Chinese Nationalism and the Colonization(s) of Hong Kong as a Qing Legacy

The 1997 handover of Hong Kong is often called a “retrocession.” This is true even among those dubbed New Qing historians, who, over the past three decades, have successfully established the Manchu imperial dynasty as a multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural empire in its own right. They deem the P.R.C.’s control of places like Southern Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet re-colonizations. Alas, their analysis does not extend to Hong Kong. This mischaracterization stems in large part from two key historiographical premises. First, in trying to show what is “not China,” they tend to essentialize the Ming realm — which included the territories that would later constitute Hong Kong — as what is indeed “China.” Second, they reject the Fairbankian impact-response model that considers 1842 a dividing line between the “traditional” and “modern” periods. Hong Kong’s colonization is thus contradictory to their image of the Qing Empire: a vibrant and formidable land power. I argue, however, that modern Hong Kong was constructed precisely through a multiphase process that encapsulated the peculiarities of the Manchu imperial logic.

This paper re-emphasizes the significance of 1842: not to lend credence to outmoded, Eurocentric portrayals of the past, but to offer a new interpretation of the Qing Empire’s metamorphosis into the Chinese nation-state that focuses on the role of Hong Kong. Today, that frontier space is characterized by economic integration, cultural assimilation, political repression, and paramilitary occupation, which have only accelerated after the sweeping National Security Law came into effect in 2020. Although the overwhelming majority of Hong Kongers are Han ethnics, I propose that the Hong Kong-China relationship should, not unlike the re-colonization of Central Asia in the 1940s and 1950s, be understood as part of the same attempt to resuscitate the former Manchu imperial project under Communist Party rule.