ABSTRACT
‘Chineseness’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘global-ness’, among others, have become highly contested categories of identity that are embedded in different narratives about the city. The society is now at the crossroads of change, amidst increasing state-society conflict, evolving Hong Kong-mainland relations and generational change. Old and new forces contest the meanings of ‘local’, conjuring up multiple images regarding Hong Kong’s identity. Three different streams of discourse may be identified as hegemonic, populist-localist and critical. A pertinent question concerns the extent to which growing sentiment against mainlandisation has influenced Hong Kong’s identity. On a deeper level, a more fundamental question concerns how far such sentiment interacts with our core values and our fluid sense of local-ness, Chinese-ness and global-ness in constituting and reconstituting our identity on multiple levels in changing contexts.
