Four decades after radically reinterpreting global relations of knowledge and power, what can Orientalism tell us about the relationship between Beijing and Hong Kong today? Drawing upon recent studies that critique Said’s exclusive focus on the East-West binary to re-envision Orientalism as one of multiple grammars of identification operating across multiple binaries, this paper expands Said’s knowledge/power framework to analyze academic studies of Hong Kong from today’s metropole, Beijing.
I examine three examples of Beijing’s Hong Kong-ology, arguing that each constructs and reproduces the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) colonial mythologies across the Hong Kong-Beijing nexus. The first, a book by Jiang Shigong, argues that the brilliance of One Country, Two Systems proves the superiority of the PRC political system, thereby rendering the maintenance of two systems unnecessary. The second, an article on localism in the official journal of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, places Hong Kong on the psychoanalyst’s couch to construct the city as an irrational child in need of guidance from Beijing. And finally, a third article provides this guidance, imposing the Party-state’s hegemonic ideology of economic development as a universal panacea.
Beijing’s Hong Kong-ology constitutes a closed, self-referential, and self- reproducing system divorced from realities on the ground, presenting predetermined self-glorifying tropes as academic analyses. While fundamentally misrepresenting reality, this nexus of ignorance and power nevertheless has real effects on Beijing-Hong Kong relations, promoting misunderstandings, fostering misguided policies, and thereby further escalating tensions.
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