Hong Kong society is grappling with the rigidity of an authoritarian and threatening regime, but also with major global social and economic upheavals.
The five articles in this interdisciplinary issue from the journal of the French Center for Chinese Studies (CEFC) in Hong Kong rigorously and nuancedly depict the context of the protest movement that began several months after their publication. The authors, drawing on their personal and academic experience in Hong Kong, illuminate through their studies in sociology, political science, anthropology and political economy the social and political transformations of the city since the 1997 handover. The whole has the great merit of giving due importance to the social and economic context of the crisis that Hong Kong is going through, the scale of which cannot be grasped if it is understood only from the angle of the political crisis, admittedly major, caused by the refusal of the Chinese authorities to give in to demands for the expansion of civil liberties, and even to simply respect the principle of one country, two systems.
Reinforced inequalities in one of the societies already among the most unequal
In their introduction, Jean-Pierre Cabestan and Eric Florence place Hong Kong’s growing integration into the Chinese economy in the broader context of East Asia’s growing weight in the global economy and China’s economic development. The weight of Hong Kong’s economy in the Chinese economy has thus fallen from 27% to 3% in 20 years, even though the city remains a key financial center as long as the yuan remains non-convertible. Cross-border trade (of people, goods, and finance) has been greatly facilitated by numerous regulations and infrastructures, with mixed results for the Hong Kong population, which is largely a minority demographically and less inclined to seize these new academic, professional, or real estate opportunities offered. Although Hong Kong was already one of the most unequal societies in the world before the handover, with very low levels of taxation and redistribution, living conditions have not improved since: the Gini coefficient stood at 0.539 in 2017 and 35% of the population GDP were captured by ten billionaires.
Market law and the Internet: opportunities and constraints for the local press
Francis Lee’s article, “Changing political economy of the Hong Kong media”, is devoted to freedom of the press and its transformations in the light of digitalization and changes in the ownership of press titles. It is recalled that freedom of the press in Hong Kong, partially free, is devoid of ex-ante censorship, unlike what happens in the rest of China. During the colonial period and until the 1980s, freedom of the press was total provided that criticism concerned the Communist Party in the People’s Republic of China and the Kuomintang in Taiwan and spared the colonial government. In the decade preceding the retrocession, these restrictions broke down with the new balance permitted by the entry on the scene of China. However, the balance gradually tipped in favor of the latter with the strategy of purchasing press organs by wealthy entrepreneurs in search of symbolic capital and political recognition. Without intervening directly in the editorial offices, these owners contributed to the development of self-censorship and “constitutive censorship”.
Lee nevertheless underlines the counterbalance provided by the professionalism of journalists and the law of the market, in the Hong Kong context where pro-democracy opinions and diversity of points of view sell. The rise of the Internet nevertheless puts the press organs under pressure and changes the situation. The financial difficulties encountered by traditional media leave the way open to Chinese capital and compromise, as everywhere in the world, the role of fourth estate of the Hong Kong media by reducing profit margins and making the cost of investigative journalism too high. The impact of the emergence of online media is mixed since on the one hand they are more autonomous from political and economic institutions and contribute to the opening of the public space to alternative and more critical thoughts, but on the other hand they tend, in Hong Kong as elsewhere in the world, to favor the balkanization and polarization of public opinion.
The causes of the emergence and evolution of localism
In “Explaining localism in post-handover Hong Kong,” Samson Yuen and Sanho Chung study the evolution of localism since 2011 as a third force in Hong Kong’s binary landscape, which traditionally pits a hybrid regime supported by a pro-Beijing business community against a pro-democracy civil society deeply attached to civic values (which is the subject of another article in the issue entitled “Disarticulation between civic values and nationalism”). Beyond studies focusing on the structural reasons for the rise of nationalism and anti-Chinese sentiment in Hong Kong, the authors paint a portrait of a deeply fragmented movement, which the objective of defending autonomy and local interests is not enough to unite, especially since it suffers from the official counter-offensive of electoral disqualification and social delegitimization denouncing its provocative and sometimes xenophobic nature. Gordon Mathews’ anthropological study of young Hong Kongers’ attitudes toward asylum seekers (“Asylum seekers as symbols of Hong Kong’s non-Chineseness”) reveals a reduction in racism toward South Asian populations among younger generations, for whom the Other is now embodied by the Chinese from the People’s Republic. He concludes that for many, “Hong Kong is open to everyone except mainland Chinese.” His research corroborates that of Lowe and Tsang (2017) who have emphasized that “Hong Kongers’ sense of collective identity is strengthened as they construct mainland Chinese as the opposite of themselves, rejecting the concept of pan-Chinese ethnicity promoted by the People’s Republic of China.”
Wan and Wong’s article “The Housing Boom and the Rise of Localism in Hong Kong” makes a compelling case that the deep deterioration in access to housing for Hong Kong’s youth is a major socio-economic cause of their support for localism and more radical actions, and the emergence of the 2014 Umbrella Movement – and possibly the current wave of protests. It is inspiring to move beyond Chinese particularism to situate the rise of Hong Kong discontent and localism within a global trend of political response to the explosion of wealth inequality driven by the growing share of stock market and property income in low-redistributive societies.
This issue of the journal Chinese Perspectives therefore offers essential reading to grasp the issues not only political but also social and economic of the crisis that has been shaking Hong Kong for more than six months. It constitutes one of the rare publications concerning Hong Kong in French to offer such a historical depth and a disciplinary panorama. It thus gives a view of a bubbling and diverse Hong Kong society, which is not only grappling with the rigidity of an authoritarian and threatening regime, but also resolutely anchored in the major global transformations of financialization of the economy, social inequalities, the impact of digital technology on the press and identity radicalization.