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Patterns of Prejudice

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Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of ChineseMainlanders in Hong Kong

John Lowe & Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang

To cite this article: John Lowe & Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang (2017) Disunited in ethnicity: theracialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong, Patterns of Prejudice, 51:2, 137-158, DOI:10.1080/0031322X.2017.1304349

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Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of ChineseMainlanders in Hong Kong

JOHN LOWE AND EILEEN YUK-HA TSANG

ABSTRACT In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontentssurrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong,there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China areracialized. Lowe and Tsang’s article provides an examination of the campaignagainst Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflictsbetween Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duality oftime or differing time-inflected cultural habits of Mainlanders and Hong Kongers.As Hong Kong’s citizenry and Mainlanders contest the status of the former colonyand claim rights over it in ways aberrant to both factions’ national consciousness,discrimination increases as Mainlanders are castigated by Hong Kongers forgrazing their territory with mannerisms deemed unsettling to Hong Kong’severyday notions of time and space. Hong Kongers’ sense of collective identity isshored-up as they reject the People’s Republic of China’s favoured concept of pan-Chinese ethnicity by constructing Mainlanders as the inverse of themselves.

KEYWORDS Chinese, ethnicity, Hong Kong, Mainland China, racialization, racism

On 1 February 2012, a giant locust hovering over Hong Kong’s picturesqueskyline was featured as a full-page advertisement in the Apple Daily, a

popular local newspaper. A commentary beside the locust enumerated theestimated financial cost Hong Kong taxpayers would have to bear forhosting each ‘locust’ or ‘shuangfei child雙非兒童’—a Hong Kong-born childwhose parents are not Hong Kong citizens—in their territory.1 In HongKong, the ‘locust’ (huangchong 蝗蟲) is a derogatory term used to castigateimmigrants, traders and tourists from Mainland China (hereafter

We would like to extend our thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructivefeedback as well as Barbara Rosenbaum for encouraging us to revise this article.1 Kenneth Tan, ‘Apple Daily Hong Kong runs ad against mainland “locusts”’, Shanghaii-

list (online), 1 February 2012, available at http://shanghaiist.com/2012/02/01/apple_daily_hong_kong_locusts_ad.php (viewed 7 February 2017). According to a Chinesesource, there were about 95,000 babies born in Hong Kong in 2011, of which 37,000(38.9 per cent) were shuangfei babies. Most of the mothers of the shuangfei babies areMainland Chinese women. See ‘Shuangfei children’, available on the China.org.cnwebsite at www.china.org.cn/learning_english/2012-04/26/content_25247210.htm(viewed 7 February 2017).

Patterns of Prejudice, 2017Vol. 51, No. 2, 137–158, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2017.1304349

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

‘Mainlanders’) as culturally inferior and dangerous ‘unequal others’, guilty ofexploiting Hong Kong’s dwindling public and social welfare resources. Theadvertisement was unequivocal in calling for a timely end to the ‘unlimited’acceptance of Mainland Chinese couples into Hong Kong. It is noteworthythat this advertisement was funded by a spontaneous online fundraising cam-paign on Facebook together with members of the local HKGolden.com forum.The effort raised more than HK$100,000 (US$12,900, £10,000) from 800donors within a week.The breathless political élan inherent in this advertisement does more than

illuminate the inordinate extent to which unsavoury mass media stereotypesexploit the negative aesthetics of the ‘locust’ to invoke the notion of an inva-sion. The social media (especially YouTube) are replete with clips of Mainland-ers at the receiving end of verbal hostilities of ethnic-specific taunts, name-calling and stereotyping. With colonial disdain, Hong Kong’s populace con-tinues to discriminate against Mainlanders using pejorative terms such asShina, dai luk lo (大陸佬), dai luk por (大陸婆) or even the degenerate AhChaan (阿燦 literally, ‘the uneducated’ or ‘the hayseed’). While Hong Kongpeople and Mainlanders share similar phenotypical markers of identity andprimordial origin as descendants of the Han Chinese, Hong Kongers continueto identify themselves in opposition to Mainlanders and remain unapologeticin their exclusionary attitudes. This article is written in a context of theoretical,conceptual and methodological underdevelopment concerning racializedsocial relations, ethnic identity formation and nation-making within therapid sociohistorical transformations of Hong Kong society.At a time when there are various migrant groups in Hong Kong, including

large numbers of domestic workers from the Philippines and itinerantworkers from other parts of South East Asia, we highlight the need for theor-etical and conceptual space to be devoted to maintaining continuity and com-parability in charting the historical and contemporary forms of theracialization of Mainlanders.2 In the literature on race and ethnicity inBritain, for example, the notion of racialization has been operationalized torepresent the nuanced ways in which the ethnically invisible white minoritiessuch as the Irish have been marginalized.3 Historically, one of the major waysin which the concepts of race and social change have been problematized in

2 The Race Discrimination Ordinance was introduced by the Hong Kong government in2008 with the intention of protecting people of all races from discrimination, harass-ment and vilification. The Human Rights Monitor unsuccessfully campaigned forthis ordinance to protect Mainlanders as a distinct racial group and ‘protected class’.While the theoretical implications of this ordinance are considerable, and beyond thescope of this article, we are of the view that, even if the ordinance were to recognizeMainlanders as a class, it would encounter the kinds of criticisms that anti-racist move-ments have met with elsewhere, that they perpetuated essentialist or exoticized stereo-types of Mainlanders as people in need of protection.

3 Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood, ‘Young (male) Irelanders: postcolonial eth-nicities—expanding the nation and Irishness’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 6,no. 3, 2003, 386–403.

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the social and human sciences is through the use of the term ‘racialization’.Michael Banton developed the term extensively to explain how race struc-tures, if not reifies, one’s perceptions of different groups of people.4 Its useful-ness is indicated by the fact that racialization has been operationalized totranscend the limitations of conventional accounts of race and racism thatemphasize pre-determined outcomes on the basis of colour differences.From both structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives, theorists havepointed to the importance of exploring conditions under which specific pro-cesses of racialization result in differential outcomes. Such works have beenparticularly successful in examining the cumulative thrust of ascribingreified meanings to minorities, in the form of how and why the meaning ofstate-sanctioned ethnic categories of containment change from plain descrip-tions to hierarchically organized categories under given economic, political,social and spatial circumstances.5

It is necessary to decouple notions of the Mainland and Hong Kong as wellas the subjective identities of both factions as they have been elided by nation-alist discourses of the Mainland. To disturb the logic of a unified ‘Chineseness’that best illustrates the myth of a common ethnicity grounded in MainlandChina, Allen Chun pointed out that

Hong Kong’s isolation from the national culture invoked by both sides of thestraits allowed for a peculiar sense of Chineseness to emerge that radically dif-fered from the assumed synonymity of one family, one people, one civilizationand one polity cultivated elsewhere by rejecting any intrinsic relationshipbetween ethnicity and nationality.6

In this nexus between the multiple experiences of British imperialism andthe resumption of Chinese sovereignty that contemporary Hong Kongersassociate with colonialism, Mirana May Szeto maintains that an orchestrated‘petit-grandiose Hong Kongism’ remains pervasive in framing racism andxenophobia.7 Racism, however, cannot be reduced to the terms of a simplebinary social system, composed of a juxtaposed ascendant Hong Kong(superior) and subordinate Mainland China (inferior) groups. Importantly,relations between racialized collectives are necessarily structured psychicallyincorporating the elements of desire, attraction, repression, transference and

4 Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock 1977); Michael Banton, ‘Historicaland contemporary modes of racialization’, in Karim Murji and John Solomos (eds),Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice (Oxford and New York: Oxford UniversityPress 2005), 51–68.

5 Michael Keith, ‘Racialization and the public spaces of the multicultural city’, in Murjiand Solomos (eds), Racialization, 249–70; Tony Kushner, ‘Racialization and “WhiteEuropean” immigration to Britain’, in Murji and Solomos (eds), Racialization, 207–26.

6 Allen Chun, ‘Fuck Chineseness: on the ambiguities of ethnicity as culture as identity’,Boundary 2, vol. 23, no. 2, 1996, 111–38 (121–2).

7 Mirana May Szeto, ‘Identity politics and its discontents’, Interventions, vol. 8, no. 2,2006, 253–75 (253).

JOHN LOWE AND EILEEN YUK-HA TSANG 139

projection vis-à-vis a racialized Other.8 Drawing on the work of Derrida,Jonathan Rutherford describes the inner logic of the psychic relations of racial-ized domination. He writes:

Binarism operates in the same way as splitting and projection: the centre expelsits anxieties, contradictions and irrationalities onto the subordinate term, fillingit with the antithesis of its own identity; the Other, in its very alienness, simplymirrors and represents what is deeply familiar to the centre, but projectedoutside of itself. It is in these processes and representations of marginalitythat violence, antagonisms, and aversions that are at the core of the dominantdiscourses and identities become manifest—racism, homophobia, misogynyand class contempt are the products of this frontier.9

It is therefore through psychical processes of (dis)identifications that anative Hong Kong ethnic identity is solidified in opposition to MainlandChina. Thus, through the infiltration of binarism in common parlance, Main-landers in Hong Kong continue to be pejoratively labelled as ‘locusts’,10 a termconnotative of being purely a nuisance and, as Iam-Chong Ip stated, ‘a stain tobe effaced on the canvas of an orderly consumer society’.11 In a more recentstudy, ethnocentrism was also deemed a crucial salient precursor of hostilitytowards Mainlanders.12

Following the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, which attracted theattention of the world in 2014, it can be said that Hong Kong society willnever be the same again.13 Currently, there are two major kinds of localismsgaining momentum, evident in the Sinophobic attitudes of Hong Kong’syouth towards alien Chinese ‘invaders’ and integral to their attempts to pre-serve and rebuild ‘native’ Hong Kong communities.14 Interestingly, themain activists of the Umbrella Movement were university students born in

8 Claire Pajaczkowska and Lola Young, ‘Racism, representation, psychoanalysis’, inJames Donald and Ali Rattansi (eds), ‘Race’, Culture and Difference (London, ThousandOaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage 1992), 198–219.

9 Jonathan Rutherford, ‘A place called home: identity and the cultural politics of differ-ence’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London:Lawrence & Wishart 1990), 9–27 (22).

10 Petula Sik Ying Ho, Connie Kuok Ieng Ho, William Chi Wai Wong and Agnes Mei YuPau, ‘The seven-year struggle: injustices at home for Chinese immigrant women inHong Kong’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2014, 154–63.

11 Iam-Chong Ip, ‘Politics of belonging: a study of the campaign against mainland visitorsin Hong Kong’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2015, 410–21 (419).

12 Siu-Yau Lee, Isabella FS Ng and Kee-Lee Chou, ‘Exclusionary attitudes toward the allo-cation of welfare benefits to Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong’, Asian and PacificMigration Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, 2016, 41–61.

13 Stephen Ching-kiu Chan, ‘Delay no more: struggles to re-imagine Hong Kong (for thenext 30 years)’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2015, 327–47.

14 Yun-chung Chen and Mirana M. Szeto, ‘The forgotten road of progressive localism:New Preservation Movement in Hong Kong’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no.3, 2015, 436–53.

140 Patterns of Prejudice

the post-1980 years, acting out of fear that their middle-class dreams were jeo-pardized by declining living standards and a widening gap between rich andpoor.15 This is symptomatic of the fact that Hong Kong’s youth will be disin-clined to accept Chinese sovereignty, and be relentless in campaigning for thepreservation of democracy and the rejection of cheap labour from the main-land. Against this unsurprising but unsatisfactory state of ethnocentrism,characterized by hostility and Sinophobia, there is arguably an acute needto understand how Hong Kongers racialize Mainlanders in Hong Kong. Con-ceptually, our point of departure in this article is that, unlike the deploymentof race, members of this group identify their shared characteristics, rangingfrom culture, language and nationhood, using the notion of ethnicity.16 Never-theless, we are also of the view that performing Hong Kong ethnicity is, bydefinition, a strategic means of displaying an ethical code of values irreconcil-able with those in Mainland China. According to Gayatri Spivak, essentialistviews are strategically deployed by both subordinated and superordinategroups to bypass or acknowledge difference.17 Strategic essentialisms wouldnonetheless be inert in the absence of shared moral values that demarcatethe boundaries of collective identity. In other words, granted that ethnicityaffirms group identity, there needs to be ‘a confirmation of sanctioned behav-iour within the group and the demonstration that group norms can beobserved’.18 Mainlanders and Hong Kongers define themselves as separateChinese groups on the basis of geohistorical, sociopolitical and cultural differ-ences fashioned during the British colonial presence in Hong Kong. However,we should not underestimate the importance Allen Chun attaches to thenotion of ethnicity as an invention, while also recognizing that phenomenaappearing as ethnicization, racialization or nationalization have underlyingframeworks of power in geopolitical forces.19

The present article aims to situate the colour-blind racisms levelled at Main-landers within a conceptual framework of the modalities of time and moder-nity, in order to understand and explain the levels of abstraction rooted in thecultural subconscious that are, at least in part, systemic responses to geopoli-tical processes (re)defining the relationship between Hong Kong and Main-land China. We also critically explore the sociocultural specificity of acomplex racialization of pan-ethnic Chinese identity in postcolonial

15 Joseph Yu-shek Cheng, ‘The emergence of radical politics in Hong Kong: causes andimpact’, China Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 2014, 199–232 (200).

16 For various contested definitions of this term, see Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity:Arguments and Explorations, 2nd edn (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, NewDelhi and Sin-gapore: Sage 2008).

17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular’,Postcolonial Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 2005, 475–86 (477).

18 Gargi Bhattarchayya, ‘Introduction: ethnicities, values and old-fashioned racism’, inGargi Bhattarchayya (ed.), Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World (Farnham,Surrey: Ashgate 2009), 1–34 (3).

19 Allen Chun, ‘On the geopolitics of identity’, Anthropological Theory, vol. 9, no. 3, 2009,331–49.

JOHN LOWE AND EILEEN YUK-HA TSANG 141

conditions. Our work is less interested in the popular media’s reinforcement ofSinophobic prejudice and, rather, draws attention to the multiplicity andcomplex interplay of the temporal and spatial in which racism and xenopho-bia are socially constructed in postcolonial Hong Kong society.Hong Kong is well known as a former British colony. It did not become an

independent or sovereign country at the end of the colonial era. It was deemedrather a Special Administrative Region (hereafter SAR) of China, with theautonomy to manage its own political, economic and legal systems for fiftyyears, that is, until 2047. Unlike Mainland China, the SARwas partially demo-cratized in an attempt to curb political anxiety in the post-1997 years and toproject optimism about the future by disarming fears of Communism.20

This study provides insight into the production of discrimination in a majorEast Asian post-capitalist metropolis as a result of the boundaries betweennation, colony and city-state being more than blurred and increasinglysubject to contestation by both Mainlanders and Hong Kongers.In the section following our research methodology, we provide a literature-

based account of the ambiguities surrounding local Hong Kongers’ identity inaddition to situating the prevailing climate of ethnocentric clout within con-tested spatial-temporal processes engrained as sacrosanct legacies of the post-colonial. As a result of Mainland China’s temporalities impinging on HongKong, we discuss how racialized constructs of Mainlanders as culturallybenighted have become aestheticized through a disavowal of the pan-ethnicChineseness favoured by the Chinese government as well as tropes of thefaecal.We then provide guidelines for future research interventions to theorizepatterns and practices of everyday discrimination towards Mainlanders inHong Kong. With few exceptions, the majority of studies in the literature re-present the unfavourable treatment of ethnic minorities on grounds of race.The framing of time as another basis for discrimination is certainly lacking.By an appeal to the timelessness of race and its relative atemporal bias, the tem-poral dimensions of the sociocultural processes intertwined with racialphenomena are de-emphasized and occluded. A greater emphasis should beput on the diachronic: the formulation, transition and transformation ofsocial institutions and conceptual structures at a particular time to identifythe multiple ways in which racisms are socially and discursively reproduced.In other words, it is the differences rather than the similarities between pastand present racisms that are more important, as Paul Gilroy explains:

‘Race’ has to be socially and politically constructed and elaborate ideologicalwork is done to secure and maintain the different forms of ‘racialization’which have characterised capitalist development.… [It is] important to

20 Tai-Lok Lui, ‘Amissing page in the grand plan of “one-country, two systems”: regionalintegration and its challenges to post-1997 Hong Kong’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol.16, no. 3, 2015, 396–409 (401).

142 Patterns of Prejudice

compare and evaluate the different historical situations in which ‘race’ hasbecome politically pertinent.21

To ensure that the temporal aspects of racism can be understood and re-presented accurately, it will be necessary also to adopt a more inclusive concep-tualization of colour-blind racism (based on ethnic differences) in Hong Kongthat transcends the self-imposed constrictions of a pervasive black-whitecolour binary currently losing currency in western multicultural societies. Thedefinition advocated by Étienne Balibar encapsulates the various pathologiesassociated with racism that resonate with the values and codes of modernity:

Racism… inscribes itself in practices (forms of violence, contempt, intolerance,humiliation and exploitation), in discourses and representations which are somany intellectual elaborations of the phantasm of prophylaxis or segregation(the need to purify the social body, to preserve ‘one’s own’ or ‘our’ identityfrom all forms of mixing, interbreeding or invasion) and which are articulatedaround stigmata of otherness (name, skin colour, religious practices).22

This highly inclusive definition of racism includes cultural or religious dis-crimination justified as prophylactic attempts to circumvent risks associatedwith fears of a hypothetical ‘doomsday scenario’. It is also consonant withthe pathologies of the global ‘risk society’ identified by Ulrich Beck,23 whichconcurrently exemplifies a blurring of the division between the rational andthe hysterical, and would therefore be better equipped at transcending theattributions of racial or ethnic discrimination to singular, monocausal struc-tures of division.

A note on methodology

Scholarship in East Asian migration studies has emphasized the need to focuson the multiple identities, subjective positions and unequal ways in whichmigrants live transnationally.24 Thus, we decided that an empirical examin-ation of how Hong Kong citizens view their mainland counterparts shouldalso give voice to Mainlanders and thereby allow scope for dialogue andthe possibility of transcending the constrictions of interrogating the essential-ist ideologies embedded in Hong Kong’s postcolonial settings.

21 Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation(London and New York: Routledge 2002), 35.

22 Étienne Balibar, ‘Is there a neo-racism?’, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein(eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Balibar trans. from the French by ChrisTurner (London and New York: Verso 1991), 17–28 (17–18).

23 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. from the German by MarkRitter (London and Newbury, CA: Sage 1992).

24 Shirlena Huang, Sang Kok Lee andMike Hayes, ‘The politics, subjectivities and connec-tivities of transnational migration in East Asia’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, vol.21, no. 2, 2012, 135-47.

JOHN LOWE AND EILEEN YUK-HA TSANG 143

The empirical research for this studywas conducted between 2008 and 2013.During this five-year period, the beginnings of cultural conflict graduallygrew into deeply rooted anti-Chinese sentiments as China became the firstAsian country to rebound from the global financial crisis of 2008. Accordingly,the years 2010–13 saw many Mainlanders purchase property and deliverbabies in Hong Kong.In 2008 we interviewed two groups of participants for the study: 1) 30

middle-class Mainlanders (15 males, 15 females) in Guangdong whoworked in Hong Kong, and (2) 30 Hong Kongers (15 males, 15 females)who were working in Guangdong province. The interviews were conductedbetween January and July 2008 in six cities across Guangdong, namely Shenz-hen, Dongguan, Zhuhai, Zhongshan, Guangzhou and Yangjiang. Most of theparticipants fromHong Kong spoke Putonghua (Mandarin) fluently and com-municated well with the Mainland Chinese while they were working inGuangdong. Sixty per cent had worked in Guangdong for less than sevenyears and 40 per cent for more than seven years.Subsequently, in 2013, two more groups of middle-class participants were

interviewed. In the first batch of Mainlanders, half the group were entrepre-neurs, a quarter were Communist Party cadres and the final quarter pro-fessionals with a median age of 40. Sixty-five per cent (39) were men and35 per cent (21) were women. Twenty entrepreneurs (out of 31) startedbusinesses in Hong Kong and most of the professionals had been workingin Hong Kong for one to ten years. The cadres, on the other hand, hadnever worked in Hong Kong, but visited frequently, at least twice amonth. The majority of Mainland Chinese interviewees held a first degreefrom university; over 80 per cent had Master’s degrees and around 10 percent were PhD holders. Their native language was Putonghua and, whilethey could understand Cantonese, they hardly ever spoke it. Over 70 percent of the Mainland Chinese participants had worked in Hong Kong forless than seven years.The second batch of 2013 interviewees were Hong Kongers of whom 57

per cent (17) were men and 43 per cent (13) were women between theages of 28 and 65 with a medium age of 50. Sixty per cent (18) were entre-preneurs, and 40 per cent (12) were professionals who had worked inGuangdong since 2008. They earned a minimum monthly salary of HK$35,000 (US$4,500, £3,600). Most of them started working in Guangdongin the early 1990s during Hong Kong’s massive industrial relocation tosouthern China. Ninety per cent of the professionals had Master’sdegrees, and 10 per cent held PhDs. A majority (56 per cent) of the entre-preneurs had a Bachelor’s degree and the highest educational attainmentdeclared by the remaining 44 per cent was a post-secondary educationcertificate.Using an ethnographic approach, we immersed ourselves in the partici-

pants’ respective communities. We conducted qualitative interviews andhoped, by means of that flexible and sensitive method, to yield ‘rich

144 Patterns of Prejudice

sources of data on people’s experiences, opinions, aspirations and feelings’.25

Prior to asking questions, interviewees would first be presented with ‘vi-gnettes’ in the form of media reports on various social issues as well ashypothetical scenarios concerning the Hong Kong-Mainland China relation-ship. This proved to be a reliable method, allowing us to empirically re-examine our respondents’ perceptions of the racial, ethnic and temporal,while encouraging them to be candid about their own identities, life philos-ophies, insecurities, imaginations and attitudes on various issues. Moreover,it allowed a synthesis of theoretically led insights that were neither strictlydeductive nor inductive, but a combination of both.26 The qualitative inter-viewmethod allowed us to make sense of the internal struggles and dilemmasexemplified by our Hong Kong andMainland China respondents and, in turn,to re-examine the resonance of theory. Finally, in the interest of protecting theidentities of our respondents, only pseudonyms were used. There were nolanguage barriers between the interviewers and the interviewees in theresearch process.

The ‘Hong Konger’ identity and the rejection of pan-ethnic Chineseidentity

Under the guiding principle of ‘one country, two systems’, Hong Kong’s trans-formation from a colony to a SAR can be described as a political experimentfull of dialectical processes. The fact that Hong Kong needed to be treated dif-ferently from the rest of Chinawas also an impetus for the imaginary rebirth ofHong Kong as a ‘nation’after 1997.27 Indeed, the decolonization and renation-alization process has necessarily involved the reconstruction of Hong Kong’snational and cultural identity along the fragmented lines of negotiation, dom-ination and resistance.28 The years of British colonial rule prior to the 1997resumption of sovereignty to China crystallized a localized Hong Kong iden-tity and historical consciousness that pointed to a meridian beyond the con-ventional designations of nationhood, state or sub-state. The colonialgovernment’s promotion of economic growth between 1967 and 1984 success-fully disarmed nationalist sentiments towards China at the expense of foster-ing political apathy and a peculiar Chineseness ‘that radically differed from

25 Tim May, Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process (Buckingham and Philadelphia:Open University Press 1993), 91.

26 William Julius Wilson and Anmol Chaddha, ‘The role of theory in ethnographicresearch’, Ethnography, vol. 10, no. 4, 2009, 549–64; James Clifford and GerogeE. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, LosAngeles and London: University of California Press 1986); Paul Willis and Mats Trond-man, ‘Manifesto for ethnography’, Ethnography, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, 5–16.

27 Bidisha Banerjee, ‘What lies within: misrecognition and the uncanny in Hong Kong’scityscape’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, 2013, 519–37 (519–20).

28 Anthony Fung ‘Postcolonial Hong Kong identity: hybridising the local and thenational’, Social Identities, vol. 10, no. 3, 2004, 399–414.

JOHN LOWE AND EILEEN YUK-HA TSANG 145

the assumed synonymy of one family, one people, one civilization, and onepolity cultivated by rejecting any intrinsic relationship between ethnicityand nationality’.29 The upshot of Hong Kong occupying a precariousvacuum between colonial Britain and China’s nationalism is an ethnonationalidentity that represents all the anomalies one would expect to arise from nega-tive identifications with ethnicity, following Eric Hobsbawm,30 which impederather than contribute to one collective form of national consciousness. Oncloser inspection, there is, in other words, a competition between a problem-atic and thematic form of pan-Chinese ethnicity or ‘Chineseness’ assertingdifferent culturally riveted temporalities about the nation-state that necess-arily force both Chinese factions to tolerate rather than embrace each otheras one people.Caught in the undertow of Sinophobic sentiments that saw Hong Kong’s

cultural space being attenuated, Hong Kongers’ fervent appeals to a distinc-tively Hong Kong identity provided a bulwark against China’s encroachingpolitical, economic and cultural authoritarianism. In this connection, itmight be pertinent to point out Ackbar Abbas’s somewhat pessimistic forecastof a cultural dislocation that he predicted would presage the imminent ‘death’of Hong Kong culture and the disappearance of its short-lived local identity.31

In an attempt to put a damper on the peremptorily imposed pan-Chinesenationalism with equanimity, Hong Kong’s populace eventually fashionedsome semblance of normality in the embryonic post-sovereignty transferyears. This was done by re(constructing) a local identity alongside a sanitizedacceptance and display of ‘symbolic’, or tokenistic, icons of the motherland’sculture (such as the national flag, national song, Great Wall of China, GreatHall of the People and so on) without feeling sufficiently attached to themeven to accord them ‘core’ status. In the words of one candid respondent:

I don’t have any special feelings aroused whenever I hear the national anthemor see the national flag. I’m still unsure about accepting the political ideology ofthe Chinese Communist Party. They are really horrible and you can neverknow when and why you’ll be arrested and imprisoned without reason. TheChen Chang case is a typical example (Alex, 50, Hong Kong entrepreneur inGuangdong).

Congruently, it is worth mentioning that, within a year after re-integration, in1998, a local Hong Kong identity was revitalized amidst a year of lamentedsuppression with numbers identifying as ‘Chinese’ plummeting to 46 percent, a 7 per cent decrease on 1997, and an increase in those (46 per cent)

29 Chun, ‘Fuck Chineseness’, 122.30 E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edn

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), 167.31 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis and

London: University of Minnesota Press 1997).

146 Patterns of Prejudice

adopting the dual ‘Hong Kong and Chinese’ identity.32 Today, the hyphenatedidentity holds sway whenever China’s cultural or sporting acclaim in theOlympics accrues benefits for Hong Kong. Shorn of their short-livedmoments of celebratory inclinations towards pan-ethnic Chinese nationality,the identity of Hong Kong’s citizenry is predicated on the boundedness ofan imagined consciousness of who they are relative to Mainlanders who areconstructed as politically corrupt, degenerate and less civilized.To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the cultural zone within and

through which dominant and minority ethnic groups live and negotiate theirdifferences and similarities in a natural or ‘normal’ way, with others andbetween themselves, the role of language in defining difference in HongKong should not be understated. A lot more can also be said about Mainland-ers’ mastery of the Cantonese language as a form of linguistic capital; and,according to Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, ‘linguistic relations arealways relations of symbolic power’.33 Thus, even though most Mainlandersin Hong Kong are not fluent in English but in Putonghua, they are reluctant tospeak Cantonese. It may be true that younger Mainlanders who were born inHong Kong are increasingly speaking Cantonese like Hong Kong natives.34

On average, the Chinese and Hong Kong middle classes had, by 2013, livedfor five years in Hong Kong and China, respectively. They were working inthe banking, finance, insurance and education sectors. However, irregularelements in speech and accent can be understood as a lack of ‘linguisticcapital’ culminating in a consequential loss of opportunities as well asfailure to be accepted in Hong Kong society. Most Hong Kong Chinese donot openly express their disdain in front of Mainlanders. Nevertheless, theydo confess to reacting negatively to Putonghua. Most Hong Kong nativesregard Putonghua as inferior, loud and annoying.

I refuse to answer someone who speaks Putonghua. I’m annoyed every time Ihear someone speaking Putonghua. The accent is very loud, annoying and dis-gusting (Kitty, 36, Hong Kong entrepreneur working in Guangdong).

I don’t believe that Mainland Chinese people will ever become full members ofHong Kong society because of cultural differences and the language barrier(Katy, 35, Chinese professional in Hong Kong).

These two respondents confirm the assertion of Bourdieu and Wacquantthat dominated peoples like refugees and immigrants have their linguistic

32 Anthony Fung, ‘What makes the local? A brief consideration of the rejuvenation ofHong Kong identity’, Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 3–4, 2001, 591–601 (597).

33 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Introduction to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago:University of Chicago Press 1992), 142.

34 David Post, Suet-ling Pong and Dongshu Ou, ‘One country two peoples? Trends in theassimilation and separation of Hong Kong’s mainland-born population’, Asian Popu-lation Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2015, 67–93.

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capital ‘more or less devalued, be it in school, at work, or in social encounterswith the dominant’.35 More alarmingly, however, disgruntled Hong Kongyouth embracing localism have even gone so far as to advocate the outrightrejection not only of Putonghua and simplified Chinese characters but alsoHong Kong’s severance of all connections with the mainland.36 There is aneed also to recognize that the recalibration of discourses surrounding linguis-tic differences will continue to feature in narratives of self-production dis-persed through multiple sites of power relations in Hong Kong.Disidentification with Putonghua by associating it with the atavistic or femi-nine affirms Cantonese as the masculine. According to Judith Butler, such dis-identifications are complicated processes designed to assuage certain fearsand satisfy unfulfilled desires. By repudiating certain identities, an individualforms his or her own identity. For Butler, ‘identifications, then, can ward offcertain desires or act as vehicles for desire; in order to facilitate certaindesires it may be necessary to ward off others; identification is the site atwhich this ambivalent prohibition and production of desire occurs’.37 The con-tradictory elements in this ‘logic of repudiation’ are reconciled: the construc-tion of identity requires some awareness of ‘not being’ as a ‘significant signof being’. Within the Hong Kong SAR, the amplification of particular mascu-line traits through the Cantonese language allows insecure individuals tonullify identifications with the mainland elements they disdain.While not consciously so, the colonial attitude towards Mainlanders explains

the contradictory ways in which citizens of Hong Kong are liable simul-taneously to affirm and repudiate pan-Chinese ethnic identity whenever it con-jures up notions of Communism, corruption, stealth and human rights abuses.In overseas settings, Hong Kong citizens are also quick to state their origins inHongKong but less willing to identify themselves as Chinese. Against a prevail-ing climate of the new Chinese middle class’s lack of interest in democraticreform,38 Hong Kong’s citizenry is quite fearful of the former colony’s financialdependence on China presaging a Communist subversion of democracy andthe attenuation of other civil liberties—colonial legacies—taken for granted inHong Kong. The concerned response of this interviewee working in Guang-dong was widely echoed by other Hong Kong citizens in China:

…most of the wealthy Chinese here don’t wish to challenge the government.The ones I work with just want to maintain the status quo and hope the

35 Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Introduction to Reflexive Sociology, 143.36 Po-Keung Hui and Kin-Chi Lau, ‘“Living in truth” versus Realpolitik: limitations and

potentials of the Umbrella Movement’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2015,348–66 (352).

37 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London andNew York: Routledge 1993), 100.

38 Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang and Pak K. Lee, ‘The Chinese new middle class and Green NGOsin South China: vanguards of Guanxi (connections)-seeking, laggards in promotingsocial causes?’, China: An International Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, 155–69.

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Communist government will remain in power so they can get even richer. I feela little worried and insecure living in Guangdong not simply because of con-taminated food supplies and rampant food poisoning. I fear Chinese rulewill be brought to Hong Kong, sooner or later, resulting in more corruption,governmental regulation of the press, new curbs on dissent and daily interfer-ence from Beijing (Lawrence, 40, Hong Kong accountant working inGuangdong).

Unwelcoming locals and Sinophobic populists in Hong Kong frequentlydeploy this rhetoric to argue that ‘mainland culture’ renders Mainlandersunsuitable for participating in a democracy. Thus, those Mainland Chinesewho share the similar sentiments of Hong Kong’s citizenry towards demo-cracy are not given a chance to show their solidarity with their ‘hosts’. AMain-land Chinese entrepreneur in Hong Kong expressed a sense of politicaldissatisfaction with China as he recounted his harrowing experience:

I wrote something to express my opinion about the June Fourth incident andthe fact that the central government should stop censoring some websites inChina… This article appeared on my university homepage. When I was study-ing for my undergraduate degree in Hong Kong in 1999, I received an ‘invita-tion’ to go to the Chinese Liaison Office (Zhonglianban中聯辦). I really freakedout. I was clearly considered anti-Communist and they were all out to silenceme. I vowed never to do the stupid thing of airing my political views onlineagain (Ken, 30, Chinese entrepreneur in Hong Kong).

The unfortunate stereotyping of newcomers necessarily involves suffusingcultural differences with moral significance. As one’s ways of being differentbecome viewed as a reflection of a ‘morally distasteful culture’ rather thanindividual judgement or choice, an individual from a minority or non-western culture disappears as a moral agent.39 The equation of immoralitywith pre-modern Chinese culture is complicit in the media’s constructions ofa hegemonic Hong Kong identity in which Mainlanders are racialized basedon their ‘inelegant lifestyles’ when they cannot adapt to localized normsenshrined as sacrosanct universal rules in Hong Kong’s temporal andspatial surrounds. The often-cited examples of Mainlanders not queuing upin an orderly fashion, relieving themselves anywhere or engaging in the con-sumption of food and drink in public transports are all transgressions of HongKong norms.The interplay of these national temporalities culminating in the present-day

Hong Kong identity was entrenched over 156 years of the colonial fashioningof everyday temporal and spatial habits. The colony’s local identity is locatedin habitual, un-reflexive routines of quotidian time rather than in shareddescent, myths or common traditions. It is the institutionalization of national

39 Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton, NJ and Woodstock, Oxon:Princeton University Press 2007), 4.

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time and the synchronicities of mundane everyday life that govern how onecan recognize one’s fellow national citizens.40 The diffusion of stereotypes ofMainlanders as dangerous, parasitic ‘national others’,41 who do not contributeto Hong Kong society, is based on their alien ways being disruptive to the tem-poral rhythms of mundane, diurnal routines and cultural practices in HongKong as they were shaped by colonialism. As Tim Edensor explains:

There is no doubt that global synchronicities, time-spaces, habits, rhythms androutines are becoming embedded in everyday lives across the planet. Andunquestionably, the fixity of temporal social patterns has been fragmentedby the demise of collective events such as wakes and Christian rituals, thedecentring of timetables controlled by the state, the rise of night-time econom-ies, increasingly flexible work practices, and the diversification of work andleisure schedules, all of which mean that identifiable national routines areless obvious than they were and it is frequently down to individual responsi-bility to organize temporal routines irrespective of others. Moreover, migrationproduces a plethora of dissonant temporalities which coincide in familiarspace, confusing and questioning national routines, and thereby, notions ofinclusion and exclusion.42

This racialization of temporal practices embodied byMainlandmigrants whoare not congenial to the narrative of the city-state’s development is the result of afailure to reject what John Plamenatz identifies as the greatest obstacle to uni-versal liberty and progress fettering Eastern (Asian) varieties of nationalism,namely, ‘the alien intruder and dominator who is nevertheless to be imitatedand surpassed by his own standards’.43 In short, Plamenatz posits that colo-nized peoples intending to achieve a progressive national culture that retainsa sense of indigeneity frequently fail to reject both their ancestral ways aswell as the ways of their colonizers. The mirror of Hong Kong’s ancestral pastis certainly China but ethnicity has played a minimal role in anchoring HongKong identity as a Chinese identity. Richard Hughes famously entitled hisbook on the former colony Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time to foreground the con-spicuous absence of a real space or time of its own.44 The clichéd title neverthe-less does not recognize that Britain’s annexation of Hong Kong necessarilyinvolved a colonization of rhythms and routines around one standard clock

40 Tim Edensor, ‘Reconsidering national temporalities: institutional times, everyday rou-tines, serial spaces and synchronicities’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 9, no. 4,2006, 525–45.

41 William Keng Mun Lee, ‘Ethnic and gender relations in Hong Kong: the work experi-ences of recent Mainland Chinese immigrant women’, Asian and Pacific MigrationJournal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2004, 233–53.

42 Edensor, ‘Reconsidering national temporalities’, 540 (emphasis in the original).43 John Plamenatz, ‘Two types of nationalism’, in Eugene Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: the

Nature and Evolution of an Idea (London: Edward Arnold 1976), 22–36 (34).44 Richard Hughes, Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time: Hong Kong and Its Many Faces (London:

Andre Deutsch 1976).

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and calendar to establish solidarities that celebrated loyalty to empire. Theprocess of colonizing time, according toGiordanoNanni, ‘entailed for colonizedsocieties worldwide, a series of cultural curfews requiring a collective materialand ideological shift in the understanding of what constituted the permissibletime for each and every activity’.45 The estrangement between the older gener-ation, and their desire for a return to China, and the younger western-educatedgeneration, and their affinities with Britain for class and cultural reasons,46 isillustrative of how the peremptory imposition of an imperial standard of tem-porality has not been willingly embraced by all of Hong Kong’s inhabitantsin its nascent colonial past. By comparison, the return to Chinese sovereigntyand the influx of Mainlanders has created an ostensible sense of Hong Kong’shegemonic temporalities being subverted and re-colonized by inferior tempor-alities from the Mainland.

Tropes of the faecal: (re)racializing Mainlanders

The unease apparent in anti-Mainland mobilizations of Hong Kong’s anxiouscitizenries is consequent on their rejection of the catalogue of aberrant temporal-ities unsettling the ontological securities of the quotidian on which Hong Kongidentity is based. Ontological security, according to Michael Skey, is evidenteither when it is threatened or absent as a result of norms imbibed in places,objects, things and rhythms of social life becoming unsettled or less predict-able.47 Recently, Hong Kong’s anxious citizenry successfully deployed solidarityto preserve their ontological security through mass protests against plannedlegal changes that would have allowed Mainlanders to drive to Hong Kong.But nowhere has this sense of threatened ontological security been more

graphically demonstrated than in the populace’s unapologetic condemnationof Mainlanders’ toiletry practices. The popular news media’s coverage ofMainlanders defecating or urinating publicly on Hong Kong’s upmarket bou-levards racializes Mainlanders as corprophiliac people unembarrassed by thesight and malodour of their solid and liquid excrement. The following inter-viewee’s admissions illustrate this well:

I saw a boy who was about six-years-old in a Hong Kong restaurant. He toldhis parents he needed to urinate and they told him to pee into an empty glass.Wewere so angry! They’re so disgustingly unhygienic as wewere all eating but

45 Giordano Nanni, ‘Time, empire and resistance in settler-colonial Victoria’, Time andSociety, vol. 20, no. 1, 2011, 5–33 (7).

46 Allen Chun, ‘Critical cosmopolitanism in the emergence of cultural modernity: reflec-tions on discursive imagination in Hong Kong and Shanghai’, Postcolonial Studies, vol.16, no. 1, 2013, 46–65 (49).

47 Michael Skey, ‘“A sense of where you belong in the world”: national belonging, onto-logical security and the status of the ethnic majority in England’, Nations and National-ism, vol. 16, no. 4, 2010, 715–33 (720).

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the restaurant manager never told them to leave. The toilet was less than aminute away! Just look at so many of them doing their business on ourstreets. What can we do? (Herman, 38, Hong Kong professional working inGuangdong).

The rhetoric used by this Hong Kong native reinforces the notion of onlyinferior and benighted or, in short, less civilized peoples disposing of theirwastes within full view of others in an unsanitary and degrading way. Thevisual depositing of liquid excrement on culinary accoutrements is deeplyoffensive to the dining etiquette of the bourgeois Hong Kong populace.Such sentiments resonate with the observations of David Inglis that subordi-nate groups within national, racial or class hierarchies are frequently depictedas faecally undisciplined and ‘excrementally libidinous’ in comparison to thesuperior ascendant society.48 This respondent articulates the palpable feelingof invasion by an uncivilized temporality very well:

In Mainland China, they can relieve themselves anywhere and many of themare brought up doing that in public. Their toilet cubicles in China also don’thave doors so they’re used to it. But this is Hong Kong! So many of themalso spit anywhere they like in Hong Kong and it’s like you need to wear a rain-coat when you go out. It’s such a shame, here in Hong Kong, it’s not illegal forthem to defecate or urinate in public. When I see them pee or s*** in Mong Kokor Tsim Sha Tsui, I record it and post my recordings on Vimeo. They hate usHong Kong people so much yet our HKSAR government gives Mainlandersfar too many benefits. Dogs and cats knowwhere the toilets are but theseMain-landers don’t! We are absolutely sick of seeing them using our streets and trainsas toilets! (Mary, 30, Hong Kong professional working in Guangdong).

Indeed, the disgust surrounding open defecation that is an aberration in anymodern city may be a historical construct but urban dwellers fail to realize thatit is often considered anything but humiliating to rural migrants who are newto urban areas.49 Intra-ethnic racisms between Hong Kongers and MainlandChinese can also be based on toiletry time. As the policing of toiletry spaceis concomitant with the regulation of toiletry time,50 the subject here is allud-ing to an aphorism about the confluence between modernity’s regulation oftoiletry time and toiletry space: certain places=certain types of people.51 The

48 David Inglis, ‘Dirt and denigration: the faecal imagery and rhetorics of abuse’, Postco-lonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2002, 207–21 (208).

49 Renu Desai, Colin McFarlane and Stephen Graham, ‘The politics of open defecation:informality, body, and infrastructure in Mumbai’, Antipode, vol. 47, no. 1, 2015, 98–120 (111).

50 David Inglis and Mary Holmes, ‘Toiletry time: defecation, temporal strategies and thedilemmas of modernity’, Time and Society, vol. 9, nos 2–3, 2000, 223–45 (234).

51 Wolfgang Natter and John Paul Jones, III, ‘Identity, space, and other uncertainties’, inGeorges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer (eds), Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernityand Postmodernity (Oxford and New Malden, MA: Blackwell 1997), 141–61.

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thrust of this aphorism conveys understandings of identity that embodycertain assumptions about ethnic origins. The respondent is clearly re-authen-ticating the self-production of an indigenous Hong Kong identity by deploy-ing the symbology of the faecal to position the spatio-temporalities ofCommunist China as primitive. It is, in essence, a subliminal way of distancingHong Kong’s primordial origins from Mainland China.Symbols about nature in general are invariably interpreted by means of the

vernacular of old and familiar aesthetic connotations. Although the vastmajority of Mainlanders visiting or living in Hong Kong do not displaytheir toiletry habits in public, there are strong tendencies for Hong Kongersto form a condescending link between ethnic differences and faecal visibilityin order to construct the modernist distinction between the temporalities ofcivility and primordial incivility. For Inglis and Holmes, the advent of capital-ism in the West heralded a shift towards the regulation of toiletry time inindustrial spaces and a re-acclimatization of bodily rhythms.52 Even as ‘social-ism with Chinese characteristics’ complicates the Marxian narrative ofmodernity, the ascendant society’s tropes of the faecal (re)racialize MainlandChinese bodies as inferior, benighted and poorly suited to the temporalrhythms integral to modernity in Hong Kong’s fast-paced climate of advancedcapitalism. In the framing of the racialized faecal tropes embedded in popularculture and consciousness that present Mainlanders as violent and incapableof becoming like ‘us’, it is evident that, even as the arrival of Mainlanders is theresult of a shift towards economic deregulation, key aspects of ‘old fashioned’racisms, recast in the present time of economic liberalization with China,predate the former colony’s financial dependence on the Mainland.

Downplaying cultural differences in the marketplace

The hitherto discussed cultural and ideological disharmonies quite clearlyresult in a reluctance on the part of Hong Kong citizens to allow Mainlandersto treat the former British colony as if it were any part of China. Bidisha Baner-jee maintains that the initial economic power and importance of Hong Kong atthe time of the resumption of Chinese sovereignty has been eclipsed by theeconomic dominance of China, and urban regeneration being channelled toneighbouring Guangdong on the Mainland.53 Nevertheless, even as HongKong needs Mainlanders to bolster their local economy, authoritarian capital-ism celebrates Mainland China as a life-enhancing asset rather than an aberra-tion to its local identity. In a bid to save Hong Kong’s economy from theeconomic doldrums wrought by the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syn-drome (SARS) in the spring of 2003, travel restrictions were eased to encou-rage economic border crossings. Both Chinese and Hong Kong governments

52 Inglis and Holmes, ‘Toiletry time’.53 Banerjee, ‘What lies within’, 520.

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announced an Individual Travel Scheme in July 2003 whereby Mainland resi-dents from Beijing, Shanghai and eight Guangdong Chinese cities would beallowed to visit Hong Kong on an individual basis. Prior to this, MainlandChinese nationals were only allowed to enter Hong Kong on business visasor as part of organized group visits. The following interviewee (a professionalChinese Communist Party cadre) affirms the valorization of the financialinvestments of a nation’s ‘unequal others’ at the expense of eradicating whatare imagined as inscrutable cultural differences:

China is a world superpower. When Hong Kong encounters any financialproblem, the chief executive [of Hong Kong] just waits for Ah Yeh [阿爷 grand-father, that is, the elderly leaders of the Chinese government] in China to paipang [派糖 pass out sweets, that is, financial help for Hong Kong]. If thecentral government won’t provide financial assistance to Hong Kong, thecity will become an orphan. Why should we need to learn doing businessfrom Hong Kongers? We have our own shortcuts to succeed and earnmoney by taking advantage of the loopholes in the law (Chan, 60, CommunistChinese cadre).

Conversations with Hong Kong businessmen dealing with Mainlandersalso revealed a general sense of disdain and a refusal to endorse what theybelieved were corrupt ways of doing business. While most of the respondentswere not in denial about the lucrative profits derived from doing business inGuangdong, there was a sacrifice involved:

I have a love-hate relationship with China. China is good for my career. But Idon’t know why I can never make myself completely adapt to their ways inGuangdong. It is difficult to live in China in the long term without goingback to Hong Kong. Ever since I suffered from several bouts of severe food poi-soning and explosive diarrhoea, I have switched to using distilled water tobrushmy teeth in China. I also must buy imported food from an internationallyrenowned supermarket (Wing, 40, Hong Kong professional in Guangdong).

A love-hate relationship with China was well articulated by nearly all thirtyHong Kongers working in Guangdong interviewed in 2008. The concomitantacceptance of the profits and trivialization of the culture and ethos of their‘unequal others’ allows for both Chinese factions to clinch business dealswith equanimity. Hong Kongers are certainly cognizant that the Chinese gov-ernment’s cooptation of Hong Kong business elites by according them pos-itions within the government constitutes an ‘unholy alliance’ that seeks toattract investments but remains inimical to democracy.54 From a materialisticand economic standpoint, good intercultural business relationships do notaddress the lingering problem of ethnocentrism or cultural prejudice as

54 Stephan Ortmann, ‘The Umbrella Movement and Hong Kong’s protracted democrati-zation process’, Asian Affairs, vol. 46, no. 1, 2015, 32–50.

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studies of ‘marketplace multiculturalism’ in New Zealand and Britainsuggest.55 Such studies raise questions about visible minorities construed as‘economic assets’ displaying their cultures in public, cultures that should bequarantined if not relegated to the private sphere.56 Likewise, in HongKong, the rhetoric of the ‘locust’ is evocative of desires to impose disciplineover the ‘self-entitled’ Mainlanders rather than to bar them from shoppingareas. In Iam-Chong Ip’s words: ‘The norm upset by the alien others is thenorm of ethnocracy, not that of consumer competence.’ He elaborates:

Ironically, mainlanders are defined as ‘flawed consumers’ not because they donot fulfil the social duties of being active buyers of goods and services that themarket offers. On the contrary, their consumption craze allegedly results inexcessive number, movement, manner and desire, which are deemed to beout of control. The question of mainland visitors is, first and foremost, the ques-tion of affective order of the consumer society of Hong Kong, rather than that ofsocial and cultural differences.57

Thus, even as governments the world over ‘need’ China’s new middle classto prop up their sluggish economies, the subordination of cultural differencesto the overriding economic needs of the marketplace will most likely result inthe exoticization of culture and the reinforcement of prejudice rather than thecosmopolitan acceptance of difference. Hong Kongers are acutely aware of themost visible social impact of the Individual Travel Scheme, namely, a suddenand remarkable increase in Mainland Chinese visitors, including pregnantwomen who are eager to deliver their babies in Hong Kong so as to gainHong Kong citizenship (and passports). This contributes to an increase inthe number of shuangfei children mentioned at the outset of this article, andfails to address intolerance. While living in the Mainland, children generatean insatiable demand for baby powder formula across the border in HongKong, especially in the wake of the Chinese milk scandal in 2008.58 Com-plaints about shortages of infant formula due to Mainland competition wereloudest in the northern part of Hong Kong, which is closest to the Chineseborder. Hong Kongers also fear that the children of Mainlanders will returnto Hong Kong when they reach schooling age, generating mounting pressureon the local government to provide sufficient places in both primary and sec-ondary schools.

55 Gargi Bhattacharyya, ‘Riding multiculturalism’, in David Bennett (ed.), MulticulturalStates: Rethinking Difference and Identity (London and New York: Routledge 1998),252–66; John Lowe, ‘Multiculturalism and its exclusions in New Zealand: the case forcosmopolitanism and indigenous rights’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 4,2015, 496–512.

56 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Introduction’, in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.), India in NewZealand: Local Identities, Global Relations (Dunedin: Otago University Press 2010), 7–18.

57 Ip, ‘Politics of belonging’, 416.58 Gerald Chan, Pak K. Lee and Lai-Ha Chan, China Engages Global Governance: A New

World Order in the Making? (London and New York: Routledge 2012), 126.

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Discussion and conclusion: theorizing Sinophobia in Hong Kong

The current unsatisfactory state of intra-ethnic affairs should not be con-sidered a surprising outcome of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty.To reiterate, as things are, the nostalgia for a return to the halcyon days ofBritish colonialism, the perpetual insecurity concerning the longevity of theformer colony’s economic dependence on the Mainland and paranoiacdread of insufficient measures to curb the influx of Mainland mobilities arepostcolonial formations of Hong Kong’s nationalism clearly inimical to cosmo-politanism’s encouragement of openness. There is, in other words, a compe-tition between Hong Kong’s heightened postcolonial consciousness and thecosmopolitan ideal of peaceful coexistence with other forms of identity,which remains elusive. While Hong Kong citizens are descendants ofChinese who were moulded into a people within the paradigm of a Britishcolony that enjoyed ‘nation-like’ status for over a century and a half, it isquite unlikely that these two factions of ‘Chinese’ will put aside their differ-ences anytime soon. Mainlanders and Hong Kongers are separated by a differ-ing historical consciousnesses; the Sinophobic hostilities levelled againstMainlanders who are allegedly defacing the city with culturally aberrantways are manifestations of prophylactic attempts to circumvent fears andrisks of unequal Others attenuating Hong Kong’s identity. Even as theremay be virtually no distinction between SAR and the former British colony,Hong Kong’s populace castigates Mainlanders who insult Hong Kong’sspaces by behaving as they would in Mainland China.Anti-immigration protagonists rebutting claims that racism motivates their

hostility conveniently invoke the apparent similarities in phenotype andcommon ancestry. Nevertheless, the blame placed on Mainland Chineseculture—rather than biological race—as the obstacle to their integrationshould not disguise the racialized hierarchies Mainlanders occupy in HongKong and the prejudiced intentions of the populace. It is not surprising thatthe former colony’s citizenry occupies superordinate geographies of economicpower vis-à-vis their mainland counterparts. A longitudinal study conductedby Zhuoni Zhang and XiaogangWu confirms that Mainlanders in Hong Kongexperience ethnic penalties in employment, earnings and occupational attain-ment without reaching parity with their native Hong Kong counterparts in thelong term.59 The lack of work experience in Hong Kong is frequently cited asan excuse for employers to discriminate against Mainlanders. As these racia-lized inequalities are no different to the ethnic penalties suffered by immi-grants in western countries, the broader notion of racism advanced byBalibar discussed earlier will be better equipped to cut across the self-

59 Zhuoni Zhang and Xiaogang Wu, ‘Social change, cohort quality and economic adap-tation of Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong, 1991–2006’, Asian and Pacific MigrationJournal, vol. 20, no. 1, 2011, 1–29.

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imposed constrictions of Eurocentric theories of race and map out the compli-cated and dynamic processes of racialization at work in Hong Kong society.The rise in antagonisms towards Mainlanders predicated on cultural differ-

ences should however signal the importance of searching beyond monocausalexplanations of exclusion that are divorced from other sites of inequalities andcultural processes. Reductionist accounts of racism in the international litera-ture have been negatively blamed for reinforcing class differences and econ-omic overdeterminism while lacking the conceptual theories to ferret outthe social processes responsible for changing forms of racialized and ethnicidentity.60 As a result of these inherent weaknesses in accounts emphasizingthe determinacy of structures, theorists of ‘race’ and ethnicity have shiftedtowards theorizing the multiple manifestations of racial and cultural exclusionusing frameworks of postmodernity. As the sociology of racism in Hong Kongis currently in an embryonic stage, the foreseeable benefits of situating the con-fluence of Mainland ethnicity with single causes such as class and gender inHong Kong ought not to be trivialized. A reductionist approach that identifiedpredictable bases of inequalities might be useful in the long term for the pur-poses of understanding institutionalized racism at a more generic, macro levelrather than a specific one.Accounts of the complexity of contemporary economic and social con-

ditions in Hong Kong’s postcolonial context would however benefit by shift-ing the gaze from ‘difference’ to ‘sameness’. Granted that pan-ethnic‘Chinese-ness’ is taken as an essentialist form and frequently elided by theascendant Hong Kong citizenry, future research interventions should comp-lement class analyses through a framework that theorizes the sociologicalinvisibility and strategic essentialisms deployed by Mainlanders in HongKong as ‘survival strategies’. This is of particular significance in relation totranscending the reductionist overarching explanation evident in theoreticalaccounts of ethnicity that emphasize the role of structures in perpetuatingracism, and in which the signifier of colour leads to a narrative of socialclosure and predetermined outcomes. In their work on the racialized Irishin Britain, Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood advocate an epistem-ology of invisibility that identifies the structural contradictions responsiblefor racializing the Irish across the pervasive binaries of ‘dominant versus sub-ordinate’ and ‘oppressor versus oppressed’.61 In a similar vein, Asian andEuropean multicultural societies, following Mac an Ghaill and Haywood’sexamples, could benefit from research that shifts towards theoretical accountsthat can represent racialized minorities displaying the mainstream’s similarphenotypical markers (viz. Chinese-ness) as both the oppressors and

60 Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, Contemporary Racisms and Ethnicities: Social and Cultural Trans-formations (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press 1999), 40.

61 Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood, ‘“Nothing to write home about”: troublingconcepts of home, racialization and self in theories of Irish male (e)migration’, CulturalSociology, vol. 5, no. 3, 2011, 385–402.

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repressed, or as both (rather than either/or) dominant and subjugated. Forcomparison, a focus in Hong Kong on the invisibility and changing contoursof ‘Chinese-ness’ would uncover the myriad ways in which Mainlandersappropriate different versions of ‘Chinese-ness’ as a means of coping withinsecurity. Moreover, by identifying the ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ among Main-land immigrants in Hong Kong, a more intricate connection between subjec-tivities and social attainment might be intertwined in ethnic formationscharacterized by hybridity and cultural syncretism.In closing, perennial debates around immigration and ethnic belonging in

Hong Kong are currently key elements of rapid social and cultural changeswrought by the 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty. The Occupy Central andUmbrella Movement activists remain unfazed and will certainly continue topursue democracy even in the face of greater adversities. Even as the bound-aries between city-state, former colony, nation-state and SAR are subject to con-testation by both Chinese factions who exert rights over the territory in waysthat each find offensive, there will be need for research that maps out the com-plexities of theorizing racism and ethnicity in Hong Kong. This work has soughtto understand themultiple ways inwhich ethnocentric prejudice towardsMain-landers in Hong Kong is not based on colour binaries due to themultiplicity andcomplex interplay of temporal and spatial factors, and modernity in whichracism and xenophobia currently pervade Hong Kong society. While it maybe evident from the empirical data that encounters between Mainland immi-grants in Hong Kong and their ‘hosts’ occur primarily for the sake of economicexpedience, both factions seem intent on maintaining a cautious distance fromeach other’s cultural differences. It is therefore an opportune time for discus-sions that will further the ambiguities we have pointed out surrounding theformer colony’s postcolonial local identity in relation to the unfolding evolutionof the populace’s mental constructs of Chinese ethnicity.

John Lowe is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Applied SocialSciences at City University of Hong Kong. Email: cartesiancircles@gmail.com

Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang is Assistant Professor in the Department of AppliedSocial Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. She earned her doctoratein sociology from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Herresearch interests include the sociology of the middle class, the sociology ofgender and sexualities, globalization and cultural sociology. She is theauthor of The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics and the MarketEconomy (Palgrave 2014) andUnderstanding Chinese Society: Changes and Trans-formations (World Scientific Press 2015). She has also published in China Quar-terly, Higher Education, Asian Journal of Social Science, China: An InternationalJournal and Sociological Research Online. Email: tsangeileen@gmail.com

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