Personal Biography

Ken Staples is a Ph. D. student at Edith Cowan University Western Australia, where he is researching the relationship between ‘hybridity’ and Hong Kong Chinese culture.  Ken lived and worked in Hong Kong for twenty years before migrating to Australia.  Since arriving in  Australia, he has completed a Masters Degree in Media Studies.  From 1995 to 1996, Ken was employed as Editorial Assistant for the academic journal Continuum.

Hong Kong culture: hybrid, bicultural, multicultural, or a continuing renewal.

By

Kenneth C. Staples

Hybridity has commanded a particular position in the commentaries of post colonial studies.  It has been linked with issues such as creolisation, in-betweeness, diasporas and liminality, with the mobility and crossovers of ideas and identities generated by colonialism.  Ania Loomba illustrates this situation in Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998), where she argues, some recent debates will serve to illustrate there are widely divergent ways of thinking about these issues [hybridity].  Robert Young reminds us that the hybrid is technically a cross between two different species and that therefore the term hybridisation evokes both the botanical notion of inter-species grafting and the “vocabulary of the Victorian extreme right” (Young, 1995:10) which regarded different races as different species. However, in post-colonial theory, hybridity is meant to evoke all those ways in which this vocabulary was challenged and undermined.  Even as imperial and racist ideologies insist on racial difference, they catalyse crossovers, partly because not all that takes place in the ‘contact zones’ can be monitored and controlled, but sometimes also as a result of deliberate colonial policy (Loomba, 1998, p.173).

Loomba gives examples of “deliberate colonial policy” (1998) used to manipulate cultural outcomes by the means of hybridisation.  She relates to the “colonial education policies which aimed to create Europeanised natives, or to use Macaulay’s words, a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and intellect” (1998).  However, Loomba’s argues that, “the underlying premise was, of course, that Indians can mimic but never exactly reproduce English values, and that their recognition of the perpetual gap between themselves and the real thing will ensure their subjection” (1998).  Another example is of “an early nineteenth-century Colombian, Pedro Fermín de Vargas, [who] actually advocated a policy of interbreeding between whites and Indians in order to hispanicise and finally extinguish Indians” (1998).

In Hong Kong, the British Government never formulated a “deliberate colonial policy“ to either create Europeanised Hong Kong Chinese through a mandatory education protocol, or, to extinguish the Hong Kong Chinese through an interbreeding programme with whites.  In general, the British Government had “little intention of transforming [the] local social structure” (Postiglione & Tang w/- Ting, 1997, p.5) of Hong Kong throughout its tenure as colonial ruler.  This policy was transmitted on through its local colonial administration, which “was known for practicing limited government, especially concerning matters in the Chinese society”, (1997).  Also there is no evidence that the mass of Hong Kong Chinese people have ever chosen to “mimic . . ... . English values” (Loomba, 1998, p.173) and set themselves apart from their own culture.

Frederic Jameson’s and Ackbar Abbas’s writings appear to reject the theories that cultural mixing results in cultural assimilation or cultural hybridity, because they see culture as being dynamic.  Any changes to cultures through additions, deletions, or any other modifications to the totality of socially transmitted behaviour patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought, within a community or population, they say, results in the expansion of a culture, to create a new norm.

Ackbar Abbas in Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1998) argues that Hong Kong culture, through its history, and social development, is a unique culture.

It is true that in a sense Hong Kong did have a history before 1841, when it was ceded to the British; there are records of human settlement on the island going back to at least to the Sung Dynasty; but the history of Hong Kong, in terms that are relevant to what it has become today, has effectively been a history of colonialism, (Abbas, 1998, p.2).

Abbas‘s arguments relate to the change of cultural space through time.  To highlight his thoughts he cites a part of Frederick Jameson's essay “on post-modernism, about the new status of culture in relation to social life today”, (1998, p.7). 

Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism, it is not necessary to imply its disappearance or extinction.  Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture through the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life - from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of psyche itself - can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorized sense, (Jameson,1991, p.47-48).

Abbas reiterates Jameson’s words in applying the same theory to Hong Kong culture, stating,

in the case of Hong Kong, there has indeed been “an expansion of culture throughout the social realm” amounting to an “explosion”.  We are witnessing certainly not the disappearance of culture, but “some original yet untheorized” form of culture, (Abbas, 1998, p.7).

Jameson and Abbas’s embodiment of the social aspects of life, into the   elements that are akin to changing culture, introduces a serendipitous component into the structuring of culture.  Many changes of social conditions are not as the result of predetermined strategic planning, but are the result of an amalgamation of events that arise from spontaneous and sporadic actions to which remedial courses are implemented, and which they in themselves may require other changes.  Jameson’s and Abbas’s arguments on culture cannot include hybrid cultures, as according to Loomba, the hybridisation of culture occurs through deliberate policies which incorporate planned strategies with known outcomes.   

Robert Young in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995) describes hybridity as “a disruption and forcing together of any unlike living things, grafting a vine or a rose on to a different root stock making difference into sameness”, (Young, 1995, p.26).  Although this statement explains ‘hybridity’ in its simplest form, it also cognates to a forced implementation, similar to Loomba’s examples of hybridisation associated with colonial rule.  Young continues, “hybridity is a making one of two distinct things, so that it becomes impossible for the eye to detect the hybridity”, [the separate constituents] (1995).

Young also explores the argument that hybridisation can also sever a single object and turn it into two, turning sameness into difference. 

Hybridity thus makes difference into sameness and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different…. Hybridity thus consists of a bizarre binate operation, in which each impulse is qualified against the other, forcing momentary forms of dislocation and displacement into complex economies of agonistic reticulation.  This double logic, which goes against the convention of rational either/or choices, but which is repeated in science in the split between the incompatible coexisting logics of classical and quantum physics, could be said to be characteristic of the 20th-century, as oppositional dialectical thinking was of the nineteenth.  Hybridity thus operates within the same conflictual structures as contemporary [cultural] theory.  Both repeat and reproduce the sites of their own cultural production whose discordant logic manifests itself in structural repetitions, as structural repetition” (Young, 1995, pp.26-27). 

Young's statement can be interpreted that, the replication of hybridisation continues the line of the hybridised product, but it can also be argued that continual hybridised fusion can make new elements.  An extension of the argument along these lines can question whether cultural hybridity is a fixed, or a dynamic state.  As a fixed state, the hybridised cultural product will continue to be seen as a hybridised product, a mixture of two or more elements which, although united, are still recognised for their separateness.  In a dynamic state the hybridised product is seen as a welding of two or more elements into a new whole with no recognised separation, and so will be seen as a new culture.  It could be argued that Hong Kong Chinese culture, as a dynamic culture, has, and continues to absorb contemporary technological  artifacts, social, and political ideas and behaviours, from its exposure to other cultures during, and post colonisation.  The aggregation of modern transportation and communication systems, the evolution from the local social/economic psyche to the global, and the adoption of a democratic ideology into the local political arena presents Hong Kong culture as a ‘real-time’ culture, a culture which is coincident with change. 

Young also examines the history of the word ‘culture’.  He states that the English word ‘culture’ originates “from the Latin words cultura and colere, which had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, attend, protect, honour and worship”, (Young, 1995, p.30).  The ‘inhabit’ meaning of the Latin cultura is particularly interesting, in that the Latin word for ‘inhabit’ is colonus,

from which the [English] derive the word ‘colony’- so, we could say, colonization rests at the heart of culture, or culture always involves a form of colonization, even in relation to its conventional meaning as the tilling of soil.  The culture of land has always been, in fact, the primary form of colonization; the focus on the soil emphasizes the physicality of the territory that is coveted, occupied, cultivated, … and made unsuitable for nomadic tribes (Young, 1995, p.31).

This linkage between the inhabitance/colonisation of land and the formation of culture, again introduces the argument that culture is dynamic.  In that, the movement of a group of people to inhabit/colonise land different to their land of origin, will through their association with the new land, create a new culture.   Hong Kong's population is a mobile population, stemming from the migration of Chinese people from the mainland to Hong Kong, which continued until the Japanese occupied Hong Kong in 1941.   During 1941 and 1945 many Hong Kong residents fled the colony, and the population, which was around 1,600,000 before the occupation, reduced to around 650,000.  Within six months of the Japanese surrender in August 1945 the population numbers were back to over one million and they continued to increase with the influx of people fleeing the fighting on the mainland between the Nationalist and the Communist armies.  “The flow of refugees continued after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in October 1949, and Hong Kong's population passed the 2 million mark in 1950” (Skeldon, 1994, p.22).  After 1950 the flow of refugees from the mainland to Hong Kong was drastically curtailed through “the exercise of close control on the Chinese side of the border” (Dwyer, 1971, P.2). 

As well as the localised population movements, Hong Kong Chinese have mobilised internationally, they are in fact a borderless community.  Today Hong Kong Chinese communities reside in Australia, Canada, the United States, Britain and many other countries.  This diaspora has lead to a globalisation of Hong Kong Chinese culture.  Graham Johnson’s essay, Hong Kong Immigration and the Chinese Community in Vancouver (1994) describes the residential concentration of the Chinese population in Vancouver.  Prior to the 1960s, the Chinese Community was largely restricted to an area of the city known as Chinatown and the adjacent neighbourhood of Strathcona.   Johnson argues that

from the late 1960s, the spatial definition of the Chinese Community became less clear.  There were two broad consequences of increasing Chinese immigration in Vancouver region after 1967.  On one hand Vancouver’s Chinatown area underwent commercial revival and, on the other, the Chinese population of Vancouver became increasingly residentially dispersed. . . . The Chinese Community was no longer bounded by a particular spatial definition; from the 1970s it became more complex and its population more scattered.  There were aspects of the developing Chinese Community in Vancouver (and Canada's Chinese communities elsewhere) that were genuinely new, but equally there were strong links with the past. (Johnson, 1994, pp.125-127)

The new Hong Kong Chinese migrants to Canada bring with them their consumer behaviours that they acquired in Hong Kong during the 1980s, when affluence grew within the ‘Territory’.  In Vancouver these consumer behaviours are especially noticeable through a growth in Hong Kong Chinese restaurants.  Johnson extrapolates that “the standard of Cantonese cuisine in Vancouver is very high, and distinguished Hong Kong chefs have been recruited from Hong Kong by newly established restaurants that are either branches of Hong Kong restaurants, or restaurants using famous Hong Kong names”. (1994, p.132)  The new consumer patterns have created a reverse effect to the residential phenomenon, in that many of the Hong Kong Chinese businesses have come together to form what could be seen as a new Chinatown.  This new Chinatown has transformed the suburban municipality of Richmond, which was until the 1980s a rural suburb, into a thriving urban business and residential area.

Estimates are that its population may be one-third Chinese.  Chinese businesses of all kinds abound.  There are shopping malls that have been deliberately created in the image of Hong Kong commercial practices by entrepreneurs of Hong Kong origin.  In addition to attractive consumer goods, such as furniture and clothing, there are stores that sell electronic goods such as Chinese-language laser disks for karaoke, videos produced in Hong Kong, Hong Kong books, magazines, and newspapers, and Chinese herbal remedies.  Such malls cultivate a Hong Kong ambience, which includes late-night opening, even on Saturdays.  Two local radio stations and one television channel carry programs in Cantonese.  It is easy to be quickly transported to a Hong Kong atmosphere made all the more authentic by the sight of the daily Cathay Pacific flight landing at the nearby Vancouver international airport. (1994, p. 133)  

Although these diasporic borderless communities of Hong Kong Chinese are situated outside of Hong Kong, they still maintain strong links with their former home.  Chan Kwok Bun in Ethnicity Paradox: Hong Kong Immigrants in Singapore, (1994) relates on the strength of Hong Kong migrants’ identification with Hong Kong, even though settled into their new countries of residence.  He states that,

ties with Hong Kong, be they social and economic, are never completely severed. Some of our informants reported that they are still maintaining two households, one in Singapore the other Hong Kong.  Others were “astronaut” families, with one spouse, usually the husband, shuttling between two places….  Most of the spouses were husbands who continued to work at better paid jobs in Hong Kong; most of them had no immediate plans to relocate to Singapore.  Still others had not completely relinquished the hope of migrating yet again to another preferred country, which might well be back to Hong Kong itself, depending on circumstances . . . after 1997. (Chan, 1994, p.316)

Many Hong Kong migrants undertake to return to Hong Kong for employment purposes after migration to some other country. Bernard P. Wong in Hong Kong Immigrants in San Francisco (1994) describes the modern Hong Kong Chinese migrant.  He says,

socially, the Hong Kong Chinese in San Francisco do not constitute a homogeneus group.  Differentiation is apparent in terms of social classes.  Some Hong Kong Chinese can be considered as belonging to the upper echelons of American society…. Many Hong Kong immigrants are highly educated or have specialised training…. After gaining the resident or citizens status, professionals or businessmen may travel back to Hong Kong or even China for high paid jobs or to conduct business.  The mind-set of the Hong Kong immigrants is thus more cosmopolitan and international.  Their social [and business] network[s] extend beyond the confines of the traditional ethnic enclave. (Wong, 1994, p.253)  

It appears from both Wong and Chan’s texts that Hong Kong migrants retain a strong association with their place of origin, and a global attitude to residency based on economic and safety factors.

Conclusion

In the case of Hong Kong Chinese culture, I find that the traditional arguments citing colonial rule as justification for a culture being labelled as hybrid, is not truly supportive.  The method of the colonial acquisition of Hong Kong, through ceding, rather than conquering the actual territory, and the relatively small number of indigenous people resident in Hong Kong Island that were directly affected by the change of sovereignty are substantial differences to the colonisation norm.  These differences, which have enabled an administration policy to be employed of “being lenient, [even] if discriminatory at times”, (Postiglione & Tang w/- Ting, 1997, p.5) has not forcibly alienated the Chinese community in Hong Kong from their chosen culture. 

The modus operendi described by Loomba to hybridise through education, or, extinguish by interbreeding the cultural identities of colonial subjects, were never policies used by the British Government during its colonial rule of Hong Kong.  In fact, in education, both the Chinese and English media continue to be used as major instructional languages within both schools and universities, even since the transfer of sovereignty to China.  The interbreeding between Hong Kong Chinese and British expatriates was never officially encouraged or discouraged.  In the early days of colonial rule intimate fraternisation between the two races was an infrequent occurrence, “each community pursued [its] own way of life largely independent from the other”, (Hong Kong Government Press, 1967, p.262).  Over many years “the old traditional practice of European and Chinese communities living apart continued in Hong Kong and was accepted”, (1967).  Regardless of the reasons that can be attributed to this practice, such as the economic differences between the Europeans and the Chinese, it did help to maintain a separation of the two cultures, as they both independently developed into Hong Kong Chinese, and Hong Kong European cultures.

Most commentators on the Chinese migration from Mainland China into Hong Kong cite various military conflicts and political changes as the reasons for the diaspora.  However, it is also safe to assume, that within these populations, many people felt some affiliation with the structure of the administration in Hong Kong which gave opportunities for people to trade freely and exercise their vocational skills.  Benjamin K. P. Leung in Perspectives on Hong Kong Society  (1996) recognises similarities existing in the goals of the Chinese and European populations of Hong Kong, with both cultures being,

largely . societ[ies] of sojourners.  Both Europeans and Chinese came to . . [Hong Kong] to make fast and easy money for a better life in their respective countries of origin, (Leung, 1996, p.49).

The similar goals of the Chinese and European populations of Hong Kong tended to reduce the emotional fervour, generated through issues of disputed land ownership and sovereignty, and consequently reduced the immediate importance of cultural issues.

Hong Kong Chinese live successfully in an environment dominated by both Chinese and Western cultures, but this does not necessarily mean that their own culture has been hybridisised.   Lynn Pan likens the Hong Kong Chinese to the ‘treaty-port’ Chinese of “pre-1949 Shanghai . . . . who succeed[ed] in becoming truly bicultural”, (Pan, 1990, p.373).  But, she also states that Hong Kong Chinese “Chineseness . . . . is unlike anything you will find in China proper.  It is sui generis, fitting neither overseas Chinese nor the ancestral Chinese mould”, (1990, p.373).   Pan’s suggestion that Hong Kong Chinese are “bicultural” (1990) is in reference to their ability to operate both within their own culture, and within the other dominant culture in Hong Kong, the British/European culture, without demeaning, or diminishing their own culture.

Pan also discusses the many different cultures that make up the Hong Kong population, and how they pursue their different linguistic, social, and culinary preferences, but are also an integral part of the Hong Kong community.  This situation proffers Hong Kong as a multicultural society, similar to the way Australia is domestically and internationally presented.  The experience of the Hong Kong multicultural environment has been carried overseas, where Hong Kong Chinese have resettled globally and live successfully within a host of other cultures.  Graham Johnson and Bernard P. Wong, describe how Hong Kong Chinese in Canada have come out of their enclave way of living, and how the modern Hong Kong Chinese migrant in San Fransisco has permeated American society.  Yet, within these associations with other cultures, Hong Kong Chinese maintain the multicultural ideal through strong cultural links with their country of origin.  

Frederick Jameson’s and Akbar Abass’s theories on cultural expansion disconnects the labelling process from culture theorising.  They indicate that  alteration to a culture does not change a culture’s perceived status, but results in an expansion of that culture.  Hong Kong is a place of changes, all of which have cultural influence.  Jameson’s and Abass’s theories embrace change through time, and recognise all of the ingredients that make up culture.  Their perception of culture is of it being dynamic and able to accept change, which seems to be a good fit for Hong Kong’s historical volatility, and for its changing future.

Bibliography

Abbas, Ackbar. (1998). Hong Kong: Culture and the politics of disappearance. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Chan, K. B. (1994). "The Ethnicity Paradox: Hong Kong Immigrants in Singapore", in Reluctant exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the new overseas Chinese, Skeldon, ed. New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc..

Dwyer, D. J. (1971) Asian urbanization: a Hong Kong casebook. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Hong Kong 1966. (1967). Hong Kong: Report for the year 1966. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Government Press.

Jameson, Frederic, (1991). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New York: Verso.

Johnson, G. (1994). "Hong Kong immigration and the Chinese community in Vancouver", in Reluctant exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the new overseas Chinese, Skeldon, ed. New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc..

Leung, Benjamin, K. P. (1996). Perspectives on Hong Kong society.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Loomba, A. (1998). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.

Pan, Lynn. (1990). Sons of the yellow emperor: The story of overseas Chinese. London: Mandarin.

Postiglione, G., & Tang, J. with Ting, W. (1997). "Transforming  Hong Kong's global identity", in Hong Kong's reunion with China, Postiglone and Tang, eds. New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc.

Skeldon, R. (1994). "Hong Kong in an international migration system", in Reluctant exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the new overseas Chinese, Skeldon, ed. New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc.

Wong, B. P. (1994)  “Hong Kong immigrants in San Francisco” in Hong Kong’s reunion with China: the global dimensions. Postiglione, G. A. & Tang, J. T. H. (eds). New York: M. E. Sharpe.

Young, R. J. C. (1995). Colonial desire: hybridity in theory, culture and race. London: Routledge.