Performing as ways of knowing: Projects of legibility and state simplification in postcolonial Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper explores the evolving, adaptive, and self-making characteristics of how the Chinese state accesses and governs postcolonial Hong Kong, focusing on how the state develops ways of hegemonic simplification and projects of legibility through performances and political rituals. While drawing inspirations from Scott's classical concepts, the paper contends that the Chinese state's ways of knowing about Hong Kong are dynamic and performative rather than static and representative. The analysis identifies two primary models of state performativity in postcolonial Hong Kong. The first model, which emerged in the initial years after Hong Kong's reunion to China in 1997, focuses on semiotic mapping between sociolinguistic differentiation and sociopolitical boundary making through improvisational and interactional performance. The second model, which the state began to increasingly develop in the late 2000s, engages in a dialectic of boundary making and boundary breaking through scripted political rituals, aiming to both harmonize and subjugate the local within the state's cosmos. Broadly, this paper emphasizes the importance of viewing the state's performances and rituals as laminated and scalar processes and movements of knowledge making and re-making across sociocultural and sociopolitical timespace.