‘You have to fight on your own’: Geopolitics, self-alienation and the new Hong Kong nationalism (original) (raw)

The Umbrella Movement was an unprecedented event in the polity’s post-handover history. During the era of Chinese sovereignty Hong Kong’s vibrant civil society has regularly taken to the streets to defend local rights and freedoms. However, while many people have joined previous protests, the Umbrella Movement’s novelty lay in the willingness of participants to take civil disobedience in huge numbers. This, in turn, reflects a deep and on-going politicisation within Hong Kong society. A key expression of this is the increasing stress of many on their Hong Kong identity as something distinctive that cannot be reduced to ‘being Chinese’. Many of the ‘new Hong Kongers’ form part of a generation that have only known Chinese rule, yet feel deeply alienated from it, seeing it as a threat to their way of life. Populist political currents have emerged within this cultural and societal context. Advocating independence of Hong Kong as a city-state, they are fiercely hostile to what they call the ‘mainlandization’ of the polity, and have promoted anti-migrant discourses and direct actions that have led to accusations of xenophobia. Drawing on unstructured, in-depth interviews with participants in the Umbrella Movement, who had varying levels of activity and diverse political affiliations, this paper explores these developments through a revised conception of Benedict Anderson’s theory of the imagined community. The chapter argues that this deeply alienated ideological form of ‘localist’ has been constituted geopolitically by the nature of Hong Kong’s combined development with the Chinese Mainland.