“You have to fight on your own”: Self-alienation and the new Hong Kong nationalism

This chapter argues that the profile and growing support for the new Hong Kong nationalists has emerged organically out of the polity’s geopolitical circumstances. The polity’s new localist-nationalists exhibit high levels of self-alienation and their rise reflects the complex power relations between Hong Kong and Mainland China. Activists from Civic Passion argue that Hong Kong, and to a certain extent Taiwan, are the only successors of traditional Chinese culture or tradition. Hong Kong’s distinctiveness vis-a-vis other territories on the “borderlands” of Chinese nationhood lies in the sheer length of time it was under European colonial control. The coloniality that forms the central component of Hong Kong’s relationship to modernity provides a series of historical reference points and experiences, which problematise its relationship to the imagined community of China. For Benedict Anderson China was the consummate example of the limited bounds so essential to the national community.