Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Romanization and Translation
- Contents
- Dedication
- Prologue: Horse Racing and Dancing as Usual
- Introduction
- 1 Televising Pop: New Stars and Renewed Sensibilities
- 2 Golden Days of the Silver Screen: Cinematic Imagination in a Not Yet Fallen City
- 3 The Sound of Chinese Cool: Do You See the City Sing?
- 4 The Importance of Being Chic: Fashion, Branding, and Multimedia Stardom
- 5 The Practice of Everynight Life: Disco as Another Kind of Dance
- 6 (Un)Covering Cosmopolitan Hybridity: Every Great City Deserves a City Magazine
- Epilogue: ‘We’ll Always Have Hong Kong’
- Select Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
Prologue: Horse Racing and Dancing as Usual
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2024
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Romanization and Translation
- Contents
- Dedication
- Prologue: Horse Racing and Dancing as Usual
- Introduction
- 1 Televising Pop: New Stars and Renewed Sensibilities
- 2 Golden Days of the Silver Screen: Cinematic Imagination in a Not Yet Fallen City
- 3 The Sound of Chinese Cool: Do You See the City Sing?
- 4 The Importance of Being Chic: Fashion, Branding, and Multimedia Stardom
- 5 The Practice of Everynight Life: Disco as Another Kind of Dance
- 6 (Un)Covering Cosmopolitan Hybridity: Every Great City Deserves a City Magazine
- Epilogue: ‘We’ll Always Have Hong Kong’
- Select Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Deng Xiaoping, the chief engineer of the unprecedented “one country, two systems” framework, famously promised Hong Kong people horse racing and dancing would remain unchanged after Hong Kong's reversion to Mainland China in 1997. This chapter discusses how horse racing and dancing were used to symbolize Hong Kong's lifestyle and the smooth transfer of sovereignty. Throughout the 1980s, the upward mobility and vigorous development of Hong Kong pop culture enabled a distinctive cosmopolitan lifestyle between the East and the West to grow and mature, and Hong Kong people came to take pride in their cultural identities.
Keywords: personal belonging, one country two systems, horse racing, dancing, lifestyle
What Is Hong Kong?
To answer this question, it is usual to begin by explaining how Hong Kong came into being from a historical point of view. As succinctly noted by John Carroll, while the Chinese Government officially holds that ‘Hong Kong has been part of the territory of China since ancient times,’ until recently, British historians ‘generally dismissed the idea of Hong Kong as having any real history until the British arrived’. It was just a ‘barren island’, or to borrow Richard Hughes’ often-cited term, just a ‘borrowed place living on borrowed time’ – ‘Hong Kong did not exist, so it was necessary to invent it.’ Regarding this assessment, Carroll cited the example of James Hayes, historian and former colonial official, noting that ‘the island was certainly well-established in settler communities long before 1841’. That said, I would rather take up the question from a different perspective, which may seem out of the blue. Refuting Hughes’ concept of ‘borrowed time, borrowed place’, renowned Hong Kong author Kai-cheung Dung has argued that ‘space and time can never be borrowed’: ‘I and many others like me simply don't accept this description of the place where we live’ because ‘we belong to the space-time that is ours. Nobody lends it to us and we don't borrow it from anybody.’ Two years older than Dung and having grown up in Hong Kong with a similar background, I share his view completely. Hong Kong has been commonly known as a barren rock, a Chinese fishing village, an imperial outpost, a capitalist metropolis, a city between worlds and a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China under the unprecedented ‘one country, two systems’ framework.
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- Hong Kong Pop Culture in the 1980sA Decade of Splendour, pp. 11 - 28Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023