Making Hong Kong Chinese: State Nationalism and its Blowbacks in a Recalcitrant City

Drawing from the literatures on strategic identity shift and on signaling, this article examines the strategies used by Beijing to impose its monist brand of state nationalism on Hong Kong. Given the nominally high degree of autonomy granted to Hong Kong, Beijing has been unable to impose its nationalism directly from above. Instead, it has made use of cooptation strategies so as to cultivate increasingly vocal and influential loyalist circles among local elites, who have promoted state nationalism from within. This logic, this article argues, has led many among Hong Kong's political elite to compete in expressing an increasingly overt Chinese nationalistic posture as a way to signal loyalty to Beijing. These strategies have however backfired, raising doubts as to the actual extent of Hong Kong's autonomy and triggering an existential crisis that led to the emergence of a reactive form of popular Hong Kong sub-state nationalism. In this context, state and popular sub-state nationalisms have fed on each other and grown increasingly irreconcilable, echoing the intensifying radicalization and polarization between the authoritarian establishment and the democratic opposition.