Old Colonial or New Cosmopolitan?: Changing White Identities in the Hong Kong Police

This paper explores the construction of whiteness, masculinity, and expatriate citizenship in the changing landscape of postcolonial Hong Kong. The context of the Hong Kong Police Force and the career of a long-serving senior British officer are used to examine changes in the meanings of whiteness in the new national and organizational contexts which have followed the handover of the Region from the British to the Chinese in 1997. Analysis reveals the place the organization may play in the construction of white identities and privileges and how, in the intersection of organizational practices and policies with personal biography, whiteness may serve to resist broader initiatives for integration. Although in their global mobility white skilled migrants may suggest performances of new cosmopolitan forms of citizenship, this paper argues that shifts towards a postidentity politics of cultural hybridity and integration can seem slow to appear in transnational expatriate contexts.