In the Name of Stability and Prosperity: Place Identity in Hong Kong and the Anti-Cultural Revolution Discourse in the KMT’s Popular Magazine

Abstract

The Cultural Revolution (CR) is often depicted as ‘the Other’ in Hong Kong’s identity formation during the 1960s and 1970s, with the main role being assigned to the benevolent colonial state, but this depiction overlooks the CR’s catalysation of local ideological conflicts between Left and Right newspapers. Situated in the tradition of studies on modern Chinese newspapers, this article scrutinises the interpretation of the CR in an unofficial KMT periodical, Popular Magazine (PM). It focuses on three salient events: the 1967 riots, China’s membership of the United Nations, and the New Leftist campaign ‘Learning about China, Caring about Society’. The KMT’s intellectual sources (e.g., the Three Principles of the People), the article shows, became comprehensible in light of PM’s own priorities as counterattacks on the local Left/New Left, consolidation of local Chinese identification, and resolution of colonial injustices. PM’s advocacy of pro-KMT national identification in the name of promoting a place identity based on ‘stability and prosperity’, as well as its anti-Communist mission, developed in a process of dialectical interaction with ‘the Other’ (i.e., the CR) while negotiating colonialism. This identity discourse compels us to rethink the pro-colonial and homogenous construction of identity discourse in Hong Kong.