Brand Hong Kong: Asia's World City as Method?

After its reversion to China in 1997, Hong Kong placed a significant emphasis on defining its international visibility as a Special Administrative Region (SAR), a gateway to the Mainland in terms of finance, trade, investment, tourism, transport and communications. In order to package its image as "Asia's world city,'' the Chief Executive's Commission on Strategic Development recommended in its February 2000 report that "Hong Kong needs to promote its unique position as one of the most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities in Asia to a wide range of international audiences.'' This led directly to the Brand Hong Kong program that bears the mission "to provide a greater focus to the international promotion of Hong Kong as 'Asia's world city.' '' The marketing strategy of the city's Brand Hong Kong program has, in its preoccupation with these values, marginalized others. The current Donald Tsang administration is keen on developing Hong Kong into a hub of Asian creative industries, but not a base for local creative industries to grow in. As long as the development of creative industries is being framed by the "Brand Hong Kong'' concept, vernacular hybrid cultures and spaces cannot surface. This article argues that the overwhelming emphasis on branding Hong Kong has ironically led to the loss of Hong Kong's intrinsic uniqueness: the blending of the global and the local into a hybrid emerging culture which is significantly "glocal.'' It attempts to assess the implications of the Brand Hong Kong program's failure in recognizing that the distinguishing characteristic of Hong Kong was its emergent community where genuine cosmopolitanisms found the space to emerge. It is important for the new Hongkongers to recognize that the brand of Hong Kong is not inevitably the property of the state-capital nexus.