In recent years, Hong Kong has become a city of protests, with identity politics playing an important role. Especially in the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Protests, protesters claimed they were fighters defending the core values of “the Hongkongers”— democracy and freedom—while refused to identify themselves as Chinese. With abundant conflict stories of protesters and government supporters, the Hong Kong media have created an illusion that the public is enormously polarized and national identity increasingly becomes a binary decision.
Scholars split up on this topic. Some agreed with the media, while others insisted that the majority of Hong Kong residents still held hybridized national identity but just stayed silent. Then how should the distinctive Hong Kong identity be understood now? Is the Hong Kong identity still hybridized with Chineseness, or is it a label marking resistance to national assimilation as the media has presented? And how has this identity division influenced the majority of Hongkongers? Are they rapidly polarized due to the fast-changing social context, meanwhile discarding certain aspects of their previous identity? Or are they “the silent majority” whose voices have been covered up by the radicals?
This study recruits the theoretical framework of boundary mechanisms and symbolic resources proposed by Oliver Zimmer (2003), trying to outline the identity perception of “the silent majority”—Hong Kong residents who stand in between of the two identity poles. In this framework, national identity is a dynamic collocation of boundary mechanisms (voluntary or organic) and symbolic resources (including political values/institutions, culture, history, and geography). In addition, this study develops Zimmer’s model by adding “collective present and future” as an additional symbolic resource.
This study relies on the original empirical dataset generated from an anonymous phone call survey of resident in Hong Kong, conducted in late 2017 (N =1002). As a natural derivation of the theoretical framework, the key dependent variable that will be studied is subjective national identity (SNI). In terms of analysis, the study uses multinomial logit regression to examine respondents’ self-identity as (a) exclusive Hongkonger; (b) hybridized identity; or as (c) exclusive Chinese. We find that, although the definition of “being Hongkongers” and “being Chinese” has significantly changed, nearly half of Hongkongers still identify their own identity as hybridized. This silent half holds both deterministic and voluntary views of nationhood. On different symbolic resources, their perceptions vacillate between “the Hongkongers” and “the Chinese”; culture and an imagination of Hong Kong-mainland collective present and future are the most important elements that influence their identity choices. For further research, the survey will be re-conducted in 2020 to measure the longitudinal changes of the boundary mechanisms and symbolic resources of the Hong Kong identity. Moreover, based on the findings of this study, we will further discuss whether the voices of the silent majority were covered by the illusion of social laceration in Hong Kong, and what result it will cause if such a laceration or a pseudo-laceration continues.