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Introduction: Coloniality and Hong Kong Chineseness British imperialist forces captured Hong Kong in 1842 and ruled the place as both a free port and a colony until recently. However, in both popular and academic discourses, people have almost forgotten Hong Kong’s status as a colonial entity. Liberal-modernist historiographies of Hong Kong usually tell a romanticized story about the growth of Hong Kong, characterizing it as a utopia of laissez-faire economics — a narrative that, highly sympathetic to colonial rule, embraces the depiction of Hong Kong as a “barren-rock-turnedcapitalist paradise” (Endacott 1964; Woronoff 1980; Ngo 1999: 120). It is said that Hong Kong was a desolate island before the British came but that, thanks to the benevolent governance and good policy of the colonial state, the barren rock has been transformed into a capitalist metropolis. This liberal-modernist narrative peddles the Hong Kong success story and operates under the presumption that Hong Kong is an economic entity on its own. Screened out from this narrative are, first and foremost, the effects of more than 150 years of colonialism in Hong Kong, and this select screening of information renders Hong Kong colonialism nothing more than a set of liberal frameworks within which capitalism was able to flourish. Moreover, this same narrative treats the colonial state as, for the most part, a non-interventionist power: the British never exploited Hong Kong economically, and Hong Kong remained not an imperialist-dominated terrain but a neutral arena where both Western and Eastern cultures could intermingle. Ironically, most of the Marxist historians, who, in the past two decades, have come from mainland China, and who are writing about Hong Kong’s pre-1997 history, also like to join the liberal-modernists in unreflectively attributing the growth of the colony to the free-market economy that flourished under British colonial rule. Rapidly churned out before 1997 as ideological justification of the moment of “return”, their writings are never hesitant in making the patriotic proclamation that Hong Kong had belonged to China since time immemorial. They rush to identify a few British misdeeds, criticizing some of the old racist ch.00(p.1-6).indd 1 3/5/09 12:39:02 PM Collaborative Colonial Power  measures and praising mainland China’s contribution to Hong Kong (Yu and Liu 1994; Liu 1997). As their political task was only to legitimize the “return” of Hong Kong to China under the “one country, two systems” policy, their antiBritish and pro-China assertions cannot go any further than a highly selective and superficial treatment of colonial history. What have turned out are examples of expedient eclecticism that have transplanted the liberal-modernist narrative of Hong Kong, flaunted in its apologetic defense for British colonialism, upon a positioned Chinese nationalistic frame.1 Drawing upon the same liberal-modernist framework, all these historical writings tell time and again almost the same miraculous success story of Hong Kong. Despite the interruptions of the Japanese occupation and of Chinese revolutions and civil wars, Hong Kong stands out as a model case of capitalist development, with its own formula for initiating the momentum of free-market growth (Endacott 1964; Miners 1981; Rabushka 1973, 1979). Bringing Colonialism Back In Despite the popularity of this Hong Kong success story, there is, however, little evidence lending support to the assertion that Hong Kong exhibited selfgenerating capitalistic growth animated by the sheer entrepreneurial spirit of a new China-based bourgeoisie (Choi, A.H. 1999). Nor does rigorous factual substantiation underlie any assertion that Hong Kong economic growth was autonomous, independent of regional political and economic formations. Getting beyond these unfounded assertions, recent revisionist historiography has shifted focus onto the important role of the colonial state, of its relationship with local society, and of the emergence of a regional economic network. Ngo Tak Wing and Alex Choi, for instance, argue against the widely held notion that Hong Kong was ruled by a neutral administrative state that upheld the principle of non-intervention (Ngo 1999; Choi 1999). They also question whether it is tenable to depict Hong Kong society as atomistic, its people as apathetic, and their mentality as functionally fit for bureaucratic colonial governance (e.g. Lau 1982). Put together, the revisionist historiographies of Hong Kong challenge these somewhat hackneyed perspectives and take the view that Hong Kong society cannot be understood independently of colonialism. The historiographies begin with the assumption that Hong Kong was a sui generis colonial city and then propose to conduct a thorough...

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