They came to dance, but ended up getting an education.

Dance, But Not As Usual

As mentioned in the Prologue, dancing symbolized the lifestyle of Hong Kong with the saying ‘horse racing and dancing will continue, and capitalist lifestyle will remain unchanged,’ in which dancing referred to dancing at nightclubs – a nightlife that showcased the city's success in the capitalist world-economy. Besides the dancing that would continue after 1997 according to Deng Xiaoping, some other dancing venues became chic trendsetters of not only the territory but also neighbouring regions. While the never-sleeping city saw big spenders in money-squandering ‘hostess’ nightclubs, disco was also seen as a kind of dance that shaped another dimension of Hong Kong's nightlife in the 1980s. Derived from ‘discotheque’, a type of dance-oriented nightclub that first appeared in the 1960s, disco became not just the preeminent form of dance music but also a culture of nightlife in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. In the aftermath of Saturday Night Fever (1977; premiered in Hong Kong in 1978), the disco wave was triggered in the territory, which later proved to be important in propelling pop idols to stardom. If nightlife was ‘one of society's few sanctioned antidotes to the monotony of the day-to-day, or what the French call le quotidian’, then disco as another kind of dancing in Hong Kong made the nightlife of this never-sleeping city even more diverse and fascinating. Interestingly, if nightclub dancing was seen as representing the lifestyle that was promised not to change after the handover in 1997, nightlife at trendy discos evinced a quickly developing pop style that uplifted the city throughout the decade.