HKU Bulletin May 2016 (Vol. 17 No.2)

Hong Kong popular culture had a brilliant flowering in the last decades of the 20 th century, but has since wilted, overtaken by cultural imports from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Mainland. Two scholars of Hong Kong culture consider its past, present and future. BEYOND THE LION ROCK Step back 30 years ago and Hong Kong-made music, films and television programmes were everywhere. They topped sales and viewership figures not only in Hong Kong but in Chinese- speaking communities around the world. Even Hollywood came knocking. To cultural critics like Dr Ng Chun-hung of the Department of Sociology, this was more than an entertainment phenomenon. The brash, pragmatic, heartfelt values conveyed in the songs and storylines were the embodiment and touchstone of modern Hong Kong identity. They helped to shape the city’s idea of itself. “If you look at other places, ideas of national identity are developed and promoted by government or intellectual sources. But in Hong Kong these sources were silent or absent for many years. Hong Kong did not have a proper government so to speak, it just had a colonial government, and there wasn’t a big intellectual circle. So people turned to pop culture stars to feed their imagination. Pop culture was the accidental hero articulating the Hong Kong story.” The rise of that culture is generally considered to have started in 1974 – the year HKU graduate and pop singer Sam Hui and his brother Michael Hui released their seminal film, Games Gamblers Play . Its fast-paced depiction of clever amoral people who got what they wanted, peppered with lots of gags and structured around a loose plot, was a huge hit. Around this time Sam also started singing in Cantonese instead of English and Mandarin, and television shows like Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK)’s Below the Lion Rock focussed on life in post-war Hong Kong. “This was a new era. The stories being told were not about China, but about Hong Kong,” Dr Ng said. But that was then and this is now. Hong Kong popular culture is a weak presence even here in Hong Kong. Is it on its last legs? Dr Ng and Professor Stephen YW Chu, who heads the Hong Kong Studies programme in the Faculty of Arts, are among scholars who have been studying its future prospects, and also just how it helped to shape the identity of Hong Kong. Articulating an identity “The best starting point to look at Hong Kong identity is to examine the time when Hong Kong did not have an identity,” said Dr Ng. Before 1950, the city was a small settlement at the base of China, with a highly transient population occupied with trade and small-scale manufacturing. It was hardly a place to get attached to. Then more than a million refugees arrived from revolutionary China and everything changed. For the first time Hong Kong had a large stable population. A baby boom ensued – in 1966, 40 per cent of the population was under age 14 and almost all of those youths were born in Hong Kong. An economic boom brought rising prosperity. And local political developments heightened people’s sense of a shared origin and future. While the 1966 and 1967 riots left many youth in particular disillusioned with Mainland politics, the policies of Governor Murray MacLehose in the 1970s – such as expanded housing, education and welfare programmes and recognition of Cantonese as Hong Kong’s second official language – strengthened the sense of Hong Kong as home. All that was lacking was an articulation of that feeling and what it meant to live and grow up in Hong Kong. This was where popular culture came in, Dr Ng said. “A main ingredient of identity is the stories circulating in a population. Pop culture became an important source of these stories and it depicted some of the core features of Hong Kong identity: being quick-thinking, being If you look at other places, ideas of national identity are developed and promoted by government or intellectual sources. But in Hong Kong these sources were silent or absent for many years… Pop culture was the accidental hero articulating the Hong Kong story. Dr Ng Chun-hung The term ’Lion Rock spirit’ originated from a television show called Below the Lion Rock , which often illustrated the preseverance and solidarity of Hong Kong’s working class in the 1970s. One of Dr Ng’s projects is ’James Wong Stories: Sky over Sham Shui Po 1949–1960’, a website featuring James Wong, a renowned Cantopop lyricist and an icon of Hong Kong popular culture. James Wong was a recognised Cantopop lyricist and writer. 16 | 17 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin | May 2016 Cover Story