Whither Hong Kong: China's Shadow or Visionary Gleam? (review)

Once upon a time, Hong Kong scholarship had an amateurish air, a whiff of the antiquarian, the curio, of scattered and unfocused memoirs drafted in stuffy colonial drawing rooms, of disconnected picaresque observations made by self-important expatriates about the quaint charms of Hong Kong life and people. The journals of the Royal Asiatic Society were replete with snippets written by such folk, describing a trip to a temple, an archaeological dig on some island or other, or recollections of a District Officer about local custom and tradition. Much of what passed for scholarship about Hong Kong was, in fact, written by these minions of the Empire—the district officers, magistrates, wives of colonial civil servants, missionaries, and the like. This orientalist brand of Hong Kong studies persisted well past its sell-by date, and could still be found well into the 1990s. It was eclectic, descriptive rather than analytical, remote rather than engaged. That it persisted was largely due to the fact that most international scholars saw Hong Kong merely as a window on China, not as a place worthy of study in itself. For a brief moment in 1997, "Cinderella" managed to grab the spotlight away from her older, uglier sister, but the fairy tale did not last long. Three years after the handover, Hong Kong has once again been relegated to the sidelines of international scholarship.

Locally, however, the sudden surge in interest in Hong Kong in 1997 had a deeper impact. Hong Kong was suddenly interesting for something other than its ability to make money. A new Museum of History opened; TV stations ran programs on Hong Kong's past; books about the "end of Empire" proliferated alongside indigenous scholarship on Hong Kong's colonial era. Until 1997, this suffered from a collective amnesia. The dominant ideology was that Hong Kong was a place without a past, a "borrowed place living on borrowed time," that Hong Kongers lack any real sense of belonging or history, that as "sojourners" and refugees their mentality was simply to survive and make money. Moreover, Hong Kong's story was one of a recent "miracle," defying all previous conceptions of colonialism as something harmful and oppressive. Nothing unwelcome was to be said about it: as far as most Hong Kong academics were concerned, the problems that did exist were mere "blips" on an otherwise tranquil surface of British rule; even the sociology of Hong Kong was economic sociology, concerned with those aspects of Chinese culture that had facilitated the "miracle." Hong Kong existed less as a "society" than as an "economy," a notion later enshrined in the Basic Law. Not until the consolidation of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the early 1970s was there any indigenous social science scholarship to question this happy picture.

With the 1997 change of sovereignty, this indigenous scholarship has come into its own. At the same time, the Asian financial crisis has dented the story of Hong Kong as an economic "miracle" and forced some rethinking about the "Hong Kong story." In the three years since the handover, a less self-congratulatory, less superficial, more theoretically informed scholarship has emerged, dealing with issues such as the increasing gap between rich and poor, the political dominance of the local business elite, feminism, sexuality, identity, the "recolonization" of Hong Kong, and critiques of how Hong Kong is governed.

Unfortunately, Whither Hong Kong completely fails to engage with this scholarship and is the worse for it. Its full title—Whither Hong Kong: China's Shadow or Visionary Gleam?—suggests a collection of scholarly essays in pursuit of a common theme: will Hong Kong after 1997 provide a "visionary gleam" for China, or will its light be dimmed under China's shadow?

Intensely aware of the hopes and fears that crystallized at the moment of handover, Yee finds his inspiration in that most republican...