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Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

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Unmasking nativism in Asia’s world city: graffiti

and identity boundary un/making in Hong Kong

John Lowe & Stephan Ortmann

To cite this article: John Lowe & Stephan Ortmann (2020): Unmasking nativism in
Asia’s world city: graffiti and identity boundary un/making in Hong Kong, Continuum, DOI:
10.1080/10304312.2020.1721434

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2020.1721434

Published online: 29 Jan 2020.

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CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2020.1721434

Unmasking nativism in Asia’s world city: graffiti and identity

boundary un/making in Hong Kong
a b
John Lowe and Stephan Ortmann
a
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong;
b
Department of Asian and International Studies, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This work examines the discursive bases to Hong Konger identities Mainland China; Hong Kong;
by using a repertoire of anti-mainland and pro-democracy graffiti graffiti; nativism;
that impose alternative, counter-geographies onto space. Given the immigration; Lefebvre
spatial specificities of pro-Hong Kong graffiti, the communication of
nativist messages is potent in demarcating the boundaries of
Hong Kong nativism and mainland ‘Otherness’ by virtue of how
mainland China and its peoples are cognitively experienced and
perceived by geographical imaginations of place. As a spatial prac-
tice, graffiti writing, it is argued, contests hegemonic representa-
tions of space and disrupts representational space through the
imposition of ‘counterspaces’ that subsume a set of power relations
which reinforce the boundaries of Hong Kong nativism using geo-
graphical imaginations of mainland China blended with truths.

Introduction
In the ‘new’ Hong Kong characterized by unprecedented violent protests against a proposed
amendment to a bill allowing extradition from Hong Kong to Mainland China in the summer of
2019, nativist sentiments have underscored the symbolic acts of protestors defacing the
national emblem and flag. Despite a formal withdrawal of the bill, the chaotic demonstrations
have evolved into a much broader pro-democracy and anti-government movement. In
response to government intransigence and police brutality, demonstrations have turned
increasingly confrontational and violent. In the third quarter of 2019, escalating cycles of
police and protestor violence wrought extensive damage and arson paralysing the operations
of pro-China businesses and Beijing headquartered corporations such as the Bank of China,
China Citic Bank, Huawei and Xinhua News Agency. With contemporary Hong Kong society
forced to confront the harsh reality of a long road to recovery, the boundaries of Hong Konger
identities remain in a state of disarray. The overt aspersions cast towards Mainlanders and
televised images of broken glass from extensively vandalized premises of businesses symbo-
lizing Mainland China’s economic influence in Hong Kong arouse reminders of Nazi Germany’s
Kristallnacht in 1938. Attacks on the China factor in Hong Kong, however, represent an
inversion of the ‘colonizer versus the colonized’ dualism pervasive in the framing of racism
in Anglo-American and European countries. The crusader-like nativism that actively excises the

CONTACT John Lowe cartesiancircles@gmail.com

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. LOWE AND S. ORTMANN

China factor with arson alongside graffiti portends an uncertain future for Hong Kong’s
inhabitants. The impact of the anti-extradition protests of 2019 on the economy far exceeds
the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and anti-colonial riots of 1967 (Chan and Pun 2020). Despite
differences between moderate and radical protestors in the 2019 protests, Hong Kong’s youth
have maintained and negotiated a strong sense of solidarity against a feared totalitarian future
upon the expiry of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ in 2047 (Lee 2019). Under colonial rule,
Hong Kongers never enjoyed universal suffrage or free elections. Nevertheless, the colonial
government implemented policies ensuring transparency of law and a policy of appeasement
through public consultations (Lowe and Tsang 2018). In the aftermath of 2014’s Umbrella
Movement failing to wrest universal suffrage from Beijing, frustrations with Hong Kong's status
as a Special Administrative Region (hereafter SAR) being attenuated by Mainland interferance
emboldened many of the city's university and high school students to adopt radical forms of
civil disobedience.
The SAR government’s ostensible reluctance to accede to public opinion fuels the
popularity of moralist activism amongst the city’s youth (Lam-Knott 2019). In the quest for
democratic reform, and nostalgic preservation of nativist claims to place-making from
Hong Kongers demanding social justice, mainland Chinese students and immigrants have
unwittingly become recipients of discriminatory treatment. Hence, growing fears of the
so-called ‘Mainlandization’ deemed a threat to Hong Kong’s way of life have heightened
demands for legitimate forms of political participation traditionally denied that, for
a smaller percentage of Hong Kongers, justifies demands for independence. In mapping
out Hong Kong’s three-decade long relationship with China as an evolution from appre-
hension to integration and to clashes, Ho and Tran (2019, 190) argue that:

Hongkongers’ non-acceptance of unequal power distribution in cultural terms has bred

a series of local discourses which have underscored separation from rather than unity with
the Chinese government, and differences rather than sameness with the Mainland.

It is therefore unsurprising that during the political and social unrest of 2019, instances of
nativist Hong Kongers assaulting speakers of Mandarin Putonghua illustrate an accentua-
tion of cultural differences between both Chinese factions. These are indeed legitimate
causes for concern. While Beijing would argue that Hong Kongers are first and foremost
citizens of the People’s Republic of China, the strong resurgence of the nativist
Hong Konger identity denotes a contraction of the pan-ethnic Chinese label that Beijing
peremptorily imposes upon Hong Kongers by emphasizing ancestry as a civilizational
commonality. Ethnicity in China is a very complex and vexed matter, not least because
debate surrounding the sinicization of Tibetans and Uyghurs is suppressed by Beijing.
Therefore, we posit that the boundaries of Hong Konger identities are no longer deter-
mined by ancestry, but re-determined by an interactional, cognitive process.
In his important work on ethnic boundary un/making, Wimmer (2008) refers to transva-
luation as an elementary stage of ethnic identity boundary un/making in conjunction with
contraction. In this epoch of turmoil reverberating across Hong Kong society, these two
processes are fragmenting the identities of pro-democracy and pro-China Hong Kongers. In
the case of the former, nativism is characterized by a global outlook towards liberalism and
the valuation of colonial legacies. To Wimmer (2008, 1036), contraction is an important
process behind the narrowing of boundaries that gives cause for labels connotative of self-
identification (ie. Hong Kong/Taiwan Chinese) to counter the imposition of other-
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 3

identification labels (ie. Chinese). The University of Hong Kong’s recent survey found that
52.9% polled identified as ‘Hong Kongers’, 23.5% as ‘Hong Kongers in China’, while 12.8%
considered themselves ‘Chinese in Hong Kong’ and only 10% as ‘Chinese’.1 To complicate
matters, the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies announced
its findings of an alarming rise in anti-Mainland sentiments reflected by more than 40% of
Hong Kongers expressing ‘a low or very low sense of belonging’ to China and 35%
expressing no interest in knowing about their ancestral places.2 For comparison, 77%
avowed a ‘high’ or ‘very high’ sense of belonging to Hong Kong.3
While Hong Kong’s dazzling skyscrapers have certainly made it a highly photographed
global city, the publicized confrontations between protestors and police filled with tear
gas against the background of an instantly recognizable skyline cause one to ponder if the
resurgence of nativism in Asia’s world city is, at first glance, an anomaly. However, in
noting how the current insurrection counteracting Beijing’s control over the SAR seeks to
redeem what was lost in the colonial past, Wang (2019, 432) argues that:

Hong Kong localism is not simply a challenge to globalization in the name of the local.
Instead, the construction of the local identity renders the global, as embodied in an imagined
colonial past, a counterforce to the national identity. To the protestors who blackened the
Chinese national emblem and raised the British Hong Kong flag, the destiny of localism is to
reinstall the “good” global residing in the past and expel the “evil” national residing in the
present. The local identity becomes a redemption.

Young Hong Kongers are ostensibly embodying outlooks towards the national in the
People’s Republic of China informed by imagined geographies and imaginations of
autonomy within the borders of the SAR never accorded under the ‘One Country, Two
Systems’ arrangement. Anderson’s influential thesis on nations being imagined commu-
nities highlights the importance of imaginations of national ‘others’ in demarcating
identity boundaries in experiences of the everyday. Thus, imaginative geographies
based on a combination of truths and falsehoods have provided impetus for some of
the worst atrocities in history that defile ‘other’ places and their inhabitants. Gregory
(1995, 2003) argues that ‘imaginative geographies’ reflect underlying anxieties, desires
and fantasies sutured onto mental and physical maps of territories. Echoing Anderson’s
(2000, 175) claim that maps ‘penetrate into the popular imagination’ and are pervasive in
influencing how ‘other’ people in ‘other’ places are imagined, Radcliffe (1996, 23) explains
that mental re-maps are used by different social groups to reconcile their ‘places’ while
producing imaginative geographies for internal and external audiences. As pro-
democracy activists articulating nativist identity claims to ownership of space are overtly
hostile to the rising visibility of the China factor in Hong Kong spaces, the movement of
2019 de-legitimizes the unelected SAR government led by Carrie Lam as representatives
of Beijing’s sovereignty. Hence, the deteriorating situation that is primarily a battle for
ownership of the semi-autonomous region raises unanswered questions about the un/
making of Hong Konger identity boundaries which demand critical investigation.
In what follows, we first provide a brief overview of the ubiquity of anti-China graffiti in
Hong Kong’s rural and urban locales before discussing how graffiti samples provide
a conduit in which the unknown artist(s) can be interpreted as producing visually
discursive cultural texts about the specificities of Hong Kong’s socio-political culture
and politics of identity in an epoch of upheaval. The second section proceeds to dissect
4 J. LOWE AND S. ORTMANN

anti-Mainland graffitied messages in terms of economic nativism, welfare chauvinism and

symbolic nativism that, when passively consumed, promote the notion that Mainland
China and Hong Kong cultures are fundamentally incompatible. Taking cue from
Carrington (2009, 412) that ‘The unsanctioned graffiti texts speak to a range of imagined
communities that co-exist, often unhappily, with the powerful geographies of the main-
stream’, we segue to discuss how nativism and the politics of space are imbricated
through graffiti that, in other words, transforms spaces into a ‘counterspace’ based on
imaginative geographies that reject authoritative definitions of how spaces are to be used
and experientially felt whilst fomenting serious tensions between Mainlanders and
Hong Kongers.

Background and methodology

After a protracted period of social and political unrest in the streets of Hong Kong, graffiti
that is overtly anti-China, most popularly, ‘HK is not China’ and ‘Free HK’ (Figures 3 and 4)
have been broadcasted internationally. As visual territorial markers of identity, graffiti with
discriminatory expressions communicated to minority ethnic groups are unequivocally
offensive. Unlike verbal racist slurs that are just utterances, the indelible etchings of
incitement onto certain spatial surrounds bring national identity into the fray of belong-
ingness in a conspicuous but silent manner. In public spaces, Lynn and Lea (2005, 54)
argue, ‘graffiti makes special demands on the observer or passer-by as it prompts a more
conscious awareness – for the briefest of moments at least – of the social and ideological
processes that take place within everyday experience’. There is a relationality between the
environment and the human body that gives graffiti a certain ‘aura’ of a carnivalesque
nature embedded in spatial politics (Pan 2014, 138–139). Racially and politically provoca-
tive graffiti, as heteroglossia, intimidate minority ethnic groups and also reveal the extent
a ‘host’ society’s sense of belonging and ontological security is disrupted. Graffiti markings
are legitimate cultural texts often consumed passively by viewers and actively consumed
by few participants who may reciprocate with graffitied replies (Mangeya 2019, 335).
Hence, from a criminological perspective, graffiti can be problematized as disruptions to
spatial orderings that as Kindynis (2018) argues, is achieved through the forceful imposi-
tion of an alternative social geography. Echoing Kindynis, Carrington (2009, 421) argues
that writing identities onto public spaces ‘fulfils a growing need for a reflexive self-
narrative, a narrative that reflects one of a range of possible imagined geographies and
linked to this, a sub-politics that challenges notions of consumption-driven public space’.
This article, therefore, argues that where graffiti in the ‘new’ Hong Kong is concerned,
imaginative geographies comprise alternative social geographies imposed by graffitists
that reject pro-establishment cartographies of Hong Kong as inalienable from China.
In addition to Hong Kong’s metropolitan streets becoming sites of political upheaval,
graffiti stereotyping Mainlanders as ‘locusts’ and demands for self-determination indir-
ectly communicate the limits of autonomy spelt out under ‘One Country, Two Systems’.
Moreover, the question of how long nativism can buttress Hong Konger identities that
racialize Mainland immigrants as ‘Others’ remains unanswered. In arguing that spatial
metaphors and practices police identities, Delaney (2002, 8–9) illuminates the centrality of
the intersectionality between race and space in mapping out how racial identities are
spatialized and spaces racialized. Figures 4–6 were taken in metropolitan Nathan and
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 5

Prince Edward Roads in Kowloon and Harcourt Road in Hong Kong Island that were badly
affected during the mass demonstrations of 2019. The remaining graffiti samples were
photographed during traverses through the hiking trails of Smugglers’ Ridge located by
Shing Mun Reservoir, a rural location in the New Territories and Needle Hill (Figures 1 and
2), to the north of Smugglers’ Ridge. The war time relics and catchwater canals leading to
the reservoir are not widely publicized and seldom visited by tourists. Unlike Hong Kong’s
bustling urban areas, the relative safety of these remote rural locations allows for sup-
pressed feelings – whether arising from ressentiment or a desire to be heard – to be
expressed through graffiti that escapes the visible surveillance of CCTV cameras.

Figure 1. The graffiti etched on the triangulation station (also known as trigonometric pillar) here
labels Mainlanders as ‘locusts’ and castigates Mainland China’s communist dogs for ruining
Hong Kongers’ HK.

Figure 2. The graffiti at the back of this signage states that ‘because we (Hong Kong and China) are on
separate sides, Hong Kong should be a nation-state and self-govern itself’.
6 J. LOWE AND S. ORTMANN

In discussing the methodological and conceptual challenges of theorizing graffiti,

Waldner and Dobratz (2013, 387–388) mention that in addition to the difficulties of
investigating how viewers as consumers interpret markings, the illegality of graffiti renders
it difficult to interview graffitist as this would require catching them in the act. We, therefore,
conducted in-depth ethnographic observations of the rural and urban environments of
graffiti, especially sites of protests and social movements affected by tear gas and petrol
bombs during 2019’s unrest. In advocating visual ethnography, Margolis highlights the
importance of visual methods such as photography in their ability to ‘capture, translate, and
render the synthetic totality that is social life and culture’ (1990, 375). However, while graffiti
in this work are about Hong Kongers’ desires and demands for their legitimate grievances to
be redressed, the spatial-temporal contexts of graffiti might on occasion provide clues
about thoughts and ideologies behind desires that cannot be translated into words. If, as
van den Scott suggests that visuals are data fully capable of providing depth to our analyses
as ‘story telling mechanisms’ (2018, 723), the visuality of anonymous graffitied messages
and their surrounds reflect power-relations and processes not always candidly expressed
through qualitative interviews. In analysing the graffiti featured in this work, we are
reflexively aware of the research assumption that interpretations of graffiti, as visual com-
munication, are determined by changes to socio-political contexts and subjectivities of
audiences engaging in its consumption.

Consuming nativism and the ‘new’ Hong Kong

Prior to the 1997 handover, the British and Chinese authorities agreed that Hong Kong
would be granted a high degree of autonomy to manage its own political, economic and
legal systems for 50 years. Hong Kong’s ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework of
governance, it has been alleged, has been subject to latitudinous interpretations to justify
Beijing’s constant interference that pro-democracy Hong Kongers construe as breaches to
promises guaranteeing their inalienable rights to remain culturally apart from the
Mainland. While the protracted Umbrella Movement of 2014 was born out of a genuine
desire to implement democracy in the former British colony, it sought to preserve the
uniqueness of a distinctively Hong Kong identity as a bulwark against the forces of
Mainlandization (Lowe and Tsang 2017). An aspect of de-Cantonization feared by
Hong Kongers surrounds the future of their Cantonese dialect and core element of
identity. Here, it is important to understand that Hong Kongers do not necessarily reject
their Chinese cultural identity, but rather, the politically correct definition enforced by the
Chinese regime they find inimical to the civic values they uphold.
In discussing the limitations to categorizations in demarcating the boundaries of ethnic
groups, Brubaker, Loveman, and Stomatov (2004, 77) advocate shifting our emphasis to
the cognitive dimensions of identity boundary un/making discerned in terms of ‘how
actors see the social world and interpret social experiences’. In also acknowledging that
ethnic identities will be in flux whenever changes to economic, linguistic and historical
practices occur despite the persistence of similar cultural practices, Frederik Barth (1994)
provides evidence of boundary un/making as an interactional rather than static process
based on cognitive experiences of the world. If, as Desbiens (2017) is right that spatial
behaviour is shaped largely by subjective beliefs about places and environments without
a clear dichotomy between truth and falsehood, imaginative geographies are central to
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 7

the demarcation of boundaries entailing consciousness of differences inflected by space/

place that articulate demands for nativist identities to be defended.
The recent surge of Hong Kong nativism and Sinophobic sentiments that provided
impetus for the Umbrella Movement arose at a time when fears for the future and
pessimism held sway (Ip 2015, 412). According to Chen and Szeto (2015, 437), Civic
Passion and Hong Kong Indigenous are two populist ‘anti-China localist’ groups that
espouse the public confrontation and humiliation of Mainlanders as ‘locusts’ in the hope
that the Beijing and SAR authorities will stem flows of Mainland visitors and migrants into
Hong Kong. For the purposes of better understanding nativism in Hong Kong, Betz (2019,
112) broadly defines nativism as ‘appeals to a range of sentiments and ideational con-
structs, most prominently patriotism, nationalism and even racism, yet goes beyond
them’. He further argues that ‘it is important to disaggregate nativism into its constituent
components, contextualize them and relate them to kindred phenomena’ (113). The
graffiti photographed in Figures 1 and is brash in invoking the ‘locust’ imagery to
stereotype Mainlanders as parasites. In disaggregating nativism, Betz (2019, 115) argues
that economic nativism is characterized by claims that migrant labour suppresses the
wages and employment prospects of local born natives whilst welfare chauvinism
foments racism through sentiments that welfare benefits funded by the native-born
population are enjoyed by migrants (who pay less taxes) resulting in the depletion of
welfare resources (120).
The economic nativism underpinning Hong Kongers’ attempts to subsume – within the
locust symbology – the conspicuous consumption habits of Mainland migrants and
tourists and anxiety created by their competition for jobs have been duly acknowledged
(Ho et al. 2014; Ip 2015; Fong and Guo 2018).
It is noteworthy that the popular campaign against pregnant Mainland mothers
giving birth in Hong Kong is also driven by welfare chauvinism. Huang, Woo, and Lai
(2019, 80) argue that despite a user-pays policy encouraging birth tourism in
Hong Kong, ‘the “user” has transformed from local low-income residents in its original
context to the target affluent consumers of the healthcare market from outside of
Hong Kong’. In explaining the campaign’s treatment of ‘accidental’ foetal citizens as
‘locusts’, Huang, Woo and Lai (2019, 84) find that:

[. . .] cross-border births are unbearable and unnecessary burdens weighing on Hong Kong’s
future – the Hong Kong government has to pay one million HKD per person to support these
fetal citizens from kindergarten through to college. Summarized in the form of an outcry,
“We, the people of Hong Kong, have had enough!” in large letters, the poster puts the task of
stopping pregnant women from coming to Hong Kong at the forefront. Along with the
powerful visual representation of the locust as a disciplinary image, the charitable discourse
calls pregnant Mainland women locusts and refers to birth tourism as “invading Hong Kong”
so as to justify the plea to the government to revise Article 24 of the Basic Law and protect
Hong Kong’s resources from being exploited by Mainlanders.

Welfare chauvinism is indeed widespread in Hong Kong. A quantitative study by Lee, Ng,
and Chou (2016) found that Hong Kongers opposing the allocation of welfare benefits to
Mainland immigrants avowed treating the latter as social and economic threats undeserving
of benefits funded by Hong Kong taxpayers. At a time when politics in Hong Kong is defined
in terms of how it responds to crises (Chan 2016), economic nativism and welfare chauvin-
ism are catalysts of moral panics that Hong Kongers use to provoke political change.
8 J. LOWE AND S. ORTMANN

In contrast, symbolic nativism, according to Betz (2019, 123), ‘is centred on the defence
of the fundamental traditions, values and historically evolved institutional arrangements
that define a particular community, its culture and identity’. Bearing testimony to sym-
bolic nativism is a largely forgotten localist movement known as the New Preservation
Movement (NPM) that focuses on the preservation of local communities, public spaces
and colonial buildings from the juggernaut of property developers and government
authorities (Chen and Szeto 2015). Notwithstanding the positive outcomes of NPM in
Hong Kong, symbolic nativism demarcates the boundaries of Hong Konger identity from
Mainland Chinese-ness by emphasizing the cognitively experienced imagined geogra-
phies of lifestyles and cultural practices of the Mainland as inimical to inalienable values
and liberties of Hong Kongers. Central to symbolic nativism ‘is the notion that certain
cultures are incompatible with each other’ (Betz 2019, 126).
In the black portion of the trigonometric station in Figure 1, the message graffitied
states that Hong Kongers enjoy their hikes, take photos and enjoy the view while the sun is
setting because the Communists are already in the city. This is metaphoric of a premature
end to the city’s autonomy. If consumed passively by hikers who are Hong Kongers, the
symbolic nativism underpinning this graffiti conjures up stereotypes of Communists
‘locusts’ as incapable of behaving with civility, graciousness and decorum in Hong Kong.
Echoing a study by Lee and Chou (2018) that negative attitudes towards Mainlanders in
Hong Kong are rooted in sociotropic anxieties is the claim that they exhibit a visual excess
of the China factor denoted by inconsiderate toiletry habits, preferences to speak
Putongua instead of Cantonese and failure to observe other Hong Kong norms such as
queuing up (Wong 2018). While ‘PRC leaders are explicit in their belief in a biologized
ethnicity’ (Sautman 1997, 79), the Hong Kong Chinese are reluctant to accept Beijing's
racialization of non-Mainlanders within a ‘mythical’ pan-Chinese-ness substantiated by
icons such as the Great Wall, the Yellow Emperor and Dragon-nology. The assertion of
a Hong Kong Chinese identity as progressive vis-a-vis the pan-ethnic Chinese-ness defined
by Beijing as degenerate necessarily embodies the reality that the halcyon colonial past
was indeed better than the present’s defects of uncertainty and unpredictability (Lowe
and Tsang 2018, 565).
In summary, the ‘locust’ rhetoric against Mainlanders in graffitied etchings draws upon
a combination of economic nativism, welfare chauvinism and symbolic nativism. While
these concepts originate from ‘host’ societies of Western countries racializing immigrants
who are ethnically and racially different, the different facets of nativism illuminate deeply-
seated tensions between Mainlanders and Hong Kongers who are both Han Chinese. In
geo-political terms, it is a farily large group of Han Chinese vilifying another group of Han
Chinese where the vilified are symbolic of political and economic power but yet remain
vulnerable as individuals.The modalities of economic nativism and welfare chauvinism are
useful for the purposes of drawing parallels with the racist ‘Yellow Peril’ stereotype
levelled against Chinese immigrants in turn-of-century Britain (Renshaw 2016). Anxieties
about the future manifested through symbolic nativism’s bolstering of a fervent
Hong Konger identity are emblematic of existing tensions between Mainland immigrants
and Hong Kongers being built around a dualism. It cannot be reduced to a similar
oppressor versus oppressed dualism in a simplistic manner that the ‘White’ versus
‘Black’ dualism has been used to theorize citizenship and ethnic relations in Western
democracies (Solomos 2019).
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 9

As it has been pointed out that Hong Kongers are lamenting the decline of graciously and
well-maintained public spaces characterized by colonial rule (Chin 2014, 1591), the racist
‘locust’ graffiti captioned in Figures 1 would arouse sentiments of Hong Kongers being victims
of the negative effects of the 1997 retrocession. The denouement, as repeatedly mentioned
by democracy activists, is that young Hong Kongers now face unprecedented economic
competition from Mainlanders. In the world’s most expensive housing market, young
Hong Kongers in the white-collar occupations are finding it nearly impossible to own
homes without support from cash-rich parents. Chan (2016, 29) states that in contrast to
their parents who enjoyed better prospects in the 1970s and 1980s when the local economy
was rapidly advancing, the post-1980s generation of Hong Kong youth with better educa-
tional credentials are failing to attain social mobility. Young Hong Kongers without property
ownership are unable to catch up with the rapid inflation of property values driven by flows of
wealthy economic migrants from China. Homeowners from lower-class backgrounds are
therefore naturally supportive of pro-establishment policies that made them asset-rich
while well-educated young high-income earners who do not own property support localist/
nativist parties (Wong and Wan 2018). Economic nativism, as a modality, captures why the
majority of Hong Kongers dissatisfied with the current status quo are the city’s youths. In
contrast, the apathetic older generation of Hong Kongers considered youth involvement in
the Umbrella Movement brash and impulsive (Suner 2017, 111). While Mainlanders have been
subject to the same forms of discrimination as migrants in Anglo-European countries ranging
from name-calling to penalties in the job and housing markets, symbolic nativism solidifies
a Hong Kong identity that remains potent in demanding greater political autonomy.
In a not too dissimilar vein that invokes the incommensurability of cultural differences,
Figure 2 justifies independence and self-governance for Hong Kong by appealing to the
argument that the political systems of Hong Kong and China are ‘on separate sides’. When
consumed passively, Hong Kongers would be reminded that their legal and institutional
affordances, in addition to 'colonial inheritances' in the form of rule of law, free press and
freedom of assembly have to be vigorously defended. As Hong Kong currently lacks
sovereignty and rights to political self-determination without nation-state status, China
considers any prospects of Hong Kong being a separate democratic system subversive to
its single party-rule (Ortmann 2016, 117). In 2016, Beijing abrogated the SAR govern-
ment’s request for the courts to interpret the Basic Law by enforcing its re-interpretation
that expelled pro-independence lawmakers. With this amounting to a disregard of judicial
impartiality, fears continue to surround the prospects of Beijing re-interpreting the Basic
Law to justify its control. At the core of this tension between the ‘One country’ at variance
with ‘Two Systems’ is the precarity of the former British colony’s SAR status as China’s
‘inalienable alien’ that Leung (2019, 177) draws to our attention:

Under the peculiar ‘one country, two systems’ principle, Hong Kong’s political existence
under Chinese rule is essentially an ‘inclusive exclusion’: It is simultaneously included and
excluded in China – like the homo sacer, (constitutionally) included solely in the form of its
exclusion. Re-phrased in the Basic Law’s terminology, Hong Kong is an inalienable part of
China by being an alien in China: The city is simultaneously ‘inalienable’ and ‘alien’ in China
according to its constitutional principle. As such, Hong Kong’s political existence under
Chinese sovereignty as an ‘inalienable alien’ that essentially embodies Agamben’s politico-
ontological structure of ‘inclusive exclusion’ or ‘exception’.
10 J. LOWE AND S. ORTMANN

The current state of political upheaval suggests that the roots of Hong Kongers’s grievances
against Beijing’s erosion of their liberties rest in the contradictions of this ‘inclusive exclu-
sion’ that universal suffrage is hoped to resolve. Thus, epitomizing the extent that young
Hong Kongers are willing to reject the assertion that their city is ‘inalienable’ from China is
the ‘HK is not China’ slogan (Figure 3) frequently accompanying the extensive vandalism of
pro-China and mainland businesses during the anti-extradition bill protests of 2019.
The message hidden behind ‘HK is not China’ is not new but rests upon falsehoods
combined with elements of truth projected to assuage fears. In the words of Gregory,

Figure 3. ‘HK is not China’ on a traffic light in downtown Hong Kong.

Figure 4. ‘Liberate/Recover Hong Kong’.

 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 11

Figure 5. ‘Fight for Hong Kong’.

imaginative geographies ‘have also reworked the relationship between past and present,
revisiting and re-presenting the past’ (1995, 476). As the SAR government led by Leung
Chun-Ying before Carrie Lam’s appointment was blamed for being overly subservient to
‘One Country’ that eroded freedoms under ‘Two Systems’ (Kaedig 2017, 164), the large-
scale demonstrations of 2019 have sought to liberate Hong Kong from the death knell of
Beijing’s authoritarianism.
In dis-identifying with Mainland China, the Hong Konger identity certainly provides
ontological security by warding off fears of a much dreaded future bursting open into the
instantaneous present. The graffitied message of Figure 4 was a slogan frequently
chanted by protestors in 2019 that, alongside Figures 3 and 5, are certainly pivotal in

Figure 6. ‘Free HK: Revolution Now’.

12 J. LOWE AND S. ORTMANN

Figure 7. This signage in front of the reservoir warning hikers not to swim in the reservoir is vandalized
with ‘Beware of the aggression of mainlanders’.

legitimizing the protection of Hong Kong’s judicial autonomy and right to appoint its
Chief Executive through universal suffrage.
While Figure 3 is overtly provocative in crossing the ‘red-line’ by disregarding China’s
sovereignty, it conceals an imagined geography of a re-envisioned historical past and
mental map of the city with a solidified border at odds with Beijing’s official map and
fundamental assertion that Hong Kong is China. The resurgence of this protest slogan
featured alongside figure 6’s message embodies the rhetoric of symbolic nativism that
even though Hong Kong is located in China, it is not of China.
Hence, there is need for a revolution to insure the continuity of Hong Kong’s autonomy
from China by resisting the subjugating forces of Mainlandization. Granted, as Gregory
(2003, 308) emphasizes that imaginative geographies have traditionally created spaces for
‘newness’ that reaffirm the need for colonial pasts to subsist in the present, the slogans
encapsulated in Figures 5–6 blend myths with truths constituting spatial performances of
nativist identity which legitimize coloniality in the absence of colonialism.

Graffiti, nativism and the politics of space in Hong Kong

As graffiti, according to Waldner and Dobratz (2013, 381) is a contentious form of political
participation through a one-off contestation of space akin to squatting, the emergent
question this section addresses is how these spaces are produced by nativist consump-
tions of graffiti as cultural texts that, through communicating imaginative geographies,
culminate in spatial performances of nativist Hong Konger identities. The graffiti featured
in this section were taken in Smugglers’ Ridge, a rural location previously used as a fort
that defended Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. The historical symbolism
embedded in this rurality creates a zone of nativist consumption that reproduces imagi-
native geographies about racialized Mainlanders and China. In Asian cities such as
Hong Kong where political upheavals are common, Pan and Shin (2018, 356) state that
spaces located away from the sites of urban activism are now contested by new spatial
practices constituting ‘experiments on the new definitions of the “commons” of social and
cultural activism’. Of pertinence is Pan and Shin’s reference to spatial practices that has its
origins in Henri Lefebvre’s triadic concept of space. In short, this triad ‘embraces produc-
tion, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation’
that ensure continuity, cohesion and spatial competence (Lefebvre 1991, 33). As Merrifield
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 13

(1993, 524) explains, spatial practices are embraced by a variety of symbols, images and
perceptions of local people, subcultures and gangs, it is correct to conceptualize graffiti in
Hong Kong’s as a product of Lefebvrian spatial practice. Kindynis (2018, 519) posits that
graffiti subcultures are reproduced by the spatial practices of graffiti artists. As
a theoretical and abstract trope, spatial practice, cannot be understood without the two
other constituents of Lefebvre’s triad, namely: representation of space and representa-
tional space.
Representations of space, to Lefebvre (1991, 38–39), comprise the dominant or hege-
monic space of current society conceptualized out of symbols, ideologies and other
abstract codifications and representations. Representations of space, also known as
‘conceived spaces’, are spaces of capital responsible for the production of space (1991,
42). As representations of space are discursively constructed by planners, engineers,
architects and developers, it belongs to the realm of the abstract as it ‘subsumes ideology
and knowledge within its practice’ (Merrifield 1993, 523). The final triad, representational
space, also known as inter-subjectively ‘lived spaces’ encapsulate the directly felt experi-
ences of spaces through symbols and images overlaying physical space with mental
imaginations of space that Lefebvre (1991, 42) suggests are fluid and alive:

It has an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house, or: square, church,
graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus
immediately implies time. Consequently, it may be qualified in various ways: it may be
directional, situation or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic.

Representational spaces are elusive and invisible ‘which the imagination (conceived) must
seek to change and appropriate’ (Merrifield 1993, 523). They are therefore also ‘imbed
with meaning that people recognize and experience as significant beyond themselves as
individuals’ (Carp 2008, 135). Depending on the characteristics of the location of politically
provocative graffiti, the modality of representational space coalesces with graffiti sutured
with imagined geographies that challenge how spaces are experientially lived. To illus-
trate, a parallel can be drawn with a Lefebvrian analysis of the defunct Queen’s Pier in
Hong Kong. Prior to its demolition, Ng et al. (2010, 422) found that hunger strikes to
preserve this colonial icon were rooted in an ossified representation of space giving rise to
a representational space cherished by Hong Kongers. Its permissible function (represen-
tation of space) was that of an aristocratic ceremony in the colonial era that racialized the
Hong Kong Chinese. As it was only in the 1960s when the colonial government allowed
the Hong Kong Chinese access to a preserve of British ruling elites, its newly embraced
representational space that lingered after the 1997 handover was that of a nostalgic
interstice between the era of racial segregation and epoch that witnessed the dismantling
of ‘Whiteness’ in spatial function and representation of space. It was no longer a British
place, but their place.
In rural locations, the state’s power-relations embedded in representations of space
and representational space are defiantly contested through graffiti conveying political
and nativist ideologies. As representational space, Smugglers’ Ridge (where Figures 7 and
8 were located) was used by the British as a fort that defended Hong Kong’s New
Territories from the Japanese who eventually invaded Hong Kong from China in
December 1941. It is worth noting that war-time remains in the form of signposts
demarcating desolate trenches and line tunnels as danger zones memorialize these relics
14 J. LOWE AND S. ORTMANN

Figure 8. Written in traditional Chinese characters, the message conveyed is that ‘supporters of
Hong Kong independence will beat up Mainlanders they see on the streets’.

with monument-like status as they speak about the location’s spatial function in the past.
Monuments, based on Conlon’s (2004, 469) reading of Lefebvre, constitute representa-
tions of space; as symbols they express how space should be used and subsume power-
relations. The relationality behind this traditional representational space of an anti-
Japanese bulwark is now disrupted by the defiant production of Smugglers’ Ridge as
a modern-day fort resisting the contemporaneous interference of Mainland Chinese
sovereignty. The presence of politically contentious graffiti can, therefore, be represented
as production of a ‘counterspace’. Drawing upon the prospects of Lefebvrian representa-
tional spaces being challenged by protagonists, Soja (1996, 68) defines ‘counterspaces’ as
‘spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate,
peripheral or marginalized positioning’. As ‘counterspace’ constituted by anti-Beijing
graffiti etched onto war-time line-tunnels and trenches, the social order of the rural
spaces of Smugglers’ Ridge is publicly defied and re-appropriated through imaginative
geographies of the Mainland’s environment and political repression across the border.
Granted as Shi (2019) locates the city’s political activism within a narrative of ‘injury to
rebellion’ depicted in Ten Years, an award winning film, graffitists similarly represent
Hong Kong natives as economically and politically victimized by Mainlandization. In
current times, Hong Kongers do not fit within the dominant binaries of the ‘superordinate’
versus the ‘subordinate’. As symbolic nativism behind the ‘I’m a Hong Konger’ movement
posits that Hong Kong’s culture and economic system are superior to the Mainland’s,
Hong Kongers are clearly capable of being both (rather than either or) the dominant and
subjugated. The repertoire of non-political graffiti that ‘bashes’ Mainlanders embodies
a culturally and spatially superordinate positionality.
The signboards containing the graffiti in Figures 7 and 8 are set against the reservoir and
warn hikers from swimming or misusing the public spaces. In short, Figures 7 and 8 embody
symbolic nativism to reify Mainland culture and language as elements of ‘otherness’ imagined
as incompatible with Hong Kong’s Cantonized culture. In Figure 7, the graffiti writer situates
mainland ‘aggression’ against the idyll of the reservoir’s drinking water – a state resource
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 15

presented as risking denudation by Mainlanders named and shamed as miscreants. Hikers

who passively consume this graffitied message would be reminded that the countryside’s
natural resources need protection from their exploitative nature.
In conjunction with the pro-independence graffiti inscribed in Figure 8 that openly
incites violence upon the bodies of Mainlanders, the symbolic nativist messages encoded
do not simply rebel against authoritative representations of space by way of disrespecting
the set functions of space as recreational reserves. These graffitied messages go further in
overlaying these physical spaces with imaginary mental spaces that transform the rural
spaces to communicate tropes of Hong Kong nativism. This outcome normally arises from
the common view that Mainlanders will exacerbate environmental problems and pollution
by their very presence in Hong Kong. While there has been a problematic dualism surround-
ing mental and social spaces being crudely reduced to physical spaces and need for human
geographers to problematize place and establish a robust politics of place, Lefebvre’s
representational space was the solution to overcome this dualism by providing the possi-
bility for places to be produced through the overlaying of mental/social spaces onto
physical spaces (Merrifield 1993, 516–520). In theorizing how anti-immigrant graffiti con-
cretizes White English identities and territoriality, Nayak (2010, 2388) argues that the
emotions behind such graffiti have intentions of marking minorities in question as ‘bodies
out of place’ in the locations concerned.
Can the same be said for Mainland bodies in rural Hong Kong? Bearing in mind that the
privileging of nativist identities in spatialities must appear natural and invisible in order to
appear fair, neutral or objective to mainstream logics (Delaney 2002, 11), Lefebvrian
representations of space and representational space structure the consumption of graffiti
in a way that constructs the spatial practices of Mainlanders using the rural country park
as detrimental to the overall prosperity and well-being of Hong Kongers. In this, there is
a certain naturalness in the unchanging rural landscapes that ‘blinds’ the totalizing effect
of nativists’ ‘counterspace’ by an appeal to the power of imaginative geographies in
solidifying the porous border between Hong Kong and its sovereign. Compared to the
now widespread graffiti samples in urban Hong Kong (ie Figures 3–6), Sinophobic graffiti
occurring in Hong Kong’s rural country parks render the countryside a safer ‘place’ for the
expression of graffiti (without the need to protect one’s identity with masks) embodying
imaginative geographies of nativism.
In contrast to the representational spaces of Smugglers’ Ridge, urban Hong Kong’s shim-
mering skyscraper-studded skyline and efficiently planned streets are indeed motifs of
a common destiny successfully achieved through the Hong Kong values of perseverance
and hard work. Thus, representational spaces of iconic skyscrapers denote the former British
colony’s transition from fishing village to Asia’s world city. The efflorescence of anti-China
graffiti such as those featured in Figures 3–6 around the business district constitute attempts
aimed at preserving the hegemony of the relationally fluid architectural feats that are
representational spaces of modernity and globalism. Hence, the combined thrust of urban
graffitied messages do not oppose the Lefebvrian representation of space designated for
banking, finance and commerce. Rather, they attempt to protect the representational spaces
of globalization and capitalism (increasingly subject to erosion) by overlaying these physical
spaces with Hong Kong nativism as mental spaces needing to remain apart from China’s
Communism. In other words, the continued survival of Hong Kong’s urban spaces requires
purification from the China factor in order for Asia’s world city not to suffer the fate of
16 J. LOWE AND S. ORTMANN

degenerating into ‘just another Mainland city’. In this battle for Hong Kong’s urban future,
graffiti writing is part of an emerging urbanism appropriating the urban as counterspace
informed by imaginative geographies. These are formed in opposition to Mainland China’s
official stance that the semi-autonomous city requires cultural integration with the rest of
China. This, in essence, is a map that prematurely erases the border between Hong Kong and
the rest of China before the expiry of the retrocessional agreement in 2047. The upshot is
a lamented unmaking of place that touches raw nerves of nostalgic place-making. In the
current state of unrest, urban graffiti writing is emblematic of Lefebvre’s (1968) ‘right to the
city’ thesis that individuals have rights to determine their futures in cities by changing spaces.
Imaginative geographies will continue to undergird a right to the city that excises the China
factor from representational spaces of urban Hong Kong.

Conclusion
After nearly 6 months of protests marked by unrest that has paralysed Asia’s global city, fears
of Hong Kong being reduced to just another Mainland city bereft of legal and institutional
affordances currently enjoyedremain enshrined in imaginative geographies of the city’s
autonomy and postcoloniality that colour perceptions of the environment, politics and
peoples beyond the SAR’s borders. In this prevailing climate of pessimism, economic nativism,
welfare chauvinism and symbolic nativism as disaggregated by Betz (2019) provide
a compendious account of Hong Kongers’ unrelenting pursuit of democracy and civil liberties.
Whilst ‘imaginative geographies’ are also integral to the un/making of identity boundaries
between Hong Kong and Mainland China, the graffiti featured in this work suggest that
a nativist outlook is buttressed by imaginative geographies articulating a defence of colonial
legacies. The geographical coordinates of Hong Kong and China remain unchanged after the
1997 retrocession, but the borders of the SAR remain contested.
As its sovereign, China’s authoritarian exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong is also
a power move inspired by its own imaginative geographies about the territories it ceded to
the British due to the humiliation of the Opium Wars. While the present political crisis in
Hong Kong is a contestation over space and rejection of Beijing’s cartographies of the SAR as
inalienable, the resurgence of nativism amongst Hong Kong youth opposing China’s
encroachment was therefore activated by imaginative geographies purporting to establish
a more progressive and democratic version of its boundaries – an alternative geography of
a democratic region legitimated by nativism within its national borders that China identifies as
a national security threat. To this end, it is hoped this work’s focus on the nexus between
nativism and imaginary geographies will enliven further debates about how Hong Kong
identity is structured by inter-subjectively felt experiences of spatial cartographies amidst
large migratory flows from the Mainland built on a mixture of geographical truths and
misperceptions.

Notes
1. Public Opinion Programme, University of Hong Kong. Source: https://www.hkupop.hku.hk/
english/popexpress/ethnic/.
2. Press releases, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Source: http://www.hkiaps.cuhk.edu.hk/wd/
ni/20190826-090147_1.pdf.
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 17

3. Ibid.

Acknowledgements
The corresponding author thanks members of the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei
Darussalam for their helpful feedback when he presented an earlier version of this manuscript at
a research seminar in December 2018. The authors express gratitude to the editor-in-chief and
anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
John Lowe completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is Senior Research Associate
in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at City University of Hong Kong. He has
published about Hong Kong and East Asian identities in Patterns of Prejudice, Critical Asian
Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, The Journal of Gender
Studies and Bijdragen tot de Taal, - Land - en Volkenkunde. Email: cartesiancircles@gmail.com
/johnlowe@cityu.edu.hk
Dr Stephan Ortmann completed his PhD in the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-
Nuremberg. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and International
Studies in City University of Hong Kong. He has published widely on Hong Kong identity as well
as China’s interest in the Singaporean model of governance in leading journals such as The Journal
of Democracy, Administration & Society, The China Quarterly, The Pacific Review and Asian Survey.
Email: sortmann@cityu.edu.hk

ORCID
John Lowe http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5865-2480
Stephan Ortmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6567-6103

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