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I will first look at different concepts that can be applicable to the population departure from Hong Kong. Migration experts have carried out studies that more or less echo the government interpretation of the reasons for the emigration that occurred in Hong Kong immediately before 1997. In the introduction to his anthology Reluctant Exiles?: Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas Chinese (1994), geographer Ronald Skeldon suggests that the departure of a group of Chinese from Hong Kong before the Handover was due mainly to socio-political factors – the sovereignty change – as ‘there [were] indeed real fears’.5 More precisely, those were the fears of the communist state.6 Yet if we read such population outward movement as an aftermath of socio-political instability, the most recent emigration from Hong Kong could simply be a

continuation of the en masse displacement of Chinese from Mainland China that started almost a century ago, when China began to be involved in major political events which continued throughout most parts of the twentieth century. We may notice that these historic incidents that affected civilians’ lives occurred in almost every decade, such as Chinese Civil Wars (1927-1937, 1945-1949), Chinese participation in the World War II (1939-1945), the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949), Chinese participation in the Korean War (1950-1953), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and the Tiananmen Massacre (1989).

Skeldon opines that there were also other reasons, most notably economic factors, for this group of ethnic Chinese to leave Hong Kong before 1997 and reside elsewhere. They would fit better in the category of sojourners because of their belief that they would return, while still some other people could be classified as ‘willing exiles’, who took advantage of the economic globalism and sought for opportunities elsewhere through resettlement.7 In sum, Skeldon highlights that emigration from Hong Kong before the Handover was not solely due to socio-political reasons and the nature of such population outward movement was more complicated than it seemed to be. His question about Hong Kong migrants as ‘reluctant exiles’ remains ‘not proven’ because ‘they are exiles, but they are not impelled to move’.8

Skeldon assures us that the nature of human geographical mobility depends to a large extent on the events before the people’s move or the future they forecast. Apart from ‘sojourn’ and ‘exile’ that the author highlights, there may then be other concepts that are also helpful in interpreting such a human mobility away from Hong Kong.

In ‘Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon’, John Durham Peters defines these three concepts of mobility, clearly having an anchorage in another

contestable concept of ‘home’.9 He points out that while ‘diaspora’ and ‘exile’ suggest ‘displacement from a center’, ‘nomadism’ ‘dispenses altogether with the idea of a fixed home or center’.10 According to Peters, ‘diaspora’ strikes a balance between ‘exile’ (which signifies a desire for ‘home’ that is far away at the moment) and ‘nomadism’ (which implies the ‘home’ being everywhere).11 He argues that as ‘diaspora’ implies being tolerant of the ‘perpetual postponement of homecoming and the necessity […] of living among strange lands and peoples’,12 it should be the superior choice among the three concepts.

Naficy hinges his definitions for the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘exile’ on ‘homeland’ instead, and distinguishes them as follows:

Diaspora, like exile, often begins with trauma, rupture, and coercion, and it involves the scattering of populations to places outside their homeland. Sometimes, however, the scattering is caused by a desire for increased trade, for work, or for colonial and imperial pursuits. Consequently, diasporic movements can be classified according to their motivating factors. […] Unlike the exiles whose identity entails a vertical and primary relationship with their homeland, diasporic consciousness is horizontal and multisited, involving not only the homeland but also the compatriot communities elsewhere.13

While these concepts and their definitions may help us understand the nature of the geographical mobility of Hong Kongers, they nonetheless are all built upon other concepts, for example, ‘home’, ‘homeland’, ‘destination’ that connote a central point towards which the action of move is geared. Derrida, however, reminds us that the ‘centre’:

[…] closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. […] It was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center

had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play.14

Drawing on Derrida’s idea, I challenged the problematics of a ‘centre’ to which Hong Kongers’ identity has assumingly referred (section 2.1.2., Chapter 1). My conclusion was that the relationship between a dubious ‘centre’ and Hong Kongers’ sense of selfhood exposes their diasporic self-awareness to the influence of the regnant circumstances – a diasporic consciousness that is thus situational. Accordingly, if we hold this ‘decentring’ view to read the way in which Hong Kongers dealt with their departure from Hong Kong, these different kinds of mobility, be they sojourns or nomadism, migrations or continued migrations, diasporas or self- exiles, could all be applicable to explain any single movement. This idea is comparable to Caren Kaplan’s view in her book Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (1996) about the difference between ‘travel’ (usually related to leisure) and ‘displacement’ (usually concerned with mass migrations) and their being not so much in complete opposite directions, as in different historicized instances.15 Yet, as stated by Bhabha on the importance of other considerations in between nations’ boundaries:

It is precisely in reading between these borderlines of the nation-space that we can see how the concept of the ‘people’ emerges within a range of discourses as a double narrative movement. The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are also a complex rhetorical strategy of social reference.16

Hence, while Kaplan’s argument is primarily premised on the function of history, I opt to understand the recent geographical movement of Hong Kongers through the whole sum of historical, social, cultural, economic and political circumstances under which this group of ethnic Chinese living in Hong Kong have made their decisions of staying or going.

If the points of departure and arrival of their geographical movement were no longer sufficient (or overly sufficient, as inferred from different kinds of mobility for interpretation purposes) to show how these people might have become since their movements started, ‘journey’ and the act of ‘journeying’ could be more inspiring to reveal the (un-)changes to these people.