BEIJING – Celebrations for Hong Kong Culture Week just ended, and if
attendance at university is a valid indicator, the people on campus
are quite fond of China's richest city.
Students mobbed an outdoor rock concert, filling a third of the main
soccer field to see a four-piece band grind out energetic tunes
fleshed out with an occasional guitar solo. They crowded a small
wooden stage with a huge picture of Hong Kong's skyline in the
background. Friends were invited to take a group photo, and the campus
Hong Kong Cultural Association would give a prize to the "best" shot.
Scores of people clogged the street leading to the student center,
where there were a series of large posters discussing major political
and culture events of the past century or so. The campus went Hong
Kong crazy.
As a former Hong Kong resident, I watched the events with an
interesting eye, or at the least the few that I stumbled into on my
way around campus. While it was nice to see Tsinghua talking about a
city I admire, I found them largely disappointing. In many ways the
culture week missed the point, as the planned events rarely touched on
the things that make Hong Kong so special.
I'm sure the planners didn't have a free hand in planning the event,
so I can't entirely blame there. There were political considerations.
The fact that Hong Kong citizens are free from political censorship,
have a partially-elected democracy and have created a vibrant,
pluralist society wasn't discussed. It might not compare so well with
the government by one party system based here.
Slightly more surprising was the lack of Cantonese, the most important
of China's thousands of dialects. Cantonese is the only Chinese
dialect to have the status of an official language (if only Hong Kong
and Macau), and unlike Mandarin, is still written using traditional
characters. Add in a few decades of isolation from Mainland China
after the founding of the People's Republic of China and modern
Cantonese is quite different from the "people's language," Mandarin.
Cantonese movies and music continue to be popular throughout Asia –
and here on the Mainland. I hear Canto-pop and Canto-techno playing in
hutong back alleys, trendy barbershops and tiny portable MP3 players.
Yet all singing during Hong Kong Culture Week was Mandarin. (To the
credit of Tsinghua's Hong Kong contingent, they all appear to speak
excellent Mandarian. The incomprehensiblity of Hong Kongers' Mandarin
is known throughout the country.)
I suppose there were political undertones here as well. Hong Kong is a
part of China now – the culture week also served as an early
celebration for the 10th anniversary of the city's "Return to the
Motherland" – and China speaks Mandarin. But it's hard to celebrate
what's unique about a city without using the city's way of
transmitting that culture.
As I noted earlier this month in Qinghai, the same attitude infects
most government celebrations of minorities. I thought that Hong Kong's
guarantee of 40 more years of a "high degree of autonomy" from the
main Chinese government might allow a more liberal celebration. But
here in Beijing, that autonomy seems rather illusive.
