Hong Kong: The Crack-up

19 December 2020, Version 3
This content is an early or alternative research output and has not been peer-reviewed by Cambridge University Press at the time of posting.

Abstract

Guided by Gilles Deleuze’s theory on micropolitics, this Essay critically presents constellations of Hong Kong facticity ranging from geographical features, history, law and diplomacy to infrastructures, minimum wages, housing conditions, migration, pop music, museums and school curriculums etc. Contrary to popular images of the Oriental Pearl, the poster child for market economy guarded by the rule of law and lately the frontline of a pro-democracy movement, Hong Kong has been cracking up like a plate. The fissures betray a deferred yet no less painful decolonization process caught in the shadow of the rivalry between the U. S. and China. Echoing Deleuze’s “lines of flight”, the metaphor of cracking up, undergirded by empirical findings, exposes the fallacy of celebrating Hong Kong’s autonomy as normatively desirable on the one hand, and the existential anxiety beneath the West’s relentless interference in Hong Kong’s struggle for its identity on the other hand.

Keywords

Hong Kong
China
U. S.
micropolitics
Gilles Deleuze
Jean-Paul Sartre
Puerto Rico
colonialism
Identity
democracy

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