'Time is moving forward, but we are moving faster': Racing towards modernity in Hong Kong and Guangdong, 1945--1962 (China).

摘要

The retrocession of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China in 1997 posed the question of convergence: how would Hong Kong integrate with the neighboring province of Guangdong? Conventional wisdom held that the two were radically different from one another in 1997, and that the origins of that difference lay in their mutual isolation between 1950 and 1976. In this dissertation, by examining the connections between the two regions at the supposed onset of this isolation, I advance three arguments: first, that while Hong Kong and Guangdong may have been very different, that difference was founded on an enduring relationship of material interdependence; second, that the nature of this material interdependence was obscured on both sides by discursive claims of independence; and third, that these discursive claims were themselves a form of interdependence.; After using migration and trade statistics to demonstrate the material interdependence of the two protagonists, I then consider the political utility that each side saw in denying this interdependence. Using the radically dichotomizing discourse theorized by Ernesto Laclau, each territory started with a master trope, and then constructed a stack of labels which it applied to the other. In the 1950s, then, Guangdong saw Hong Kong as colonial=exploitative=class stratified=dehumanizing. Hong Kong, meanwhile, saw Guangdong as socialist=planned=unfree=poor. Each side thus intended to legitimate its own government and impugn its rival. However different the labels they employed, their capacity to share in this discursive rivalry revealed a common subscription to the principles of modernism, expressed in the language of time and progress. Thus, in the 1950s, Hong Kong viewed Guangdong as its economic past: an underdeveloped hinterland of cottage industries and agriculture. Guangdong, meanwhile, looked on Hong Kong as its political past: a territory oppressed by colonialism.; The body of the dissertation examines the evolution of this rivalry through a series of problems the two regions faced as they tried to develop isomorphism: the alignment of the populations resident in, citizens of, and loyal to, a state. Using case studies of migration, border control, resettlement and remittances, the dissertation charts the influence that each region had on its neighbor.