Decolonisation deferred : Hong Kong identity in historical perspective

The identity of Hong Kong people has created endless debates before the handover of the city from Britain to China in 1997. The colonial historical narrative that understates the importance of Hong Kong’s local culture reveals one fact: the Hong Kong population was indeed highly mobile. Hong Kong, under British rule, was a crucible accommodating both of the antagonistic Chinese identities as it became a refugee society. The international perspective and spirit of cosmopolitanism underlying the ideology of democratic self-government were against both colonialism and class-struggle-style communism. A thorough process of decolonization should be one in which the spirit of independent subjectivity of the colonised can be liberated from the oppressive colonial system. Whether Hong Kong people, during the early colonial time, had a unique identity of their own, or any trace of an emergent local consciousness, is a matter of academic debate.