Guide Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese

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Law Wing Sang provides an alternative lens for looking into Hong Kong's history by breaking away for the usual colonial and nationalist interpretations. Dra.
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It was very dark.

Collaborative Colonial Power - The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese

They went to your triad head for scapegoat. The lived experience of the Walled City was therefore intimately bound up with experiences of crime, corruption and makeshift politics. Nonetheless, in the physical memorialisation of the Walled City on the site of the original habitation — in the form of an open-air museum and walled garden Harter, — this memory is erased.

Although the park preserved several artefacts of the Walled City, such as the old cannons and the structure of the Yamen the official office Kowloon Walled City Park, , the site erases the experiences of crime, corruption and unsanitary conditions from the official record, replacing these experiences with ornate gardens in the style of the early Qing dynasty See Figure 3.

WikiZero - Conservatism in Hong Kong

A government official involved in the demolition plan, interviewed for the project, notes that:. Detailing the collaboration between Hong Kong elites and government officials from both the UK and China, Law argues that a technique of social reproduction has emerged that has kept Hong Kong citizens in a state of subordination.

In a creative analysis incorporating both history and literary studies, Law traces the patterns in both culture and government that demonstrate this persistent form of power brokerage and its impact on social life in Hong Kong. The contest over this physical memorialisation of the Walled City, and its erasure of politically sensitive ideas, mirrors this broader pattern of history and heritage in Hong Kong. Alternative forms of memorialisation have emerged in relation to 4 June — through a yearly vigil in Hong Kong attended by tens of thousands 12 — and towards the Walled City particularly.

Interviews with police officers demonstrate that the lead-up to demolition involved a process in which the physical site of the Walled City became reimagined as a site of tourism. One officer described it as a:. This process signifies a process of untethering from the Walled City as a lived place, and into the realm of cultural memorialisation. Tracing a similar pattern, there is a marked difference between film depictions of the Walled City from the period before demolition and those from the period after.

The Walled City has also deeply influenced the science fiction sub-genre cyberpunk for example, the work of Wilson Gibson , which focuses on the dark side of the future and expresses the anxiety of postmodernism and late capitalism Featherstone and Burrows, : 3 , as well as a range of video games such as Call of Duty Treyarch, , Deus Ex: Human Revolution Eidos Montreal, , Jet Set Radio Future Smilebit, and Guild Wars: Factions ArenaNet, In Hollywood films, and in fiction and video games, the Walled City is presented once more as a space of makeshift culture.

In the process, the idea of the Walled City has become tethered to alternative cultural flows and eddies that have carried it — like a branch on a river — to unpredictable contexts. Japanese consumption of the reimaginings of KWC in colonial Hong Kong is a manifestation of the Orientalist fantasy Ng, : , as well as a nostalgic yearning for Japanese national past Iwabuchi, a : — Opened in , the Kawasaki Warehouse involves a complete reconstruction of a section of the Walled City, including minute details such as dated posters, rustic signs and the inclusion of actual domestic waste collected from Hong Kong households see Figure 4 Ryall, Covering a long wall over two levels, it incorporates intersecting walkways, ramshackle Chinese row-houses, red neon Chinese lettering, hanging balconies, mannequinned sex shows, launderettes and roasted meat sellers — recasting the Walled City into a strange region of consumption, consumerism and nostalgia.

A street from the Walled City has been painstakingly reconstructed from old photographs and street-plans in the midst of a gigantic amusement arcade. It is situated in a huge, bleak warehouse set amidst a flat-grey backdrop of office buildings and train lines — the effect is incongruous and unsettling, like a brown sock tumbling round in a white-wash. The fieldnote below reflects on the experience of entering the building:.

You step forward; before your eyes can adjust, a set of sliding doors zing apart. A sharp hot blood-curdling wail assaults you as you stumble forward. Your heart-rate leaps up, pounding and tentative; bewildered, you step forward again, and find yourself in a dimly-lit, narrow alleyway of Chinese storefronts. Once your eyes adjust, you venture forward again. There, the first signs of incongruity confront you — an elevator, and an escalator. A sickening, lurching feeling descends as you ascend to the next level.

Fieldnote, 18 July The Walled City thereby becomes dehistoricised for nostalgic fantasy and consumption Iwabuchi, b : The distinction between history and memory is blurred in this hyperreal re-creation:. After the initial, heart-rending shock of entry, the sadness of the arcade swims into view. That slightly grubby, greasy tang of stale smoke and broken dreams and small-change capitalism. Nobody looks at the walled city exhibit.

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A staff member tidies busily; the punters make a beeline for the machines. This contradictory co-existence of consumerism and unvarnished social life in some ways reflects a unique configuration of crime, consumerism and culture in Asia Lui, Studies on East Asian popular culture usually position Japan as the producer and other locales such as Hong Kong as the consumers Bridges, ; Iwabuchi, b ; Otmazgin, ; therefore, the reconstruction of the imagined Walled City reverses this cultural flow. Nonetheless, as analyses of cultural memory suggest, the Walled City has also been re-appropriated, reincorporated and re-embedded into everyday life in new and unpredictable ways.

One example of this can be found in the incorporation of the Walled City into youth-led ACG action, comics, gaming practices in Hong Kong. Authored by the writer Yu Yi and illustrated by Danny Szeto, it involves the story of Lok Kwan, a male protagonist and triad member who escapes to the Walled City see Figure 5. Y: Initially, I was targeting people of my age.

I was 30 when I wrote the novel. I wrote about the collective memories of the s. The manga adaption subsequently attracted many secondary school students. This is weird because they were not our target audience.

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The readers are much younger than our expectation. Y: Yes. Even primary school students buy the manga. I once attended a fan event. Fans published 10—20 fan works. Most of them are in their 10s. In the case of COD, this involved the acting out of characters from the comic book in particular locations in Hong Kong — including in the Walled City Park. As you can see the park nowadays has framed our memory in certain limited ways.

The History of Hong Kong

I feel that I have exactly missed the chance to explore KWC in real since it was demolished a few years after I was born. Indeed, in certain circumstances, COD cosplay itself was intended as a reclamation of Hong Kong identity. As Maigo recalls:. KWC is something that Hong Kong has lost. KWC no long existed when I was born. What we know about KWC are all myths.

We can play with many … local elements … Something that is very Hong Kong.

Much more than documents.

This approach is intended to build foundations for a nascent Asian criminology while unsettling the roots of scholarship on crime and culture which tends towards an Anglo-American perspective. First, in contrasting the lived experience of place constituted by people who lived and worked in the Walled City — which frequently features crime and corruption — with the sanitised memorial in its place, the article has drawn attention to the politics of forgetting and memory in Hong Kong.

In this way, the Walled City highlights a complex and fragmentary picture of a highly connected, hyper-mediated and consumer-driven crime-media nexus that has distinctive characteristics. As film historian, So, interviewed for the project, summarises:. KWC is like adding sugar to a cup of coffee: you add a cube of sugar to it and it melts.

Only a tiny piece of concentrated sugar is left. Most aspects of Hong Kong since the s have already merged into the broader environment: the society, the colonial rule, or the general global political economy of the 20th century.


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But there is still something that cannot be dissolved … KWC is the most concentrated essence of Hong Kong … there are always forces of resistance. It is what makes Hong Kong interesting. The multiple ways in which the Walled City has been re-storied and multi-mediated lead to several conclusions pertinent to the study of crime, media and culture in Asia.

First, while the standard toolbox of criminological concepts can be problematic when applied to Asia Lee and Laidler, , the virtual domain has created a level playing field in which there is a clear argument for a common theoretical vocabulary. Second, it is important to understand these lived realities within specific cultural contexts. Hong Kong and Asia are interesting and important sites as they have different forms of youth subcultures and demonstrate the importance of the local — cosplay subcultures for example exhibit both the fluidity of cultural reference points and an anchoring in history.

Third, the study of cultural memory represents a critical meeting point for these processes, demonstrating the need for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives in tapping into these unique rhythms. Tsang documents a total of nine skirmishes over efforts to clear the Walled City in the course of the 20th century.

Despite a legal ruling of habeas corpus over the territory in , which established legal sovereignty, this was never recognised by the Chinese government Tsang, : The YouTube film has been viewed over , times. The first results of each search engine were examined, which included blogs, newspapers, videos and bulletin boards. Official records of KWC were almost absent. The book has never been out of print, and has been translated in Japanese; a second edition was published in Recently, the South China Morning Post ran a graphic of the Walled City that was the most viewed page for several months Carney, ; not long after, Wall Street Journal Asia unveiled a large-scale interactive website including a documentary and video interviews.


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The webpage subsequently topped the webpage Reddit, resulting in tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments. On corruption, politics and triad activity in Hong Kong see Lo , and Chu The 4 June vigil has become one of the defining markers of Hong Kong identity by emphasising freedom of speech and assembly in contrast to the situation in Communist China Vickers, : There have been several documentaries broadcasted by local television stations.

Besides film and television representation, there have been two local theatre productions, Tales of the Walled City , , and One of the Lucky Ones , which represented the utopian and dystopian life in KWC respectively. In online discussions, comments tend to be sympathetic to the residents, with a clear affective resonance inspired by the place.