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Chapter 6 Essentializing Colonialism: Heroes and Villains We provided the scaffolding that enabled the people of Hong Kong to ascend : the rule of law, clean and light-handed government, the values of a free society, the beginnings of a representative government and democratic accountability. This is a Chinese city, a very Chinese city with British characteristics. —Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, July 30, 1997 I feel like a child who has grown up under the care of a foster mother, but now it is time to reunite with my natural mother. I treasure the warmth I feel in the arms of my foster mother and worry my natural mother is a fierce woman. I feel anxious. —A Hong Kong citizen, South China Morning Post, June 20, 1997 History has demonstrated unequivocally that without the Chinese Communist Party, there would be no socialist new China, and there would be no smooth return of Hong Kong. —The People’s Daily, editorial, June 30, 1997 “To thank the Opium War” is not an appropriate way of saying it, but to say thank you for what colonial rule has brought to Hong Kong would be consistent with the facts. —Lee Yee, a columnist, June 30, 1997 Great Britain lost its first colony with theAmerican Revolution in 1776 and may have lost its empire with India’s independence in 1947. Even so, turning over the “capitalist jewel” of Hong Kong (as the media call it) to Communist China in 1997—eight years after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall—symbolizes the end of global colonialism. If India’s independence marked the beginning of dismemberment of the British Empire, by the time Britain bids farewell to Hong Kong, its world hegemony had already long receded. All Britain could do was to reminisce about its past glory and to grumble about the likely Chinese abuse, but 109 it was totally powerless to sway the contour of history. It is significant to note that while Indians ousted the British with vehemence, Hong Kong people wistfully implore the British to stay, only to be repulsed by the PRC, whose rise on the international stage has been met with the West’s consternation. Amidst the ending of the Cold War, the struggle over the closing of British colonial rule in Hong Kong is a center of global ideological theatre for almost two decades. Under colonial domination, as Osterhammel (1997: 16–17) writes, the fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the indigenous people are made and implemented by a minority of foreign invaders, who convince themselves to have “ordained mandate to rule” and to pursue “interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis.” Fanon (1968) characterizes colonialism as exploitation, manipulation , suppression, mistrust, racism, deceit, and imposition—definitely antithetical to the now universally accepted democratic values. The ugly arrogance of old British colonial officials and their discriminatory practices in Hong Kong was vividly caricatured by such renowned Chinese writers as Lu Xun. On the other hand, what the British managed to achieve in Hong Kong was said to have fathered SunYatsen’s revolutionary thought that led to the toppling of the corrupt Manchu dynasty in 1911. Since 1949 Hong Kong has been a source of ideological construction as a “beacon of freedom” at the door of the “Iron Curtain” or as a symbol of colonial oppression against a people’s revolution. Is British colonialism in Hong Kong markedly different from the characteristics of classical colonialism? Has British rule been continuously evil, inhuman, and ruthless for 150 years, or has it become “kinder and gentler” in its latest stages? What does “the end of Hong Kong” imply to China and to Britain? History is a Rorschach test. Picking certain aspects for selective emphasis at the expense or to the exclusion of other equally salient aspects is an inherently ideological process. We shall show in this chapter that as the PRC media seek to essentialize colonialism as something inherently evil, the British media seek to de-essentialize it as something that may bear positive results. Hong Kong media, however, find themselves caught in split loyalty and identity. Like any form of foundationalism or fundamentalism, essentialism is a process by which the rich, complex, and even contradictory dimensions of a people replete with culture and history get reduced to certain oversimplified, innate, natural, or immutable properties (Said, 1993). These “fundamental” properties serve to “define what something is, and without which it could not be what it is” (Edgar and Sedgwick, 1999...

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