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Introduction
The Anthropology of Contemporary Hong Kong
Grant Evans & Maria Tam
When anthropologist Barbara Ward arrived in Hong Kong in 1950 she remarked that in âthe harbour itself, all the local craft were under sail; in the New Territories every particle of flat or terraced land was under rice âŠâ. Indeed, rural rhythms still pulsated faintly through the city: âStreet life was also marked by seasonal changes of colour, for most men wore Chinese suits â black in summer and soft bluish grey with wide white turned back cuffs in autumn and winterâ (1985:ix). Ward came to Hong Kong firmly convinced that a central tenet of anthropology is the cross-cultural study of meaning, the attempt to see âthrough other eyesâ. She herself did this by studying a group marginal to mainstream of Cantonese society, the âTankaâ or boat people. Like many anthropologists of her day she travelled out of the city to carry out her main fieldwork. In the academic division of labour which had developed in both Europe and America anthropologists were allocated tribal peoples and peasants as well as exotic (to some people âirrationalâ) belief systems, while sociologists studied industrial societies, cities and ârationalityâ.
But world politics also dictated where, when and how anthropological fieldwork was done. Prior to 1950 few anthropological studies had been written about China; the work by Fei Hsiao Tung and Frances Hsu was exceptional. After the communist revolution in China anthropology was vilified as an âimperialistâ discipline and disappeared from the mainland until its recent revival (Guldin 1994). Thus, if anthropologists wished to study âChinaâ they were confined to Hong Kong and Taiwan, so when anthropologists came to Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s they invariably headed off to the still rural villages of the New Territories to study what was left of âtraditional Chinaâ. The influential work on Chinese lineages by Maurice Freedman was partly based on fieldwork there, as were many other studies. Anthropologists came to Hong Kong to investigate âtraditional Chinaâ, not the rapidly growing modern city of Hong Kong.
There were some exceptions to this rule however, including an insightful study of a small factoryâs organization written by Barbara Ward in the mid-1960s where she tried âto discern what, if anything, was specifically âChineseâ about the socio-economic relationships involvedâ (1985:140). Culture came into play âonly in those areas where the demands of technology itself were not overridingâ (1985:140), and she found a sum of âintangiblesâ (1985:169) which added up to something like a âChinese style for running economic institutionsâ (1985:169), or at least a perceived difference in style. In the context of recent mythologising about the âuniquenessâ of the Chinese firm (trenchantly critiqued by Greenhalgh 1994), Wardâs study stands out as a sober and careful piece of research. Perhaps it is also the first real anthropological study of modern Hong Kong. While others did some research in urban locations what they documented there was the persistence of âtraditionâ. Only in the early 1970s did urban anthropological research consciously begin with the work of Fred Blake, Greg Guldin, John Meyers and Eugene Cooper. However, this work soon stalled, and when the âreal Chinaâ opened up in the 1980s anthropologists flowed across the borders.
Institutional factors also influenced the anthropological study of Hong Kong. When an anthropology department was established at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1980 following a division from the sociology department, the emphasis of its staff was on the study on Chinese minorities and Chinese âtraditionalâ culture. At the University of Hong Kong anthropology, for various reasons, remained a minor stream within the sociology department. In general, it was sociologists who taught about and studied urban industrial Hong Kong.
Only recently have anthropologists begun to focus on modern Hong Kong society. This corresponds to a global shift in anthropological interest which has broken the straightjacket of the old academic division of labour and allowed the anthropological gaze to roam over the whole of human action. Furthermore, in China itself anthropology has revived and it is no longer confined to the ethnology of minorities, but also focuses on the Han and urban anthropological research (Guldin and Southall 1993). In Hong Kong these re-orientations have also been spurred on throughout the 1980s and 1990s by the prospects of reunification with China in 1997 and an ever intensifying cultural debate about âHong Kong Identityâ.
Culture & Identity
It was the closure of the border with China following the communist revolution in 1949 that gave Hong Kong a heightened sense of distinctiveness. Prior to then it was primarily seen as a place of transit. The migrants who flooded into Hong Kong after the revolution maintained this mood for a while in the 1950s, but soon it became apparent that most of them were here for good. Indeed, the British Colonial Government initially thought there would be a reflux of refugees when conditions stabilised on the mainland. The realisation that the thousands of refugees in their squatter settlements were here to stay brought into existence the massive public housing programme which has gone on ever since. Many of these migrants were from urban China, and fortuitously combined with migrant capital from Shanghai they provided the essential ingredients for the rapid transformation of Hong Kong into a modern industrial society. By 1984, when the Joint Declaration was signed between London and Beijing for the return of Hong Kong to China, a whole new generation had been bom and bred in Hong Kong and a unique cultural formation had established itself in the colony. Writing in the China Quarterly in 1984 Hugh Baker declared âThe Emergence of Hong Kong Manâ:
He is go-getting and highly competitive, tough for survival, quick-thinking and flexible. He wears western clothes, speaks English or expects his children to do so, drinks western alcohol, has sophisticated tastes in cars and household gadgetry, and expects life to provide a constant stream of excitement and new opening. But he is not British or western (merely Westernized). At the same time he is not Chinese in the same way that citizens of the Peopleâs Republic of China are Chinese. ⊠Hong Kong Man is sui generis and the problems of the territoryâs future are more difficult to resolve because of it.
(1984:478â9)
One might remark that not only is Bakerâs âHong Kong Manâ close to journalistic clichĂ©, but also very middle class and male. A few years later Wong Siu-lun argued: âThe Hong Kong Chinese may be described as Westernized only in a superficial sense. They have adopted a number of western folkways [unspecified], but a substantial number of them still adhere to traditional Chinese mores on various aspects of social livingâ (Wong 1986:307). In 1988 Lau Siu-Kai and Kuan Hsin-Chi published the most comprehensive exploration of the âmentalityâ of Hong Kong in their The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese. They wrote: âIn our 1985 survey, an astonishingly large proportion of respondents (59.5 percent) identified themselves as âHongkongeseâ (HPung GĂłng yĂ hri) when they were asked to choose between it and âChineseâ. This Hong Kong identity, though not implying a rejection of China or the Chinese people, necessarily takes China or the Chinese people as the reference group and marks out the Hong Kong Chinese as a distinctive group of Chineseâ (1988:2). The Hong Kong ethos, they say, ârepresents a mixture of traditional Chinese culture and modern cultural traits âŠâ (1988:2). Since then the debate over Hong Kong âidentityâ has sharpened. The following book is a product of that debate and is a concerted attempt by anthropologists and people engaged in cultural studies to examine the nature of contemporary Hong Kong culture and society.
As is immediately apparent from the few statements reproduced above, the discourse on Hong Kong culture among academics often echoes the terms found in tourist brochures: Hong Kong is a place where âEast meets Westâ, but where âChinese traditionâ still holds sway. The common sense appeal of these categories to both gwĂĄilĂłu (foreigner) and Chinese academics, advertising copywriters, journalists and the person in the street who has been brought up on a diet of this rhetoric is itself intriguing. It is an idea which has both a history and a theory of culture embedded within it.
The history of the idea is intimately bound up with Hong Kongâs colonial history which until relatively recently saw a radical social and cultural separation between the British colonial officials and expatriate population and their Chinese subjects. For a long time âEastâ met âWestâ in a kind of cultural stand-off. Of course all colonial powers need to develop a local elite that respects the achievements of the dominant power and who is able to act as âcultural translatorsâ between the foreigners and the local population. Such a group of âAnglophilesâ did emerge in Hong Kong. We await a full social history of British Colonialism in Hong Kong which hopefully will tease out the culturally enigmatic lives of this âAnglophileâ elite, for they were in the vanguard of the creation of an identifiably modern Chinese culture in Hong Kong. On the other hand, colonialism everywhere also produces its own experts on the colonised peoples, many of whom engage in an extended romance with the dominated culture. We can see this clearly among the French, for example, in Indochina. In Hong Kong, as a counterpoint to the indigenous âAnglophilesâ a group of expatriate âSinophilesâ emerged. The speciality of the latter was the documentation of âChinese traditionâ, and anthropologists were often found in their ranks. Indeed, in the recent political row over âtraditionalâ indigenous land rights in the New Territories and alleged discrimination against women (see the chapters below by Selina Chan and Eliza Chan) âtraditionâ found some of its strongest supporters among this expatriate group. This colonial history established a powerfid discourse of âEast meets Westâ, and the âmodern world meets Chinese traditionâ. There was, of course, for a long time a strong âracialâ discourse as well, with the British seeing themselves as representatives of âcivilisationâ and Chinese customs as âbarbarianâ; while for their part the Chinese held a mirror image of the gwĂĄilĂłu (foreigner). But this discourse has not survived, although academic and political debates in Hong Kong often disturbingly echo these faded sentiments.
What are the attractions of this âEast meets Westâ ideological discourse?
First and foremost, it is extremely simple. Its binary structure allows it to accommodate an infinite variety of situations, and better still, it works for both local Hong Kong Chinese and for expatriates. Hong Kong Chinese, when they encounter mainlanders, are able to explain their differences from them by their âWestemessâ, when they encounter expatriates they can explain their differences from them by their âChinesenessâ. Expatriates on the other hand quickly recognise Hong Kongâs modernity as a familiar âWestemessâ, while all differences can somehow be accounted for perhaps by âtraditional Chinesenessâ. And so on. What is most bewildering about the situation is the rapid codeswitching that goes on within it.
But letâs look a bit more closely at the structure of this discourse and at the contradictory valuations of âWesternâ on the one hand and âtraditional Chinese/Confucianistâ on the other.
Westernisation: positive valuation.
â liberalism, freedom of thought, rationality
â egalitarianism, generally and of gender
â industrialization, affluence, science and modern education
â individualism, choice of values in relation to sexuality
â fashion and popular culture
Westernisation: negative valuation.
â family âbreakdownâ and divorce
â sexual immorality
â disrespect for authority and liberalism
â advocacy of change and future orientation
â general problems of the modern world
Chineseness (âConfucianismâ): positive valuation
â familism
â respect for elders
â social order
â scholasticism
â sexual morality
â hard work
â âChinaâs glorious pastâ
Chineseness (âConfucianismâ): negative evaluation
â conservative morality
â chauvinistic attitude to women
â authoritarianism
â opposed to change
This list could no doubt be extended and refined, but what is immediately apparent from it is its contradictoriness, how an idea valued in one context is not valued in another. In reality individuals hold a mixture of all of these views and in different proportions, and, depending on context, they rapidly code-switch from one point to the other, often being only vaguely aware of the inconsistency. The coexistence of all these views is partly related to the rapidity of social change in Hong Kong, and the mixture of codes within individuals is different between generations who for obvious reasons have experienced different aspects of this rapid social change â we return to the complexities of cultural change below.
The idea of Westernization as an explanation for social and cultural change is perhaps much stronger in Hong Kong than elsewhere in Asia because of the continuation of colonial rule, the predominance of a foreign language in the education and governmental system, and initially the high profile of rich foreign hohng (business houses). The process of modernization of Hong Kong society was, therefore, inevitably conceptualised as alien. People everywhere feel powerless in the face of rapid social change and they feel disoriented. Europe itself (âthe Westâ) during the massive transformation from feudalism to capitalism experienced similar disquiet, with massive traditionalist messianic movements (unsuccessfully) mobilised against the change. In Hong Kong this feeling could be partly managed by conceptualising this as a force from the outside â colonialism, Westernisation, and so on, and indeed all the problems which come with industrialisation can in this way also be blamed on âthe Westâ. Rapid social change also produces a certain nostalgia for an idealised stable past and the idea of âChinesenessâ is important here. Yet attempts to articulate a âtraditional Chineseâ way, or a âConfucianâ way, in a modern industrial society encounters fundamental obstacles â which, of course, does not mean that people will not continue to try.
Barbara Ward in her studies of the âboat peopleâ here in Hong Kong developed a theory of âconscious modelsâ in order to understand âTankaâ ideas of Chineseness. Often when she asked the people in the village of Kau Sai why they follow a particular custom they answered: âBecause we are Chineseâ. This she says was their conscious model of the social system which they carried in their minds in order to explain, predict or justify their behaviour as âChineseâ. The problem begins, however, upon the investigatorâs realization that people in different locations of China have different ideas about what it means to be âChineseâ. There are, therefore, a variety of conscious models âa number of different Chinese ideal patterns varying in time and space with varying historical development and the demands of particular occupations and environmentsâ (1985:42). The overarching model is a rather idealised version of Chineseness promoted by the traditional literati. This ideal, always incompletely known by ordinary Chinese, was what they aspired to but fell short of. Yet each group believed that the way they lived more closely approximated the ideal than any other neighbouring group which they observed. They constructed an observerâs model of these other groups as distinct from the model they had of their own way of doing things which Ward called their immediate model. Thus they carried in their minds an ideal or ideological model of Chineseness, their observer models of other Chinese groups, and their immediate model of themselves which may vary considerably from other groups and from the ideal model. âStrictly speaking,â writes Ward, âthe only people who can observe differences between immediate models are outsiders (or social scientists); what a Chinese layman compares is his own immediate model of his own social arrangements with his own âobserverâsâ model of the other fellowâsâ (1985:51).
Following from these ideas of Ward what we are suggesting is that the framework elaborated earlier constitutes some of the elements of the conscious model held by people living in modern Hong Kong. It allows them too to construe some people as more Chinese than others, or less (as with âABCâsâ, American Bom Chinese, as explored in Greg Guldinâs chapter below). The important thing to bear in mind about conscious models is that, as Levi-Strauss who stimulated Wardâs work remarks: âconscious models are ⊠by definition very poor ones, since they are not intended to explain the phenomena but to perpetuate themâ (1968:281).
The coherence of Wardâs model hinged on the reality of an ideal Chineseness, one modelled on the literati of the Ching Dynasty. The collapse of the old structure left a hole at the centre of the Chinese system, and so throughout the Twentieth Century Chinese intellectuals and others have endlessly debated what it means to be âChineseâ. Nationalism has been the main overarching ideology to step into the vacuum, although different nationalists have disagreed on what is âessentiallyâ Chinese. For example, the victorious communist nationalists for a long time attacked Chinese âfeudalâ beliefs and practices, as had the Guomindang in its early days. The latter however became a defender of Chinese tradition from its base in Taiwan after 1949, and only recently has Beijing supported a re-exploration of Confucianism. In other words, the cultural content of Chinese nationalism has been under continuous renegotiation.
In a recent essay on culture and identity in Hong Kong by Chan Hoiman a recurring theme is Hong Kongâs lack of âa unifying cultural foundationâ (1994:447). Thus Hong Kong would appear to epitomise the century long crisis of Chinese identity. He writes, Hong Kong âidentity can only be defined in relation to its vacuous centreâ (1994:460). This âvacuous centreâ in Hong Kong is filled by popular culture, which however can only paint over the fragmentary nature of the colonyâs culture. Nevertheless, it acts as âthe key dynamicâ because âpopular culture is d...