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4 Double Identity of the Colonial Intelligentsia: Ho Kai Postcolonial studies have dispensed much ink on the ambivalent state that colonial rule perhaps left to the colonized people in the “contact zone.” Frantz Fanon’s famous “black skin–white masks” metaphor reflects his effort to capture the miserable split identity of the colonized: he asserts that colonial authority is so overwhelmingly dominant that it works whenever colonized subjects try to mimic the colonizer’s culture. Homi Bhabha, in contrast, argues that mimicry undermines colonial authority as much as it does other in-between states of hybridization or creolization in which resistance is not just possible but always embedded, as well. In short, Fanon considers the ambiguous identity of the colonized to be one of wretched misery, whereas Bhabha considers the ambiguity to be a facilitator for the emergent and the new. However, many critics have already pointed out that these claims about colonialism’s universal effects should be qualified by closely examining the specific contexts of the events in question. For example, Ella Shohat (1993) suggests that we need to discriminate between diverse modalities of hybridity, by which she means that we should give contextualized treatments to different types of hybrid state. Arif Dirlik pushes that criticism further by disputing against the overemphasis of colonial discourse analysis upon the determining power of discourse without taking the wider institutional structure into consideration; thus, he warns that the “condition of in-betweenness and hybridity cannot be understood without reference to the ideological and institutional structures in which they are housed” (Dirlik 1994: 342). In many ways, late-nineteenth-century Hong Kong manifested the cultural characteristics of a colonized contact zone. Compared with the Hong Kong of earlier eras, the Hong Kong of this era had a generation of English-educated Chinese students, thanks to the English education system put in place by Legge, Hennessy, Eitel, and their followers. The Western Affairs Movement also cultivated similar breeds in other coastal cities in China; in many ways, ch.04(p.79-102).indd 79 3/5/09 12:40:44 PM Hong Kong In-Betweens 80 the Chinese who lived in these contact zones were caught in a colonial or semi-colonial situation where their identity was constantly put in doubt. They commanded English or other European languages; they were equipped with all sorts of Western learning that granted them expert status in certain professional fields; they had different cultural outlooks, aspirations, tastes, habits, and moral values that might mark them out from the traditional Chinese literati. They were the equivalents of the Indian Babus or, in the pejorative Chinese idiom, “fake foreigners” (jia yang gui zi). However, although useful in some aspects, neither Fanon’s nor Bhabha’s notions about colonial ambivalence can offer us enough tools with which we might understand either the colonial (or, to be exact, the semi-colonial) situation of these coastal cities in general or the political or cultural mindsets of the colonized natives in particular. Among the colonized, there was, no doubt, widespread mimicry of the West; hybrid or creolized cultural forms were also burgeoning in every quarter, yet it is still far from adequate to invoke the associated or presumed colonizer-colonized couplet as a way to start assessing the effects of the specific power formation. In this chapter, I will roughly follow Dirlik’s lead by delineating the ideological and the institutional conditions of the specific mode of cultural and political inbetweenness that were contingent on the collaborative colonial formation that was, itself, grounded in but not confined to Hong Kong. I will demonstrate also, how this power formation extended across Hong Kong and China and played its part in fashioning the new order of post-imperial China both in real terms and in imaginary terms. Outlining competing post-imperial political visions and programs, I will take Ho Kai, a prominent Hong Kong figure who also occupies a pronounced position in modern Chinese intellectual history, as an example that illustrates a line of mercantilist-reformist politics at the eve of Republican China. In unveiling the political and the cultural dynamics involved, the case of Ho Kai will enable us to firmly grasp not only the interests and world-views of the emergent Chinese comprador-merchant class but also the formation of a collaborative-colonial intelligentsia’s subjectivity at this unique historical juncture. China studies have paid attention to the new coastal urban public that emerged in the treaty ports and have debated what effects this...

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