‘Faces of Hong Kong’: My city? My home?

Abstract

Confronted with the limits of neoliberalism and distressed by the integration with the Mainland, can Hong Kong imagine a different home, a different sense of belonging? This article approaches this question by examining ‘Faces of Hong Kong’, a campaign inaugurated via the BrandHK platform in 2010. Designed by the government, the campaign proposes to showcase Hong Kong to a global audience through the stories of real people. In this series the most popular video is the one featuring Chow Yun-Fat and his story about Kowloon City. ‘Re-searching’ Kowloon City by way of walking through the district, the author argues that it is no longer a site for the younger generation of Hong Kong people to write their own success stories. The apparent ‘disappearance’ of Kowloon City indicates that ‘sense of belonging’ as a concept is gradually diminishing.

Keywords

Brand Hong Kong Programme Chow Yun-Fat generic city hybridity Kowloon City sense of belonging spatial justice urban renewal

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