarkably successful in reformulating Hong
Kong's economy whenever a new crisis undermines the previous niches
that had been relied on. The handover is creating another crisis in a long
100 City & Society
series, and key leaders and entrepreneurs with working-class origins alike
are formulating new strategies to cope with the challenges and take hold of
the opportunities.
Imagining the city of the future, though, is not just a metropolitan
project, because all of Hong Kong's people have had, in one way or
another, to imagine that city of the future and their place within it (or out
of it, through migration or through return to China). Beijing refused the
participation of Hong Kong in negotiating the colony's return, insisting
that it was an issue to be dealt with by London and Beijing alone (phrased
as rejecting the concept of the "three-legged stool," as if a two-legged
stool would be more stable). The result is that imagining the future in the
public realm has been dominated more than usually by the elite,
particularly those outside the ranks of the Hong Kong Chinese themselves,
and for most ordinary people imagining the future has involved imagining
and constructing a future for themselves and their children. Thus, to
consider the topic in a balanced way, we must consider both imagining or
planning the future by collectivities or their representatives, and the
equivalent processes in the private realm. As a corollary which space
doesn't permit exploration of in this paper, these prospective plottings of
the future have had a significant impact on other metropolitan centres of
the world through Hong Kong emigration (Mitchell 1997). Now that the
story seems more likely to have a happy ending, places like Vancouver are
fearing the effects of the return of Hong Kong immigrants and their money
on their economies and real estate markets (for example see Walkom
1997).2
Talking about the Handover

The handover, of course, is not just about the future, but also about the
past. Wu points out that "what is the end for Britain is the beginning for
China," symbolized by the countdown clock in Tiananmen Square. After
this clock reaches the zero-hour, "this former foreign colony will be given
fifty years to become synchronized with the rest of the country"
(1997:418). The official image of Hong Kong for the first half of the
twenty-first century is this: "the previous capitalist system and the way of
life shall remain unchanged for fifty years in Hong Kong" (Deng
Xiaoping, quoted in Sum 1995:76). At one level this is a Utopian promise3:
a city that changes yearly, which is widely alleged to be fundamentally
based on change (e.g. SCMP 27/6/1997:10) through its rapid responses to
new market signals, and the flexibility of its people and organizations in
taking advantage of new market opportunities, can hardly remain
unchanged for a half century. Translated, the promise is based on Marxist
Hong Kong 101
social theory: The essential nature of Hong Kong as a capitalist system
will remain, despite any flurry of superficial changes. If all that is solid
melts into air, what remains solid is the capitalist system—the basic nature
of which melts all about it, at least until the revolution or the end of the
fifty promised years.
The half century of being the second system in the one country
represents the amount of time that is necessary for China to catch up. Once
the stark distinction between Hong Kong's prosperity and the rest of the
country has been diminished or completely ended, the incorporation of
Hong Kong into the ancestral land as "just another Chinese city" will be
feasible without undermining the interests of either Hong Kong residents
or China as a whole. Thus the half century of separation and convergence
will be followed in the second half by complete incorporation. But what it
will be incorporated into is a point of dispute for observers. The official
view is that China will be a rich and modern socialist nation, and surely
the dalliance with capitalist practices will no longer be necessary for a
nation that will have caught up with the advanced-capitalist nations so that
China will be able to demonstrate the way forward to true communism.
The more sceptical outsider assumes that the transition to post-socialism
will be complete before 2047, and China will be a powerful and
prosperous capitalist nation (if it hasn't fragmented or self-destructed
during the transition).
A central theme in many speeches and media comments on the return
of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty involved the assertion that certain
things must be preserved if Hong Kong is to retain its central desired
quality. For example, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright says that
"the preservation of civil liberties and democracy were important elements
to the maintenance of Hong Kong's way of life and the confidence of
international investors in its future.... Hong Kong's success is based on
both economic and political openness. If the latter erodes, so will the
region's wealth" (Hong Kong Standard, June 17, 1997:4). Many examples
of this formula can be derived from even a casual screening of the media:
"Hong Kong's success starts with free trade.... Hong Kong has to remain
an open, competitive and cosmopolitan city" (SCMP 29/6/1997:11); "the
secret of Hong Kong's success is adaptability" (SCMP 27/6/1997:19), "if
we continue to add value to China, our future will be very bright. If we do
not, we should get what we deserve" (SCMP 23/6/1997:D10
Chris Patten, the last colonial Governor, "[urges] continuity in the
institutions and the values that have brought wealth and stability hitherto
—rather than promises about more wealth, more stability without
commitments to the means by which they might be achieved?" He argues
that safeguarding civil liberties is vital to Hong Kong's prosperity because
the "greatest strength that any state can have comes when each of its
citizens feels that he or she lives in a place that trusts them to use their
102 City & Society
talents to the full." Through the "quiet exercise of those heroic qualities of
kindness, forgiveness, patience, thrift and hard work, the people of Hong
Kong have built a society that works well in every sense" and these, Patten
concludes, "are the foundations on which the future will be built here"
(quoted in SCMP 24/6/1997:21). The general message that Patten offers is
that Britain has "provided a framework of liberal values which has enabled
Chinese men and women to thrive and excel" (quoted in Tambling
1997:369). His argument is woven around a rejection of arguments that
there are "particularly Asian values" that work better than do open
electoral institutions, and in the context of Chinese criticism of the late
colonial democratization of Hong Kong as an attempt to destabilize the
colony before its return to China. Within this context, Hong Kong is "a
bridge, a vital link between East and West.... Hong Kong represents the
kind of Asia with which both West and East are comfortable. An Asia
committed to open markets and open minds. An Asia committed to the
rule of law and respect for human freedom.... It offers, in that sense, a
vision of the future for Asia" (quoted in Tambling 1997:370). Thus,
imagining the future of Hong Kong can also be seen as projecting a future
for all of capitalist Asia.
The Financial Secretary, Donald Tsang suggested that Hong Kong's
"success in the past, its success now and in the future is based on some
very basic tenets" which include the rule of law administered by an
independent judiciary, a level playing field, a strong, committed and
corruption-free civil service, law and order, the free flow of information,
and a prudent fiscal policy (SCMP 23/6/1997 :D3). Here the features of the
colonial administration and its policies are presented as the underlying
foundation for Hong Kong's prosperity. But the argument is consistent
with Chris Patten's emphasis on the values and energies of Hong Kong's
people, because it is the rule of law and the level playing field that make
the energies of the people productive rather than being misdirected into
corrupt and disruptive rent-seeking.
Tung Chee-hwa, the new Chief Executive of Hong Kong, asserts that
confidence in Hong Kong will continue based on four factors: First the
high degree of autonomy provided by the one country, two systems
formula; second, the firm belief in the community that "Hong Kong's
lifestyle will remain unchanged"; third, "Hong Kong people's vitality,
adaptability and resilience" will continue to provide the "driving force
behind our ever-growing economic and social benefit"; fourthly, Hong
Kong will continue to benefit from China's growth (SCMP 23/6/1997:D1).
Here, the "x" factor is less the colonial legacy, and more the wise policies
instituted by Beijing, combined with the qualities of the Hong Kong
people themselves.
Obviously, it is not unreasonable to talk about what kinds of things
have to remain more or less unchanged if Hong Kong is to retain its
desired qualities. Indeed, it is implied in the very formula of Hong Kong
Hong Kong 103
retaining its way of life for the fifty years after 1997. However, there is
considerable variation in what it is that needs to be retained and or
preserved if the variable descriptions of the desired features are to be
saved. There would seem to be a trope of metonymy (the feature standing
in for the whole) operating here along with emic models of causality (even
if the emic models are those of academics).
There is another distinct line of discourse, which stresses that it is
change that is most basic to Hong Kong's nature (e.g. SCMP
23/6/1997:D7), the very dynamism within which "all that is solid turns to
air" (or more precisely, to money). From this formulation, any attempts to
fix and solidify what is the nature of Hong Kong's system will inevitably
undermine its nature and/or success. Luhmann (1976) talks about
modernity producing conceptions of "open futures," in which a diverging
set of possibilities is conceived, within which actions determine which of
the "future presents" will eventually come to be. At the same time,
recognition of this open future engenders attempts to control or delimit the
future, which he calls "defuturization." He examines two versions of this,
technology and Utopia. Technology attempts to put future events under
human control. In the next section, I will suggest that technology "fixes"
the future in another way, in that commitments to infrastructural
developments channel the direction and form that the city grows for years
to come.
Clearly defuturization as a goal is clear in talk about managing the
"handover": things must be done in order to prevent the many dystopian
possibilities that are envisaged, and to encourage the coming to fruition of
the most desired possibilities that are seen as being inherent in Hong
Kong's development up to this point. But, as I suggested earlier, there are
some disagreements both about what such a desired future would involve
(postcolonial critics offering a rather different vision than OECD
ambassadors and business spokespersons), and what are the measures of
preservation that must be taken in order to filter out the undesired futures
and increase the chances of the desired one.
Some of these discourses, clearly, are instrumental. Arguments are
constructed to persuade others of the necessity to protect something which
is in the speaker's interests.4 A rhetorical dimension of appealing to
common interests to persuade the audience of the generality of the claim is
particularly common in public discourse, and some decoding of such
speech acts is necessary. But even those engaged in public persuasion may
believe strongly in these claims, so we cannot dismiss them as simply
rhetorical and instrumental. Furthermore, they may also be right in their
claims: Interest does not preclude accurate analysis. This paper does not
attempt to assess these claims, but simply to delineate their nature and the
expectations and projects that they imply.
104 City & Society
Building the Future
The city has become
adjunct to its airport.
The airport has become
a mere coach station
for families strung out
across oceans and continents.
"The family at home"
used to refer to one place at a time.
It will now be redefined. (Louise Ho 1996:270).
Abbas (1997a:298) echoes the same sentiments and suggests that as "the
airport infrastructure spreads through the city, we will have...not just a
large airport or the airport as city, but something else, the city as airport"
(emphasis in original). The struggle between London and Beijing over the
construction of the U.S. $25 billion new airport on Lantau Island was one
arena within which the future of Hong Kong was more generally
contested. More recent debates about whether a new container terminal is
needed illustrate the same point. From one point of view, the return of
Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty will reinforce its role as the mediator
between the Chinese and the world economies. Others argue that the
economic reforms in China mean that more trade can be conducted
directly, reducing Hong Kong's role as entrepot, particularly as southern
China has substantially enhanced its port facilities. Already the busiest
container port in the world, demand is projected to increase from the 1996
total of 13.2 million 20-foot-equivalent units (teu) to 31 million teu in
2005 and 40 million teu by 2016, which means that a new four-ship-
berth-container terminal has to be built every two years for the next 20
years (SCMP 27/6/1997:18). The same kind of issues and mindboggling
numbers could be enumerated for comparable infrastructural features such
as airport and airfreight capacity, or telecommunications investment.
While planning involves persuasive storytelling, as I suggested above,
much of the plot has already been committed to paper in the form of
medium- and long-term contracts for the development of infrastructure.
The infrastructural projects that have been and are being committed to in
Hong Kong involve hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to particular
kinds of future, so that the future can be partly seen in the entrails of
airports, roads and railway projects. On October 8, 1997 Chief Executive
Tung proposed to boost Hong Kong's prosperity by spending U.S. $11.4
billion on roads, railways, a science park and other infrastructure over the
next five years (Economist 11/10/1997:46). The future inscribed in these
projects involves further shrinking of the Victoria Harbour through
reclamation, urbanizing what remains underdeveloped in the New
Hong Kong 105
Territories, massive boosts to the integration of Hong Kong with its
Chinese hinterland, and a vision of Hong Kong as ever-more central to the
intermediation of the new Chinese market economy with the world-
capitalist market. These visions are experienced on both sides of the
border. Guangdong plans to spend an "unprecedented" amount on road
and rail construction over the next fifteen years in order to "weave Hong
Kong and Macau into the fabric of the region" (SCMP 27/6/1997:15).
Over H.K. $80 billion is allocated for sixteen expressway projects in the
1996-2000 Five-Year Plan, as well as other huge sums for rail and power
projects. Investment in these projects is flowing in both directions so that
the "border between Hong Kong and the mainland has become a two-way
street for infrastructure investment" and will expand from a narrow road at
present to a "superhighway over the coming years as China uses Hong
Kong as its window on the world" (SCMP 27/6/1997:14).
Even the metaphors used by commentators suggest the significance of
the construction of facilities for transportation and communication for
expectations about what Hong Kong's future holds in store. If Hong Kong
is a metaphorical bridge between East and West, the figure of speech is
being embodied in ambitious concrete bridges between the former colony
and the motherland. Perhaps nowhere else in the world is human
transformation of the landscape more evident and impressive than in Hong
Kong. Mark Twain's suggestion to "buy land, because they aren't making
any more of it" is routinely ridiculed in the development practices of Hong
Kong. When land is as valuable as it is in Hong Kong, engineers can find
ways to make a great deal more of it, and have done since the first
reclamation in 1851 (Bristow 1984:28). In the 1945-83 period alone, new
reclaimed land accounted for 1.7% of Hong Kong's total land area (Smart
1992). And when land isn't being reconstructed, the built environment is
being redeveloped. Abbas (1997b: 64) points out that the political slogan of
fifty years without change is "belied by an urban landscape that mutates
right under our noses, making the question of spatial identity particularly
problematic."
As Hong Kong comes to serve as a command and control centre for
southern China, the New Territories become less peripheral and more
interstitial, particularly for those New Towns on the rail line which have
become convenient staging grounds for daily or weekly commutes across
the border to manage or supervise manufacturing or other business being
conducted within China. The rural regions that once both evoked an older
China in the monographs of anthropologists and served to separate and
buffer capitalist Hong Kong from communist China are generating "not
suburbia (spaces designed to be different) but exurbia (which is a
repetition of the same)" (Abbas 1997a:298). For Abbas, the "cloning of
urban space expands the reach of the urban into almost every part of the
106 City & Society
New Territories; but it is also a contraction, in that the development and
evolution of new towns is also a devolution into the generic" (1997a:298).
The cloning is not restricted to the New Territories, but is just as
visible across the border and in enclaves throughout China. The "fractal"
self-replication of Hong Kong urban spaces is creating a complex
landscape of retirement homes, second wives kept in villas, Hong Kong
style restaurants and nightclubs, bowling alleys, and a vast array of other
spaces of transcultural influence. The infrastructural bridging of Hong
Kong and China is producing "Hong Kong in China" and, to a lesser
extent, "China in Hong Kong" that will continue mutating in unpredictable
but fascinating ways at least until the promised or threatened end of the
fifty year interregnum.
Living the Handover

In their exclusion from the public realm of effective discussion of
Hong Kong's future, ordinary people have concentrated on responding
through actions. Since voice is largely unavailable, exit has been one
important kind of reaction which has received a great deal of attention (J.
Smart 1994, Mitchell 1997, Ong 1993). The impact of emigration has
ultimately been less significant than other practices engaged in by those
who have stayed, since only a small percentage have been able to leave.
Everyone in Hong Kong, however, has had to come to terms with the
implications of the handover for themselves and for their families, even if
coming to terms means simply convincing oneself that moving would be
more traumatic than whatever might come of staying. The most common
response, even for those who migrated permanently or temporarily, has
been to continue the prior strategy of amassing resources to be able to
cope with whatever new challenges and threats will be imposed by those
who do control the public realm of voice and policy-making. Money-
making and accumulation—often accomplished through enduring dreadful
conditions of overcrowding and overwork (Smart 1992)—rather than
political engagement or resignation, has long been the coping strategy par
excellence in Hong Kong. These, just as important as talk about the
handover and imagining the future, are the myriad ways in which Hong
Kong's people are living the handover and struggling to create personal
futures that they desire for themselves and their children. From these
millions of individual projects, the success or failure of the transition will
be forged. The voices of imagining in the public realm have an impact on
these individual projects, but the high level of cynicism of a colonial
populace denied the opportunity to become postcolonial critics means that
Hong Kong 107
they are often as adept at decoding the messages of these pronouncements
as are deconstructionist academics.
The miracle of Hong Kong's prosperity,
is inseparable from its precariousness. It is the pervasive anxiety

about the future that releases the boundless, if neurotic, energy
of the community.
This anxiety spurs self-employment and entrepreneurship,
arouses an insatiable desire for educational qualifications and
induces an alertness to changes in the world and an appetite for
information, all ingredients of our economic success [Wong
1997:386].
It is not just what we hope and plan for that has this impact, but also
what we fear, and how we believe that others will react in relation to the
futures that they project. Wong suggests that because of their history,
Hong Kong's population is unusually oriented towards the future, and this
orientation is regularly clouded with anxiety and dread about events that
individuals cannot control. This anxiety is believed to generate high levels
of activity rather than a fatalistic acceptance of lack of control over destiny
(the classic formulation of the Chinese attitude toward the future),5 and to
be a key component in Hong Kong's economic success. In a study of
international migration, Findlay and Li (1997:42) found that informants
frequently referred to the desire iox fat tsin or "self development and the
fulfilment of one's potential." The loss of confidence in progressive
improvement characteristic of postmodernity has not yet developed in East
Asia: the modernist assumption that the lives of one's children will be
better than one's own is still dominant (Lee 1994). Given the centrality of
human capital rather than other resources to Hong Kong's success, this
distinctive focus on and attitude towards the future would seem to be of
considerable general importance.
Furthermore, the anxious future has characteristically engendered
patterns of planning and investment that emphasize individual or familistic
responses—if I can do nothing about preserving Hong Kong as a whole in
the future, at least I can increase our own chances of being able to survive
whatever cataclysms may come along. Surveys of Hong Kong people's
attitudes have not supported the post-materialist thesis that continued
periods of affluence replace materialist emphases on physical security and
money-making with post-materialist concerns with "belonging, self-
expression, and the quality of life" (Nevitte et al. 1995:330). Ho and
Leung (1997) found very few Hong Kong people surveyed in 1995 could
be classed as fitting in the post-materialist category. Even in comparisons
with earlier surveys, they found no clear evidence of a cultural shift away
from materialism. Economic stability and prosperity remain "the major
concerns of most Hong Kong people, and therefore freedom, democracy
108 City & Society
and human rights appear to be less important in their daily lives"
(1997:351). They suggest that soaring inflation (particularly for housing)
has affected the living standards of people so that "such an economic
context gives no fertile ground for the growth of post-materialist values
when people are almost burnt out fighting for survival" (1997:353). The
insecure political context and general feelings that the ordinary citizen can
do nothing to produce a more secure collective future (Lau 1997) mean
that the rational response to producing greater future security would be to
earn more money, develop skills, and invest in the education of one's
children, either in order to migrate, or at least to increase one's chances to
do so if true need should ever arise.
Surveys have "revealed the existence of gloomy perceptions about the
future among the local population. There is a widespread belief that things
will deteriorate after 1997—civil rights will be curtailed; personal
freedoms will be reduced; the legal system will degenerate; living
standards will fall; corruption will rise; and, the government will become
less efficient and trustworthy" (Wong 1997:387). But pessimism is
"diluted by a strong personal faith in family cohesion and advancement....
Hong Kong people continue to express a high degree of satisfaction with
family life and a conviction that the life chances of their children will be
better than their own, even beyond 1997" (1997:338).
The smoothness of the handover has done quite a lot to reduce the
pessimism about the political future. In March 1997, a survey found that
62% were optimistic or very optimistic about the future after the handover,
and only 6% were pessimistic, although 30% were neither (Asiaweek
4/4/1997:27). When asked in May-June 1997 whether they would feel
happy or sad on the day of the handover, 60.9% said happy, while only
15.2% expected to be sad. Between July 1992 and June 1997, the
proportion who thought that Hong Kong should become independent
dropped from 50% to 35%, while those who thought it should become a
Special Administrative Region increased from 23% to 40%. The
percentage who wished to remain a British colony dropped from 52% in
1987 to 25% in 1992 and 19% in 1997 (SCMP 26/6/1997:21). Pessimism
about the future has increased lately, but because of the Asian financial
crisis rather than because of anything that Beijing or the new
administration has done.
It would be naive to assume that people's attitudes about the handover
and the future explain their actions. To a considerable extent, the reverse is
true: People's actions in relation to the future, such as deciding to try to
migrate or not, have a strong influence on their attitudes (Salaff et al. n.d.).
If migration is ruled out as a serious possibility, it is much easier
psychologically to convince yourself that the disruption involved in
migrating would be much greater than any realistic threat involved in
staying. (I do not imply that this might not be an accurate assessment.)
Hong Kong 109
Similarly, having undergone the costs of emigrating, comfort could be
found in deciding that those who stay are foolhardy. Knowledge of stories
from emigrants to Canada and elsewhere about how difficult it is to live
and work in such places has served to console many people to remain in
Hong Kong as it becomes an SAR (Smart and Smart 1996).
One dimension of living the handover that has attracted a great deal of
media and academic attention is the way in which people have undergone
"soul-searching" in regard to their identity (Sum 1995). Abbas (1997b:71)
points out the irony that this is a culture of disappearance since its
"appearance is accompanied by a sense of the imminence of its
disappearance, and the cause of its emergence—1997—may also be the
cause of its demise." Gordon Mathews (1996) has been studying the
upsurge of concern with "identity" in the runup to the handover. He finds
that the most appropriate metaphor is the "cultural supermarket" where
people shop for identities that fit, but fashions constantly change and last
year's identity may end up neglected in the overstuffed closet. Although
the handover has led to more people having to consider such issues of
identity, it is still much more common for what the British call the
"chattering classes." Just as Chinese folk religions are based on orthopraxy
(appropriate practice) more than orthodoxy (appropriate belief), multiple
identities are common practices that most Hong Kong people usually do
not feel a need to sort out. In my research with Josephine Smart, we found
that Hong Kong people doing business across the border in China
manipulate (or manifest, to avoid the derogatory or intellectualist
implications of the term "manipulate") a combination of insider and
outsider identities in engaging in cross-boundary practices. In pursuit of
the new opportunities available in reform China, Hong Kong people
regularly engage in identification and self-representation practices that
may assert outsider and insider roles simultaneously (Smart and Smart
1998).
Despite the emphasis in the media on "the new era," and
transformation, on the ground, in the lives of ordinary people, very little
has changed as yet. There have been symbolic changes like the new
insignia for police and customs officers, and the switch of the British
garrison for the PLA, and the replacement of the elected Legco with the
provisional appointed one, but most of these things haven't changed daily
life much yet. Some of the policy proposals from the new Chief Executive
Tung Chee-hwa could have a significant effect, but none of them are
things that couldn't have been proposed by an activist colonial governor
such as Maclehose. Changes there most definitely will be, but these are
primarily continuation of trends that had already developed since the
Sino-British agreement, particularly integration of the two economies, a
higher influence of Beijing on local decision-making, and the extensive
110 City & Society
development of infrastructure to facilitate movement of goods and people
between Hong Kong and China.
Living the handover mostly involves the same kinds of challenges that
dominated life before the handover: The difficulties of ordinary life in an
expensive and densely crowded city. For ordinary people, imagining the
future doesn't involve any kind of metropolitan or collective project, but
fear, hope and prudent management of risk, savings and investment. The
future has always been more uncertain for people in Hong Kong than in
most other places, and imagining the future is less an intellectual activity
than the common practice of everyday life.
Conclusions
As I write this in December 1997, the level of pessimism about the
future has increased considerably in Hong Kong. Ironically, though, this is
not primarily because of fears of disorder or loss of freedoms spilling
across the border from socialist China, but a result of the stockmarket
crash, serious decreases in real estate prices, pressure on the Hong Kong
dollar, and serious decline in tourist spending, all resulting from the
financial crisis besetting all of the capitalist Pacific Asian countries. A
year ago, no one expected instability and fear of the future to be the result
of capitalist, rather than socialist, developments. Indeed, Beijing has
responded quite effectively to reduce the impact of these developments on
Hong Kong, and so far China has been the Asian economy least subject to
the current economic crises.
Raymond Lee (1994:3) observed that while belief in modernity and
progress is undergoing a serious crisis in the West, it appears to be
"enthusiastically promoted and celebrated in the rapidly-developing Asian
societies." While Westerners have come to be profoundly sceptical about
the belief that life generally improves, so that the next generation can
expect better than their parents, this assumption has continued to be held
and lived in Pacific Asia, including Hong Kong. Not only could progress
be planned for and expected, but Asia could do this without following in
the pathway of the West, but instead forge it's own distinct route to
modernity (Smart 1997). The financial crises of 1997 are the first serious
stumbles in this climb. One result is that Western commentators have
turned sharply against the idea of distinct Asian capitalist patterns. Not
only is history now barren of alternatives to capitalism as a road forward,
but even the variants of capitalism are increasingly seen as diminished to
inevitable convergence with the American style of capitalism.
Another possible outcome is that 1997 may turn out to represent Asia's
crisis of faith in modernity and the Enlightenment project of rationality
Hong Kong 111
and progress. Looking back, this year may represent the same kind of
transition that 1973 and the oil crisis have come to represent for Western
patterns of modernity. If so, we can expect significant changes in the kinds
of patterns and ideologies that I have examined in this paper. Narratives of
continual and unlimited development and growth may become much less
persuasive in years to come, so that debate comes to focus on other issues
than just the best ways to foster growth and redistribute the proceeds.
What forms will postmodernity take when it develops in contexts like
Hong Kong where democracy has never taken deep root, or in Southeast
Asian countries where authoritarian limits on democracy are still
considerable?
Postmodernity diminishes certain kinds of narrative resources,
particularly those of technocratic control, reducing their ability to persuade
(see Westwood and Williams 1997). In their absence, the way that
planning constitutes the future begins to take on different forms. What
these forms will be like in an Asian context is unclear. The common view
of Los Angeles as "paradigmatic symbol of the postmodern city"
(Charlesworth and Cochrane 1997:220) is an unlikely outcome for the
much denser cities of Asia, but since prior conditions have critical
influences on feasible outcomes, I believe that the kind of city that Hong
Kong becomes in the twenty-first century will continue to be influenced
by the mundane realities of infrastructural projects already committed to
and planned for the future, and by the way that people's projects of living
the handover respond to the challenges and opportunities of Hong Kong's
anomalous and unprecedented status.
Notes
1
Guldin (1995:110) notes that the attraction of the "Hong Kong model" for
their counterparts in Guangdong province is in the way that it shows "how to be
both Chinese and modern." The influence of this emerging southern Chinese
version of modernity is spreading throughout China. Friedman describes how the
dominant nationalist narrative in China has been a Maoist anti-imperialist one in
which the CCP saved the nation by "providing the correct leadership that would
mobilize patriotic Chinese, push imperialists out of China" and thereby
permitted "an independent China to prosper with dignity" (1994:67). By the
1990s, much of this narrative had been discredited, and one result was a new,
southern-oriented imaginary, in which national success was, "identified with the
market-oriented activities of southerners who joined with Chinese capital from
disapora Hong Kong, Macao, or Southeast Asia to produce world-competitive
products that earned foreign exchange that could be invested in building a
prosperous China" (Friedman 1994:79). Even in the interior provinces Schein
(1996:209) has noted the "shift of attention toward Hong Kong and Taiwan as
112 City & Society
desirable sites for emulation," and models for how to participate in "the
cosmopolitan culture of late capitalist consumption, which itself is dismantling
the East-West binary."
2
This is particularly ironic given the frequent stories told earlier about the
negative effects of Hong Kong money flowing into such cities (Smart and Smart
1996).
3
Abbas (1997a) points out that Hong Kong has always seemed to need only
the right formula to make it work, and now "laissez-faire" or "positive non-
interventionism" is being replaced with "one country, two systems" as its
formula/mantra.
4
The best analysis of the relationship between discourse about Hong Kong's
transition and the position/interests of the speaker is in Sum (1995).
5
In a study of the comparative semantics of time, Alverson (1994:105)
found that Mandarin (Potonghua) expresses an experience of time as a medium
of motion-bearing events which differs from English expressions in that "the
experiencer is always stationary in the medium, facing the direction of the
past...with his or her back to the future. The past is before one; the future
is/comes from behind." Socially, one is positioned facing back towards
ancestors, rather than facing towards a future in which Christ will return or
progress will be accomplished. However relevant this might be for traditional
China, it does not express the experience and or practices of urban
Hongkongese, who consistently focus on the implications for their children in
their decisions about migration (Smart 1994).
References Cited
Abbas, Ackbar
1997a Hong Kong: Other Histories, Other Politics. Public Culture 23:293-
313.
1997b Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Alverson, Hoyt
1994 Semantics and Experience:Universal Metaphors of Time in English,
Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Asiaweek..
(various dates) A weekly newsmagazine published in Hong Kong
Bristow, Roger
1984 Land-Use Planning in Hong Kong: History, Policies and Procedures.
Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.
Charlesworth, Julie and Allan Cochrane
1997 Anglicising the American Dream: Tragedy, Farce and the
"Postmodern" City. In Sallie Westwood and John Williams, eds.
Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. Pp. 219-232. London:
Routledge.
Hong Kong 113
The Economist
(various dates) A weekly newsmagazine published in London.
Findlay, A.M. and F.L.N. Li
1997 An Auto-Biographical Approach to Understanding Migration: The
Case of Hong Kong Emigrants." Area 29(l):34-44.
Friedman, Edward
1994 Reconstructing China's National Identity: A Southern Alternative to
Mao-Era Anti-Imperialist Nationalism. Journal of Asian Studies
53(1):67-91.
Guldin, Gregory E.
1995 Toward a Greater Guangdong: Hong Kong's Sociocultural Impact on
the Pearl River Delta and Beyond. In R. Kwok and A. So, eds. The Hong
Kong-Guangdong Link. Pp. 89-118. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe.
Ho, Louise
1996 Hong Kong at the Crossroads. In Barbara-Sue White, ed. Hong
Kong: Somewhere between Heaven and Earth. P. 270. Hong Kong:
Oxford University Press.
Ho Kwok-lung and Leung Sai-wing
1997 Postmaterialism Revisited. In Lau Siu-kai et al. (eds.) Indicators of
Social Development: Hong Kong 1995. Pp. 331-358. Hong Kong: Hong
Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies.
Hong Kong Standard
(various dates) A daily newspaper published in Hong Kong.
Lau Siu-kai
1997 Democratization, Political Leaders and Political Disengagement. In
Lau Siu-kai, et al. eds. Indicators of Social Development: Hong Kong
1995. Pp. 107-136. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific
Studies.
Lee, Raymond L.M.
1994 Modernization, Postmodernism and the Third World. Current
Sociology 42(2): 1-63.
Luhmann, Niklas
1976 The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society.
Social Research 43:130-152.
Mathews, Gordon
1996 Names and Identities in the Hong Kong Cultural Supermarket.
Dialectical Anthropology 21:399-419.
Mitchell, Katharyne
1997 Transnational Subjects: Constituting the Cultural Citizen in the Era of
Pacific Rim Capital. In Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, eds.
Ungrounded Empires. Pp. 228-256. New York: Routlcdge.
Nevitte, Neil, Miguel Basanez, and Ronald Inglehart
1995 Directions of Value Change in North America. In Stephen J. Randall
and Herman W. Konrad, eds. NAFTA in Transition. Pp. 329-343.
Calgary: University of Calgary Press.
114 City & Society
Ong, Aihwa
1993 On the Edge of Empires: Flexible Citizenship among Chinese in
Diaspora. Positions l(3):745-778.
Rotenberg, Robert
1996 Extraordinary Vienna: Identity and the Metropolitan Project. City and
Society Annual Review 1996:82-100.
Rutheiser, Charles
1996 Imagineering Atlanta. London: Verso.
Salaff, Janet W., Wong Siu-lun and Fung Mei-ling
n.d. Hong Kong Families' View of 1997.
Schein, Louisa
1996 The Other Goes to Market: The state, the Nation and Unruliness in
Contemporary China. Identities 2(3): 197-222.
Smart, Alan
1992 Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong. Hong Kong:
Centre of Asian Studies.
1997 Oriental despotism and sugar-coated bullets: Representations of the
market in China. In James Carrier, ed. Meanings of the Market. Pp. \S9-
194. Oxford: Berg.
Smart, Alan and Josephine Smart
1996 Monster homes: Hong Kong Immigration to Canada, Urban
Conflicts, and Contested Representations of Space. In Jon Caulfield and
Linda Peake, eds. City Lives and City Forms: Critical Research and
Canadian Urbanism. Pp. 33-46. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
1998 Transnational Social Networks and Negotiated Identities in
Interactions between Hong Kong and China. In Michael P. Smith and
Luis E. Guarnizo, eds. Transnationalism From Below. Pp. 103-129.
New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Smart, Josephine
1994 Business Immigration to Canada: Deception and Exploitation. In R.
Skelton (ed.) The Reluctant Exiles. Pp. 98-119. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe.
Sum, Ngai-ling
1995 More than a "War of Words": Identity, Politics and the Struggle for
Dominance during the Recent "Political Reform" Period in Hong Kong.
Economy and Society 24:67-99.
South China Morning Post
(various dates) A daily newspaper published in Hong Kong.
Tambling, Jeremy
1997 The History Man: The Last Governor of Hong Kong. Public Culture
23:355-375.
Throgmorton, James A.
1996 Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of
Chicago's Electric Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Walkom, Thomas
1997 Vancouver Real Estate Prices Drop as Immigrants Start Going Home.
The Toronto Star September 29,1997.
Hong Kong 115
Westwood, Sallie and John Williams
1997 Imagining Cities. In Sallie Westwood and John Williams, eds.
Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. Pp. 1-16. London: Routledge.
Wong Siu-lun
1997 Hong Kong: Past, Present, Future. In Lau Siu-kai, et al., eds.
Indicators of Social Development: Hong Kong 1995. Pp. 383-392. Hong
Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies.
Wu, Friedrich and Sin Yue Duk
1995 Hong Kong and Singapore: "Twin Capitals" for Overseas Chinese
Capital. Business and the Contemporary World 3:21-33.
Wu, Hung
1997 The Hong Kong Clock—Public Time-Telling and Political
Time/Space. Public Culture 23:329-354.
Yahuda, Michael
1995 Hong Kong: China's Challenge. London: Routledge.

City Society - 2008 - Smart - Hong Kong S Twenty First Century Seen From 1997

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

City Society - 2008 - Smart - Hong Kong S Twenty First Century Seen From 1997

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ALAN SMART

Hong Kong's Twenty-First Century Seen

DURING THE TRANSITION to its new status as a Special

DURING THE SUMMER of 1997, the world's attention, and that of

Imagining Cities and the Future

Talking about the Handover

Living the Handover

is inseparable from its precariousness. It is the pervasive anxiety

You might also like