What Does It Mean to Be Chinese?

Under the distant gaze of Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait on a shelf in Alfred Ko’s office, a plaster bust of Mao Tse-tung rubs shoulders with a replica of the Goddess of Democracy, symbol of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square.

Colonialist, Communist, democrat: This jumbled iconography of China’s past reflects the conundrum of Ko’s identity. Being Chinese--in or outside China--isn’t simple. And Ko, living in British Hong Kong in the months before China reclaims the territory, has found it’s often contradictory.

After the bloody army crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, said Ko, who was then a student in Canada, he considered--and rejected--getting a Canadian passport.

“I didn’t feel like I belonged there,” he said. “I’m Chinese.”

Better to face an uncertain future in a China-controlled Hong Kong, Ko reasoned, than to live as a foreigner abroad. The People’s Liberation Army may have forestalled or even killed his dreams for a democratic China. But it did not dim what he felt defined him most--his sense of being Chinese.

There are many versions of what it is to be Chinese. About a fifth of the world’s population--including most of the 1.2 billion people in China and the estimated 30 million “overseas Chinese” in 109 countries around the world, including Hong Kong--is considered ethnic Chinese.

But differences in dialect, religion, ideology and cuisine divide the greater Chinese nation at least as much as different languages, religious denominations, cultures and cuisines divide Western Europe.

“China is really multinational--almost like a continent itself--like Europe,” said Wang Gungwu, a Singapore-based scholar who has spent a lifetime studying the Chinese diaspora.

But as the recent furor over disputed Japanese-held islands in the East China Sea demonstrated, there is also something about being Chinese that transcends geographic borders and ideological differences.

Joining hands in protest against the erection of a lighthouse on one of the rocky Diaoyu islands by the right-wing Japan Youth Federation were Communist mainlanders, overseas anti-Communist dissidents, Taiwanese Nationalists and Taiwanese separatists, Hong Kong democrats and Chinese Americans.

For a moment--and not the first--bitter rivals united against a common foe. In this case--and not for the first time--the foe was Japan.

“Only the Japanese could have brought so much show of national unity among the Chinese,” said Wang, 66, the author of 20 books, most dealing with the question of what it means to be Chinese.

“We are all Chinese in the way that Westerners are Western,” Wang said in a telephone interview from Australia, where he is professor emeritus of Far Eastern history at Australian National University. “You may be American or English or French or German, but if you are asked if you represent that civilization known as Western civilization, you would agree that you do. I think China is a bit like that for those who call themselves Chinese. There is a high degree of abstraction both in the West and in China.”

When Hong Kong activist David Chan drowned while attempting to place the red flag of the People’s Republic of China on “occupied” Diaoyu Island, he became a martyr for Greater China.

That martyrdom stretches across vast expanses of territory and imagination, reaching from the narrow hutongs of old Beijing to the broad avenues of Monterey Park; from the Chinese quartiers of southeastern Paris to Snake Alley in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei.

More than 6,000 people, representing all factions in Hong Kong’s political spectrum, attended Chan’s funeral service and cremation in Hong Kong earlier this month. The red Chinese flag draping the coffin was supplied by Beijing’s representative in Hong Kong.

The mourners included several candidates for the job of the territory’s chief executive after British rule ends next year. Also attending were some of Beijing’s harshest critics in Hong Kong, including Democratic Party Chairman Martin Lee.

“Japan did what Beijing has been trying to do for years,” said Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Szeto Wah, holding a national flag during an earlier memorial service. “Our common resentment of Japan’s aggression brought us all together--and we are all proud to be Chinese.”

Szeto is an unlikely patriot, a critic of Beijing who, after seven years of protesting in front of the unofficial Chinese embassy’s closed doors, was finally welcomed inside when he came bearing a petition to protect the islands. Szeto was pleased to find common ground after countless confrontations.

“But in the end,” he mused, “I think Beijing’s idea of patriotism is different from ours.”

What is it that made Szeto trade his picket sign for a Chinese flag, caused David Chan to take a fatal leap into a roiling sea and confounds people in Hong Kong about to return to a motherland that the majority of them once fled?

“It’s instinctive, the way you might feel if someone insulted your mother,” said teacher Wai Hing-cheung at a protest outside the Japanese Consulate in Hong Kong, explaining the sentiment that has transcended borders and ideology to unify the Chinese diaspora. “In this case, it’s our motherland. We must protect its dignity.”

But feelings of Chinese-ness do not necessarily lead to uncritical political loyalties, said Helen Siu, a Yale University professor who has written extensively on Chinese identity. In fact, the Chinese diaspora has been triggered largely by political upheavals on the mainland.

“People identify with China on many levels--racial, cultural, social, political--stretching over centuries of history,” she said. The China that the scattered descendants of the Yellow Emperor call their own is more an imagined community than a true homeland.

That identity often includes a romantic vision of an ancient China portrayed as once the world’s most advanced, cultured nation--all the more frustrating for those who feel that modern China has somehow been held back by its own rulers’ mistakes and by outside powers’ connivance.

“I think the commonality is a sense of uncertainty about the political future of China,” said diaspora scholar Wang. “Economically, everyone seems to be doing very well, but politically, [China] is heading nowhere in particular. There’s a sense of lack of progress in the way a modern state should be developing people’s freedom to express themselves, people’s participatory rights.”

Instead, Wang said, there seems to be a political vacuum in China, “a bunch of leaders who appear to be just fighting for survival or at least fighting for control. All these things are complications that Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland all face in common.”

Indeed, as China’s market-oriented economic and social reforms erode the Communist foundations of the state, Beijing leaders are searching for ways to preserve their legitimacy and create a substitute ideology to unite the country.

A patriotic campaign last year commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II redirected people’s focus from domestic problems toward Japan’s past aggressions and China’s emerging strength. The movement gained momentum last spring, when China lobbed missiles into the sea near a Taiwan tilting toward independence to warn Taipei to stay in the family--or else. And the symbolic dispute with Japan over the tiny islands in the East China Sea ignited demonstrations from Taiwan to Toronto.

Ironically, public exhibitions of patriotism have not been occurring in China itself. Though official speeches and mainland newspapers have been filled with strident denunciations of Japan, public demonstrations have been strictly controlled.

One did slip by authorities. On Sept. 10, in the southern special economic development zone of Shenzhen, fans attending a soccer match raised a banner calling for the “protection” of the Diaoyu islands--and they raised it across from a section of the stadium reserved for senior officials.

Captured in a photograph on the front page of a Guangdong province newspaper, the banner was the first open political demonstration in China since the 1989 pro-democracy movement. But it was not repeated in other locations. Some people even worried that it would result in a government crackdown on soccer, which has become an enthusiastically attended spectator sport in the People’s Republic.

In Beijing, since the islands issue surfaced, squads of police have been stationed outside major universities and in the diplomatic enclave to block any student marches on the Japanese Embassy.

The government ordered protest organizers out of the city and shut down computer billboards discussing the issue. When a group of demonstrators from Hong Kong, the nearby Portuguese colony of Macao and Taiwan managed to evade a Japanese naval blockade and actually plant China’s five-star flag on one of the islands earlier this month, Chinese media ignored the incident.

“The leaders know all too well that discussion can quickly turn to disorder,” said Bob Broadfoot, the director of Political & Economic Risk Consultancy in Hong Kong. “Playing with patriotism is a dangerous game that can quickly backfire against the government.”

In Hong Kong, after Chan’s death, shouts against resurgent Japanese militarism were accompanied by grumbling that Beijing had not done enough to protect the islands. Hong Kong and Taiwan, it seemed, were more intent on protecting the motherland than was the regime in Beijing.

Protesters in Hong Kong also began to worry about their right to demonstrate--even for patriotic reasons--after Britain hands the territory over to China on July 1.

“Before 1997, Chinese in Hong Kong have the right to take to the streets to show their nationalism and patriotism,” remarked Hong Chin-tin, a political critic. “But after 1997, they may not have that right.”

Because of the coming change in sovereignty, Hong Kong is now the stage where questions of Chinese identity are being most urgently played out. More than half of Hong Kong’s population, it is estimated, came here from China to escape civil war, famine or the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, or simply to seek a better life.

“What defines Chinese-ness?” asked pro-Beijing politician Cheng Kai-nam. “. . . Nationality can change on paper, and speaking English doesn’t make us Western. But in some ways, we have preserved Chinese culture here in Hong Kong better than in China.”

For some in Hong Kong, Cheng noted, the Diaoyu islands issue is an opportunity not only to find reassuring common interests with China but also to show that they are more Chinese than the mainland in their patriotic fervor.

But for many others in the territory, the question of identity is still blurred by a grudging respect for its achievements under British colonial rule and estrangement from their future leaders. Suddenly confronted with Beijing’s expectations of “patriotic” behavior, Hong Kong finds the motherland a place both alien and familiar.

As he does every year, William Tang, one of Hong Kong’s best-known fashion designers, recently returned from the avant-garde front lines of fashion to the most conservative spot in Hong Kong, his home village near the Chinese border, for a traditional mid-autumn festival.

The celebration always occurs at the first full moon after the autumn equinox, and this year the date fell near Chinese National Day on Oct. 1. For the first time, the entire village honored not only the moon but also the 1949 founding of modern China.

Hong Kong is filled with refugees from the civil war that led to the 1949 birth of the People’s Republic; they pointedly did not celebrate National Day. Even in Tang’s village, a paradigm of patriotism, feelings were mutedly mixed.

In black jeans and a black shirt, Tang stood like a slash of shadow in front of a garish 50-foot-high sign reading “Celebrate the 47th Anniversary of the New China.” Revolutionary songs rose to crescendo against the racket of firecrackers.

“It’s a very strange feeling to look up and see the Chinese flag flying here,” said Tang. “And the music drives me crazy.”

He remembered the songs from his childhood, when the Cultural Revolution was turning China upside down and the village people could see the corpses of its victims floating down the river from the mainland. When his aunt was not allowed to cross the border to join the Red Guards, he recalled, she set fire to herself.

The village still has strong ties to the mainland--a group of the area’s leaders was the first from Hong Kong to visit Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, while nearly 2 million other Hong Kong citizens filled the colony’s streets in emotional protest.

On the festival day, the village elders sat proudly on a red-bunting-bedecked stage with Chinese officials, toasting the return to the motherland. A group of teenage boys shouted “Ganbei”--”Cheers”--with the officials and drank up.

But ambivalence rippled through the crowd.

“It’s a bit early to celebrate 1997,” said one woman. “We’ve still got some time left.”

When asked if she’s not proud to be Chinese, she gave an answer that is echoing throughout Hong Kong in these anxious countdown days: “I’m Chinese. I love China. I just don’t like the government.”