Political Trust and Political Identity at the Chinese Periphery: the Identity Shift in Hong Kong since 1997

In spite of a growing body of research on sub-national identity in Europe and North America since the 1980s, a number of key questions in this domain remain surprisingly little understood. What is the relationship between local and national identities and how can they be measured appropriately? What are the key driving forces behind the formation of local identity movements? To drive the debate further this study explores these two issues in the case of Hong Kong, a former British colony and since 1997 a semi-autonomous entity under the People’s Republic of China. Drawing on a rich source of semi-annual opinion surveys conducted between 1997 and 2013, it seeks to describe and explain the puzzling shift of political identity trends in post-1997 Hong Kong from an increasing inclination towards China back to an apparently strengthening sense of local identity. The paper shows that: first, instead of capturing identities with an often used single survey item, a conceptually more rigorous approach measures them separately. Doing so reveals that the key shift was not a rise of localism, but a gradual strengthening of nationalistic sentiments until 2008, which has substantially weakened since and has been accompanied by a declining compatibility of local and national identities. Second, findings suggest that in contrast to other prominent explanations, declining trust in the central government plays a pivotal role for the weakening identification with the nation and is intertwined with the decreasing compatibility of identities. Hence, the results indicate that increasingly hardline policies by the Chinese central government have backfired and contributed to a growing alienation from the nation among Hong Kongers. Thus, the study highlights problematic assumptions underlying widespread identity measures in surveys that recent research in the European context has also pointed to. Moreover, it underscores the critical role of the perception of the political center among peripheral populations for understanding why localist movements gain ground.