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Diasporic Memories and Conceptual Geography in Post-colonial Hong Kong

Abstract This paper explores how the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been trying to incorporate post-1997 Hong Kong into the framework of a Greater China. The construction of two ‘narratives’ are examined: the grand narrative of Chinese history in secondary school textbooks in Hong Kong; and the development of a new regional framework of the Pearl River Delta. The first narrative, which focuses on the past, signals the PRC government's desire to inculcate through education a deeper sense of collective identity as patriotic citizens of China amongst residents of Hong Kong. The second narrative, which represents a futuristic imagining of a regional landscape, rewrites the trajectory of Hong Kong by merging the city with the Pearl River Delta region. However, these narrative strategies have triggered ambivalent responses from people in Hong Kong, especially the generations born after 1980. In their discursive battles against merging with the mainland, activists have sought to instil a collective memory that encourages a counter-imagination of a particular kind of Hong Kong that draws from the pre-1997 past. This conflict pits activists and their supporters against officials in the local government working to move Hong Kong towards integration with greater Guangdong and China at large. But the local resistance discourses are inadequate because they are constrained by their own parochial visions and colonial nostalgia.