In recent years, pro-democracy protests have increasingly challenged the legitimacy of Beijing rule, stressing that the "One Country, Two Systems" form of governance has not been upheld. Echoing the political unrest and the disillusionment of many pro-Hong Kong/anti-China citizens, the Hong Kong film industry has seen a rise in politically motivated works that emphasize the idea of the "local." This article examines contemporary pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and questions the role that social activism plays in the formation of individual and group identity in post-handover Hong Kong and how the very idea of the "local" is seen as subversive by the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Through analyzing Hong Kong's localist discourse in Ten Years (2015), a dystopian film that exemplifies the revival of political art and activism in Hong Kong, this article seeks to engage with contemporary developments of localist thought in relation to identity formation in a decolonizing space, to interrogate the dichotomy of the "local" and the "national" in order to understand how the former works to destabilize national narratives, and to examine the plethora of tactics employed by the CPC to silence social movements in Hong Kong, including censorship of film and social media. This article will ultimately argue that the extensive censorship of art and media in and related to Hong Kong reveals that the CPC's project is to enforce a unified and singular national identity, wherein Hong Kong localist thought is seen to delegitimize state authority and endanger national sovereignty.
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