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Over the past two centuries, even though Hong Kong was turned into a British colony and completely cut off from communist China after 1949, the people of Hong Kong in the colonial era always identified themselves as Chinese and embraced Chinese nationalism from an ethno-cultural angle (So, 2016). When China became an economic powerhouse of the world and the Hong Kong economy was increasingly dependent on China, Hong Kong people began to identify themselves as Chinese more than as HongKongers. Public opinion polls conducted by the University of Hong Kong shows that the percentage of Hong Kong people identifying themselves as “Chinese” increased from 18.0 percent in 1997 to 38.6 percent in 2008, whereas the percentage identifying themselves as “HongKonger” decreased from 35.0 percent to 18.1 percent in the same period (Ma, 2015).
However, localism and a localist movement began to emerge in the 2000s. Localists started a series of preservation movements in mid-2000s to prevent the demolition of local communities and historic buildings such as Star Ferry Pier and Queen’s Pier. In the 2010s, there emerged another kind of localist protesters who used a catchword “locust” to denounce mainland immigrants eating up Hong Kong’s resources. Hong Kong fans started to boo the Chinese national anthem at the international soccer matches against China and Cambodia in Mong Kok Stadium in 2015. Soccer fans wore T-shirts and held signs with slogans such as “Hong Kong is not China” and chanted “We are Hong Kong” (China Real Time Report, 2015; Chin, 2016).
This “Anti-mainland” Localism was further upgraded to “Hong Kong Independence” after the 2014 Umbrella Movement. A 2016 survey done by the Chinese University of Hong Kong reported that around one-sixth of Hong Kong population supported the city becoming an independent entity after 2047, and nearly 40 percent of HongKongers aged 15–24 supported independence (Lin, 2016).
Political organizations openly advocating for independence emerged during 2015–2016. In August 2016, a 2,500 people rally – dubbed as the “first pro-independence rally in Hong Kong” – was held at Tamar Park, outside the Hong Kong government headquarters in Admiralty (Ng et al., 2016). This defiant rally was followed by the electoral victory of several pro-independence legislative councilors in the September election.
What explains this changing pattern of identity...