This book discusses what has happened to Hong Kong culture – its creative industries – since 1997, and particularly over the past decade. Its title, Lost in Transition, refers to Chu's major argument: in trying to maintain the status quo in Hong Kong after 1997, in an era in which China has increasingly come to occupy the world's economic centre stage, the Hong Kong government has helped to diminish Hong Kong, which can no longer serve as a bridge between China and the world, but must now find its own new identity.
Its introduction begins with Fortune magazine's 1995 cover story proclaiming “The Death of Hong Kong.” This did not happen, as Fortune admitted 12 years later, and yet, as the introduction explores, Hong Kong has declined in significant ways. Mainland Chinese cities have become increasingly capitalistic and international, bypassing Hong Kong. Chapter two then explores the rise of China, most simply economically but in its soft power. This chapter discusses the actresses Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li as new emblems of Chineseness in the world, and the debates they aroused as to what Chineseness consists of in a multicultural present, quoting Ang Lee as saying, “to be more Chinese you have to be Westernized” (pp. 32–33). Hong Kong's future is in a rising cultural China – but what, then, is Hong Kong's own identity to be?
Chapter three details what Chu terms “Central District Values” – the values of Hong Kong's commercial centre, values that Hong Kong's second chief executive, Donald Tsang, sought to make the values of Hong Kong as a whole, in a form of strong-government neoliberalism. The “Donaldization of Hong Kong” will necessarily remain incomplete, Chu argues, but “would further shape Hong Kong into a package society” (p. 68), a generic capitalistic city with no soul. Chapter four analyses the “Brand Hong Kong” campaign as “Asia's World City,” a branding that rides roughshod over Hong Kong's grassroots citizens, its diversity and its creativity.
Chapters five and six look at two specific aspects of Hong Kong's creative industries that have fallen into sharp decline in the years since Hong Kong became part of China: its movies and its music. Critics have claimed that “Hong Kong cinema was the most dynamic popular cinema in the world from the 1970s to the end of the century” (p. 94), but that era is gone: largely because Hong Kong films, in seeking mainland markets, have lost their own identities, with co-productions with mainland China becoming the new economically dominant form. In popular music, too, the influence of Hong Kong has faded: Cantopop, a dominant musical form in Hong Kong and in greater China in the 1980s and 1990s, has lost its pre-eminence, with Taipei taking its place as the capital of Chinese popular music. As Chu puts it, with Hong Kong “heavily slanted toward the national, the local can no longer be hybridized with the global to generate a vibrant glocal” (p. 134). Chu describes various efforts at the creation of an alternative music culture in Hong Kong, but these have had minimal impact.
Chapter seven, the book's conclusion, sums up the book's message: “Hong Kong has been troubled by the anxiety of becoming another Mainland city. It thus took great pains branding itself into an ‘international’ city, which … led to its being lost in transition” (p. 151). The conclusion then veers into a discussion comparing the state of Hong Kong to the state of comparative literature in the world today, making for a rather anticlimactic ending, until Chu considers, in his last pages, whether the core values of Hong Kong might be not just lost but also found in transition.
I learned quite a bit from this book – its discussion of the decline of Hong Kong movies and music was particularly informative, in that while the decline is widely known, its causes have not been much analysed, and this book does this very well. There has been a need for a book discussing the recent situation of Hong Kong, and this book partly fills that need. I wish that its author had been less tied to a comparative literature/cultural studies framework, and more able to integrate social scientific analyses into his discussion – in that case, the book could have transcended its particular academic genre, to attract in the breadth of its analysis scholars, students and laypeople curious about Hong Kong as a whole in the early 21st century. This is not that book; but nonetheless, for anyone who wonders about the fate of Hong Kong's cultural industries, it is still well worth reading.
