Demolition Literature: Hong Kong, Taiwan, China

Abstract

The landscapes of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China are fast changing under large-scale neoliberal urban development and infrastructure projects. Wholesale bulldozing of entire communities, cultures and ways of life is a shared predicament, which has galvanized people towards the consideration of what culture means in the local and trans-local context. Anti-demolition movements by urban and rural communities used to be understood merely as spatial justice and housing/living rights movements. Nowadays, these space-based, rights-based movements have taken a cultural turn in discourse and methodology. They are now articulated also in terms of cultural identity politics, heritage preservation, and participatory community building. These protests talk about preserving socio-cultural networks, traditional crafts and industries, markets and streets. Its methods are that of cultural tours, public art, poetry recitals, independent music, gradually consolidating into longer publications, documentaries, films and the creation of community museums. Also, in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, we see increasing numbers of writers and artists engaging in such cultural preservation movements (for lack of a better word), intervening directly at the sites of confrontation, producing art that empowers, inspires and strikes back, generating discourses, histories, chronicles and fantastic imaginaries that consolidate the seeds and desires of change. We see them starting magazines, creating spaces, fighting in elections. Assisted by intensified inter-local interaction in social media and daily life, such art and movements can sometimes grow viral translocally, and subaltern, marginal and quotidian communities in these places now share a heightened awareness about the inter-local nature of injustice, exploitation as well as resistance. Against this context, this paper will comparatively examine relevant literary works, like Hong Kong poetry emerging out of the destruction of local communities, such as Liu Wai-tong’s (廖偉棠) A Spectral Hong Kong Odyssey (2009), Chan Mit’s (陳滅) Market, Go to Hell (2008), Lok Mou’s (洛謀) North of the Island (2010); Taiwanese writer Wu He’s (舞鶴) novel Wu He Danshui (2012), about development drastically transforming Danshui’s physical and libidinal landscapes; and PRC writer Yan Lianke’s (閻連科) personal demolition chronicle, 711 Park: the Last Memento of Beijing (2012), banned in China, published in Taiwan and read also in Hong Kong. This paper will analyze the local and inter-local cultural dynamics or the lack there-of among such works, read for what horizontal Sinophone cultural politics might mean from the subaltern and quotidian perspectives, and question whether or not binaries like China and the periphery becomes less relevant than the relation of people to the state and global capital, urban dominance to rural devastation, and discriminatory localism to minor cultures.