A Formação da Identidade de Hong Kong e seus impactos sobre o relacionamento com a República Popular da China

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the impact of the formation of an identity in Hong Kong over the relationship of the people of the city with their compatriots of the mainland and with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The city of Hong Kong became a British colony because of the victory of Great Britain against China in the 1st Opium War and had been used as an instrument of the British commercial politics during the colonization. Some people had created a sense of identity in the first years of the colonization, however, the majority of the Chinese believed that Hong Kong was just a temporary home. Because of this mentality, the construction of an identity was only possible after the Communist Revolution in China as a consequence of the mentality change that occurred in the colony; said that, the major part of the immigrants that had moved to the city after this period were trying to establish themselves in the city. The Communist Revolution broke the barrier which had been preventing the formation of an identity, while the economic development that happened after that, along with the governance model which had been conceived by the British, created the bases of a Civic National Identity in Hong Kong. In 1997, due to results of the negotiations between Great Britain and China, the city had to be reintegrated under the model “one country, two systems” which determined that Popular’s Republic of China would have to maintain the autonomy of Hong Kong for 50 years. The situation of Hong Kong after the handover can be split in two moments. In the first moment, slowly, people started to identify itself more with China and less with Hong Kong; but, this process started to be reverted when the population realized that the influence of Chinese central government was soaring fast, especially after 2009. Nowadays, there has been a radicalization of part of the population, and localist parties have emerged in the city and some of them demand the independence of Hong Kong.