Equipos e instrumentos adquiridos e implementados por la empresa

2.6. CODA: HK as Exception, Now as Rule

And, hence, we return to the HK-PRC border at the Shenzhen Bay checkpoint. Why does it still exist despite HK’s “return”/ “handover” to China? Is Hong Kong not a part of China?

The answers to these questions are now clear.

My having to cross the HK-Shenzhen immigration checkpoint raised the question of why there was a border in the first place, especially in light of HK’s “handover” to the PRC in 1997. This compelled me to offer a brief account of the respective histories of Hong Kong vis-à-vis the PRC to shed light on their different trajectories and the somewhat fraught relations between Hong Kongers and their Chinese neighbours. Indeed, the fact that ethnic Hong Kong Chinese often ask to be distinguished from their mainland Chinese counterparts – sometimes going so far as to deny being Chinese - reveals the depth to which feelings run on the subject.²⁴

24 Reflecting on the conundrums of identity in HK, Eng (2012) has noted, “With the historical handover in 1997, the people of Hong Kong were presented with an historical challenge to their identity, culture and sense of belonging. This challenge could be posed by the query: Are you a Chinese or a Hong Konger?” It appeared that

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Thus, I attempted to weave into the ethnography a brief account of the historical factors/conditions that gave rise to the differences and cross-border hostilities/tensions evidently extant between Hong Kong and the PRC today. As my ethnographic materials in the chapter demonstrate, these HK-PRC differences run deep and cut across the gamut of socio-cultural life. How could a people so apparently similar in ethnicity differ so radically just because they were located on opposite sides of a seemingly arbitrary border? These differences are implicated in mundane everyday experience and work their way into biases, preferences, and decisions about children’s education, language, and the pursuit of the good life in general.

In short, the chapter’s ethnographic content reveal that the HK-PRC rift is foremost a cultural divide, a divide over ways of knowing and being. These ways of living invariably involve normative valuations, for they are predicated on implicit beliefs about what is

“good”, “true”, and “beautiful”: in a word, on what makes the “good life”. Not surprisingly, there was little doubt whence these virtues came. As one apologist for empire said at the dawn of Britain’s annexation of Hong Kong: “Even the Chinese will ere long recognize that a connection with England and the Western worlds is the greatest of blessings, and will be thankful for the events which opened to them the floodgates of European civilisation and knowledge, and raise them in the scale of nations.” Indeed, it is owing to such self-validating claims that Hong Kong was, by way of its association with Britain, believed to be the

miniature embodiment of the latter’s, ostensibly superior, civilisation.

Our perusal of the modern historical record of China thus suggests that the cultural divide between HK and the Chinese mainland owes its origins to Britain’s colonial

adventures in China. For better or worse, Britain’s foray into the Chinese civilisational polity had the effect of altering forever Chinese historical trajectories, with the island-colony of Hong Kong coming under the formal political control of Britain and the West, whereas mainland China was cast as being in political and ideological opposition to them, first in the form of the Qing dynasty then subsequently as a Communist People’s Republic. It is the institutionalization of this opposition between the West and mainland China that continues to this day – with Hong Kong being for much of this period ensconced politically and

ideologically in the West, one of Britain’s spoils of the war as decreed by 1842’s Treaty of Nanjing.

one had to identify with the Chinese of China or that of Hong Kong with its roots in British colonization.

Implied in the question was a challenge to choose an identity as well as social and political affiliations. (Eng 2012: 6). On a related note, Smith asks, “What did it mean that people would try to destroy all traces of their past and lose all relation to it? Where does such an impulse originate?” (Smith 2010: 117).

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Accordingly, notwithstanding Hong Kong’s “handover” or “return” to China in 1997, the border remains, physically, if not also ideologically. In other words, Shenzhen Bay immigration checkpoint, along with those at Futian, Luohu and Huanggang, exist not only as physical borders/check-points restricting the flows of people and goods but as symbolic barriers as well, signifying an ideological and cultural divide that commemorates the historic, watershed Sino-Western encounter of the mid-19^th C.

It is against this historical background that we can better understand the border’s continued existence as well as the cultural differences existing on either side of it. To be sure, the border is a cultural border entailing normative valuations about what is “good”, thereby creating practices on one side that tend to be different from the other. Consequently, the historical background proffered also allows us to better appreciate how these differences oftentimes become a catalyst for cross-border tensions and resentments. I have in the chapter suggested that these perceived cultural differences were attributable to the rhetoric of the British Empire, which hailed rule of law, good governance, and, of course, prosperity via free trade, against their antithesis on the Chinese side. Naturally, there was also modern medicine and hygiene, the blessings conferred by modern science. These were the symbols of Western civilisation that supposedly separated one side of the border from the other, Hong Kong from the mainland.

Cast in the light of its history, we may thus understand the border as historically marking out the West from China, the ostensively civilised from its opposite. Thus, it is arguably Hong Kongers’ status as a more immediate heir of Western civilisation – albeit as colonial subjects - that they have often laid their claims of cultural superiority over their mainland Chinese counterparts.

Towards the end of the chapter, however, we noted that the resurgence of the PRC had today undermined the basis for Hong Kongers’ claims of being more “civilized”. On the back of historically unprecedented growth, averaging 10 per cent annually over the past three decades, the PRC has become somewhat similar to, even surpassing HK: it, too, was enjoying so-called civilisation as evaluated by its everyday material and technological paraphernalia.

Meanwhile, growth in the HK economy had waned over this time, which was characteristic of a mature, industrialised economy. This reversal of their respective fortunes was significant, giving rise to sentiments of ressentiment on the Hong Kong side.

Hong Kong’s economic development had in the past been exceptional but the single-minded focus on economistic development had now also become the rule throughout the PRC, with the city of Shenzhen being its lead expression/experiment in the post-Mao era.

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Hong Kong had been expropriated as a bridgehead to open China to the West in the mid-19^th C; hence its being exceptional to the mainland Chinese and their tendency to view it with suspicion. However, by the 1970s, Hong Kong’s exceptionalism had not only become normal on the mainland, it was desirable, with Shenzhen verily becoming the expression of the apparent gestalt shift, the change of worldviews, especially among the Chinese ruling elites.

Thus began the single-minded conviction to turn Shenzhen from the modest backwater it was to the world’s industrial manufacturing centre, an ambition that, for the most part, had been accomplished by the time I arrived in 2011.

Thus has been the account offered in the chapter to explain the present and the history of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen/PRC border, including ethnographic content of the more

conspicuous social activities taking place around it, with the “good life” being implicated in them. With this historical reflection about the HK-Shenzhen border, I have set the socio-cultural background for understanding “good life” aspirations in Shenzhen. The following chapter describes my efforts at settling in.

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