Sebastian Veg

The Rise of “Localism” and Civic Identity in Post-handover Hong Kong: Questioning the Chinese Nation-state

While it was traditionally accepted that Hongkongers shared a form of pan-Chinese cultural identification that did not contradict their local distinctiveness, over the last decade Hong Kong has seen the rise of new types of local identity discourses. Most recently, “localists” have been a vocal presence. Hong Kong has – quite unexpectedly – developed a strong claim for self-determination. But how new is “localism” with respect to the more traditional “Hong Kong identity” that appeared in the 1970s? The present study takes a two-dimensional approach to study these discourses, examining not only their framework of identification (local versus pan-Chinese) but also their mode of identification (ethno-cultural versus civic). Using three case studies, the June Fourth vigil, the 2012 anti-National Education protest and the 2014 Umbrella movement, it distinguishes between groups advocating civic identification with the local community (Scholarism, HKFS) and others highlighting ethnic identification (Chin Wan). It argues that while local and national identification were traditionally not incompatible, the civic-based identification with a local democratic community, as advocated by most participants in recent movements, is becoming increasingly incompatible with the ethnic and cultural definition of the Chinese nation that is now being promoted by the Beijing government.

The limits of representation: Wang Bing's labour camp films

ABSTRACT This article proposes to compare two films by Wang Bing — his documentary He Fengming (2007) and feature film The Ditch (2010) — from the perspective of their implicit ethics of representation. The two films are part of one original project: after its publication in 2001, Wang Bing bought the rights to Yang Xianhuis collection of reportage literature Chronicles of Jiabiangou, devoted to a labour camp in Gansu, where several hundred ‘rightists’ died of famine in 1959–1960. He Fengming, whose husband died in Jiabiangou, was one of his interviewees: her testimony stood out so strongly that Wang Bing used it as material for a stand-alone documentary. This individual testimony, filmed in a markedly undramatic style, contrasts with the theatrical mode adopted by Wang in the 2010 feature film, raising many fundamental questions about the representation of suffering, the conceptualization of history, and the relationship between factual and fictional accounts of history.

Creating a Textual Public Space: Slogans and Texts from Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement

Hong Kongs Umbrella Movement (September–December 2014) represented a watershed in Hong Kongs political culture and self-understanding. Based on over 1,000 slogans and other textual and visual material documented during the movement, this study provides an overview of claims, which are oriented towards an assertion of agency, articulated at different levels: in a universalistic mode (“democracy”), in relation with a political community (Hong Kong autonomy and decolonization), and through concrete policy aims. At the same time, slogans mobilize diverse cultural and historical repertoires that attest the hybrid quality of Hong Kong identity and underscore the diversity of sources of political legitimacy. Finally, it will be argued that by establishing a system of contending discourses within the occupied public spaces, the movement strived to act out a type of discursive democracy. Despite the challenges that this discursive space encountered in interacting with the authorities and the public at large, it represented an unfinished attempt to build a new civic culture among Hong Kongs younger generation.

Testimony, History and Ethics: From the Memory of Jiabiangou Prison Camp to a Reappraisal of the Anti-Rightist Movement in Present-Day China

The memory of the Anti-Rightist Movement has long been a blind spot in Chinese debates, with historiography limited to elite politics and little engagement with the repercussions of the movement at grassroots level. However, the publication of Yang Xianhuis 2003 book, Chronicles of Jiabiangou , marked a turning point. Based on extensive oral history interviews, Yangs book makes a substantive connection between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the establishment of dedicated laojiao camps such as Jiabiangou in Gansu province. Documenting what he claims was a policy of dehumanization, he suggests that intellectuals were far from the only victims of a movement characterized by its extra-legal procedures. Ordinary people were often drawn into it and were more able than intellectuals to resist the legitimizing discourse of loyalty to the Party to which many intellectuals continued to cling. For Yang, the testimonies of the Rightist victims in Jiabiangou provide a fruitful field in which to investigate the breakdown of elementary social trust in society during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Situated ambiguously between oral history and literary intervention, Yangs work has, together with other recent publications such as Tombstone , contributed to reopening the debate on Maoism in Chinese society today.

Anatomy of the ordinary: new perspectives in Hong Kong independent cinema

Hong Kong cinema is generally considered to be in the midst of a crisis brought about by the growing weight of the Chinese market and a loss of cultural identity due to the territorys growing assimilation into the mainland. However, in recent years a group of independent directors, mostly born in the 1970s and 1980s, have sought to redefine the issue of Hong Kong identity while side-stepping both knee-jerk opposition to China and colonial nostalgia. This article proposes a broad survey of independent films made in the past few years in Hong Kong. Highlighting several recurrent themes – working-class lives, cross-border connections, critical reflections on both colonial history and the new connections with China – it suggests that these films lay out an aesthetics of the ordinary to define Hong Kongs distinctiveness. Resisting the spectacular aesthetics of genre films and the hyperbole of the ‘Hong Kong success story’, they probe Hong Kongs everyday experience from the angle of the quotidian and the ordinary.