Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture In

THREE Hybridity, Civility, and Othering In Search of Political Identity and Activism in Hong Kong WAI-MAN LAM In the months after June 2019, the protests against the Extradition Bill in Hong Kong fundamentally altered the territory’s image as a place of political apathy. With leaderless, anonymous, and confrontational resistance, the protests also signified an important turn in social unity in Hong Kong, in which the opposing factions wo lei fei fei 和理非非 (peaceful, rational, nonviolent, and no profanity) and yong mo 勇武 (valiance) have stood and fought together without interfering with the other’s approach. As the protests signify important changes in civil society and the local culture, it is worth looking back at the cultural trajectories that have led to these developments. The political culture of Hong Kong has undergone significant changes in recent years, especially around the time of the Umbrella Movement, with the emergence of various brands of localism and activism, as well as enhanced social divisions due to different political beliefs and strategies in pursuing democratization in Hong Kong. Using the postcolonial concepts of hybridity and othering, this chapter reviews the development of political identity and political activism in Hong Kong from colonial times up to the period of the Umbrella Movement.1 It assumes that the hybrid political culture of Hong Kong nourished during colonial times has created room for the growth of a distinctive dual Hong Kong identity 1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the conference “Sunflowers and Um- brellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong,” organized by the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, on 16 and 17 March 2018. The author wishes to thank Professor Thomas Gold and Profes- sor Sebastian Veg for their kind invitation, and the participants of the conference for their helpful comments. The author would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. IEAS-Sunflowers and Umbrellas - text.indd 68 9/4/20 3:48 PM Hybridity, Civility, and Othering 69 after the territory’s return to China. The local Hong Kong identity would also unavoidably be internally inconsistent and disunited with strong tendencies to “otherize the Other” because of its multiple and truncated cultural sources. With a focus on the development of political activism, this chapter unravels the meaning and significance of the narratives of civil disobedience and yong mo as political strategies during the period of the Umbrella Movement in late 2014. I argue that the strategies of civil disobedience and yong mo, differentiated into negotiative activism, asser- tive-expressive activism, and yong mo activism, with their acceptance of confrontation and militancy as political strategies in pursuing democratization, signify important deviations in Hong Kong’s political culture marked by depoliticized inclinations and civility, and the dual identity of Hong Kong Chinese. The brands of activism and their dissensions are considered natural developments in a historically hybrid political culture. The budding tendencies of confrontation in the brands of activism at that time, nevertheless, articulated the activists’ collective reflections on the necessary actions to be taken to reinstate Hong Kong’s constitutional ide- als and reconstruct the local Hong Kong identity. The following analysis is based on interviews with protest participants and various published sources. Political Identity, Decolonialization, and Activism Whereas the process of identity construction takes place in every society, it is a particularly interesting subject of study in colonial and postcolonial societies (e.g., Anderson 1991; Derrida 1981; Smith 2001; Triandafylli- dou 1998). This chapter conceptualizes identity from a poststructuralist perspective as defining the “one who is” by identifying the “sameness” of individuals through which they are recognized as members of a com- munity. In that, the process of self-definition necessarily defines the “one who is not,” or the Other, and how the oneself is different from the Other. The definition stresses the self-perception of the uniqueness of oneself. Depending on the perceived extent of threat to one’s identity, one may or may not feel the need to eliminate others because of the perceived uniqueness and difference. Scholars have pointed out that colonialism rules by both physical and ideological forces. To maintain control, colonizers develop systems or policies that enable their power to extend over the colonized territory and people. Ideologically, colonizers cultivate belief systems beneficial to their rule and maintain a hierarchy of cultural superiority. Of relevance here, such belief systems are often depoliticized and denationalized, and, in the name of saving souls, aim to make the indigenous people more IEAS-Sunflowers and Umbrellas - text.indd 69 9/4/20 3:48 PM 70 Wai-man Lam “civilized”—that is, more like the colonizers. The term civility, in the European sense, refers to values such as dignity, respect, politeness, and tolerance. As some would argue, these values aim at producing a peaceful coexistence with others, including the colonizers (Haiven 2017). Thus, despite the ethical values, civility is an important ideological category that helps depoliticize the indigenous people and facilitate social stabil- ity in colonial rule. Citing Frantz Fanon, Glen Coulthard argues that the colonized are trained to elicit the colonizers’ recognition by adopting their standards. Revolutionary moments come only when the colonized reject the colonial politics of recognition and start to look upon and/or rebuild their own traditions as a source of self-empowerment. The struggle leads them to strive for a new sense of self and a postcolonial political order (Coulthard 2014; Haiven 2017). Decolonization thus involves conscious reflection, adoption, and/or rejection of the values, including civility, socialized by former colonizers and the reconstruction of one’s personal identity in terms of his or her relationship with politics and the nation. In reality, decolonization is always a complex story. Under British rule, Hong Kong was depoliticized and fed with a strong sense of political powerlessness. Civility and the rule of law had been cultivated by the British as important elements of the colonial order in the society. Although Hong Kong carries a tradition of political activism, political radicalism was minimal until the protests against the Extradition Bill in 2019 (e.g., Lam 2004; Szeto 2004). While political activism signifies the readiness to participate in politics, which may or may not aim at bring- ing about fundamental social and political changes, political radicalism refers to the beliefs, critiques, or actions of people that advocate complete and fundamental social and political changes to the current value systems and structures (Dictionary.com; Oxford Dictionaries). The latter entails the idea that political change has to “come from the root” (Vocabulary. com) and includes a readiness to participate in illegal, and sometimes violent, political action targeting thorough social and political changes (Moskalenko and McCauley 2009, 239–60). It should also be noted that radicalism is different from extremism. Being a contested concept, radicalism has been a signifier of mainly left-wing progressive, liberal, and prodemocracy political forces. It is affiliated with a progressive reform- ism rather than utopian extremism, “whose glorification of mass violence radicals generally rejected” (Bötticher 2017, 74). Although radicalism is critical of authoritarianism and outdated political order, it is selective on the use of political violence. It is also emancipatory in nature, relatively tolerant of different ideas, and seeks to extend human rights, as com- pared to extremism that considers violence as legitimate and conformity as desirable. As such, radicalism, although often stigmatized, bears no IEAS-Sunflowers and Umbrellas - text.indd 70 9/4/20 3:48 PM Hybridity, Civility, and Othering 71 essential link to terrorism and may be considered as legitimate resistance to corrupt regimes (Bötticher 2017). Notably, Hong Kong was denationalized along with being depoliticized. The development of Chinese nationalism had been highly discour- aged by the colonial government (e.g., Morris and Vickers 2015, 305–26). While the Western world was set as an exemplary to colonial Hong Kong, China was the opposite. By the time of the political handover in 1997, Hongkongers had already acquired a hybrid ethnic identity with elements of Chineseness, Westernness, localness, and cosmopolitanism. The Hong Kong identity, as described by Homi Bhabha, is a cultural hybridity that is far from univocal or unambiguous, and which has access to two or more sources. Such an identity is both internally contentious and unstable, but is facilitative of new outlooks (Bhabha 1994; 1996, 87–106). So, one may imagine, since the colonial identity construction was suc- cessful in Hong Kong, the reconstruction of a politicized, empowered, and national self has been difficult. Indeed, the series of political incidents that besieged the two decades of posthandover Hong Kong are the histories of Hongkongers making choices among different ethnic identities, and rediscovering their relationship with politics and how much they would value the key beliefs culturally constructed by the colonizers and selec-

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