ABSTRACT
Between the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on December 19, 1984, and the Chinese government’s resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, Hong Kong developed a new epochal consciousness characterized by the idea that Hong Kong’s own historical time had not only a beginning and an end, but also was a period of transition. The development of this time consciousness came about through the reconfiguration of Hong Kong’s modernity. As on the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong’s modern historical experience can be divided into three temporalities: the colonial time of British rule (1842-1997), the transitional time of the Hong Kong countdown (1984-1997), and the national time of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR; 1997-2046). All three were shaped by international agreements. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842), the Treaty of Beijing (1860), and the Extension of the Colony treaty (1898) were the cornerstones of the first temporality. The Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984) authorized the appearance of the second temporality, and the Basic Law of the HKSAR (1990) prescribed the legitimacy of the third. During the countdown process, each temporality was tied to a particular dimension of historical time: the first to the past, the second to the present, and the third to the future. The perception of July 1, 1997, as an ultimate deadline reordered the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. It first made Hong Kong’s past problematic and then encouraged the displacement of the past as a problem of the present. The development of a new Hong Kong cultural identity thus became inseparable from finding appropriate solutions to the problem of the present.
