Academic literature on the topic 'Essays relating to Hong Kong Chinese'

In the late 1920s, cultural nationalism in Hong Kong was imbedded in Confucianism, having been disappointed with the New Culture Movement and Chinese revolutionary nationalism.1 It also inspired British collaborative colonialism. This study attempts to explain the link between Hong Kong and the Confucius Revering Movement by analysing the essays on Hong Kong of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the father of modern Chinese literature and one of the most important revolutionary thinkers in modern China. The Confucius Revering Movement, which extended from mainland China to the Southeast Asian Chinese community and then to Hong Kong, formed a highly interrelated network of Chinese cultural nationalism associated with Confucianism. However, the movements in these three places had different cultural and political roles in keeping with their own contexts. Collaborative colonialism’s interference with the Confucius Revering Movement is one way to understand Lu Xun’s critical reading of Hong Kong. That is, Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement was seen as an endeavour of the colonial authorities to co-opt Confucianism in order to deal with influences from China. This article argues that Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement should be regarded as one of the main perspectives through which to understand Hong Kong’s educational, cultural and political histories from the 1920s to the late 1960s. Lu Xun enables us to see several links. The first link is the one connecting the Confucius Revering Movement in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the Chinese community in Southeast Asia. This leads to the second link, that is, Lim Boen Keng (Lin Wenqing), the leading figure of the Confucius Revering Movement in the Southeast Asian Chinese community who later became the President of Amoy University, where Lu Xun had taught before his first visit to Hong Kong. The third link is the skilful colonial administrator Sir Cecil Clementi, who came to British Malaya in February 1930 to become Governor after being the Governor of Hong Kong. We can observe a network of Chinese critical/resistant and collaborative nationalism from these links.

Abstract This essay argues that the queer figure of the child that crops up curiously in (post–)Umbrella Movement Hong Kong is a defining political signifier for characterizing the city's youthful protesters and imagining alternative futures for Hong Kong. In many mainland Chinese media outlets, the youthfulness of the Hong Kong demonstrators is often emphasized to critique their fixation on the Western ideology of democracy. For the young resisters and their sympathizers, childishness connotes a different script of identity: it entails a narrative of temporal suspension in the face of assimilation into a Chinese homogeneity. By, for example, comparing the political star Joshua Wong to Peter Pan, who refuses to grow up, or by assigning uniform-wearing grade-school students the role of “the keepers of the Umbrella Movement,” prodemocratic cultural narratives keep alive the possibility of a political alterity that resists the neoliberal, temporal mandates of Hong Kong's government and mainland China. Theorizing that possibility in the context of temporal, queer, children's, and postcolonial studies, this essay contends that the future of resistance in Hong Kong will follow a lateral horizon, a sideways course that will put minor dissenters into new and nonheteropatriarchal relations with the existing order of the city.