Decolonizing Global Modernity: Urban Cultural Movement in Hong Kong

Abstract

Expressions like ‘Empire’ (Hardt and Negri) and ‘The New Imperialism’ (Harvey) have tried to associate aspects of colonization and imperialism to globalization and neoliberalism. There is abundant scholarship on the early ‘effective’ practice of neoliberal economic policies by authoritarian governments, but it is difficult to associate neoliberalism with ‘colonial’ implications in a convincing manner beyond the rhetorical, theoretical gesture. Neoliberalization is a highly contested process everywhere, including Hong Kong, but the colonial legacy has made the recognition and articulation of resistance significantly more difficult in the Hong Kong mainstream discourse. The Hong Kong case from the 1980s to now demonstrates better than most places how a colonial form of governance, which trickily continues in large measure after the 1997 sovereignty change, allows its conglomerate of institutional and business elite more clout to glocalize neoliberalism, and thus, effect a much more seamless transition from colonial to global modernity. This paper attempts to show how the transition from ‘colonial’ to ‘global’ exploitation actually operates on the discursive and practical levels and examines why ‘colonial-like’ injustice can happen again and again to the once colonized population with increasing mainstream consent. It also examines how the obstruction to democratization and the mainstream inability to cognate decolonization as a relevant process are related to the alignment of local liberal democratic discourses with the neoliberal agenda. This process is illustrated through the mainstream Hong Kong failure to understand the decolonization discourse produced by the Star Ferry and Queen’s Pier movement, which is also in many ways an anti-neoliberal movement. As Arif Dirlik has observed elsewhere, earlier struggles against colonialism are easily ‘naturalized’ into a history of global modernity defined by global capitalism, and claims to alternatives disappear from this teleological history. If colonial imaginaries have been uncritically rearticulated in post 1997 Hong Kong global city redevelopment projects, how then can a postcolonial rethinking of local culture and heritage preservation movements help to articulate critical insights about neoliberal global city competition and culture-led urban redevelopment in the present context?