Losing More Than Just a Clock Tower
Last year, a huge fuss was raised over the future of Hong Kong’s Star Ferry pier. Built in 1957, the stout, white building, topped by a boxy clock tower, was one of Hong Kong’s last civic structures remaining from the postwar era. Thousands of people passed through it every day as they travelled across the harbour from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui. As plans were hatched for a new waterfront reclamation project that would shift the shoreline by 300 metres, however, it became clear that the pier’s days were numbered.
What was the big deal? Hong Kong is, after all, a relentlessly-paced city that has always placed a higher value on economic growth than anything else, especially local heritage. But, to the surprise of the reclamation project’s government backers, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers decided that the Star Ferry pier was one building they weren’t willing to see demolished. More than its architectural value, it was its place in the territory’s “collective memory” that caused so many people to lash out against its destruction.
Hong Kongers voiced their discontent in different ways. One group occupied the pier and unveiled protest banners; others made art, like Karden, who created a series of linocut prints depicting the Star Ferry clock tower. Together, the combined tide of support for the pier was so great that it made headlines around the world, interpreted not simply as a movement to save an old building but the birth of a new, critical discussion on Hong Kong’s heritage, culture and identity. Ultimately, though, despite their success at generating a widespread public discussion, their efforts did not prevent the Star Ferry pier from being razed last summer.
Since its handover from Britain to China in 1997, Hong Kong has been forced to consider its own place in the world. The emergence of a new generation, born in Hong Kong, well-educated and lacking the refugee’s drive to succeed at all costs, has only added to this identity crisis. For the first time, notions such as collective memory have entered the Hong Kong vocabulary, to such an extent that it seems that even a dour media organ like the South China Morning Post has taken a liking to the concept, arguing that Hong Kong’s intangible cultural heritage must be protected, such as when the “King of Kowloon” died last summer.
After decades of relentless growth, it seems that Hong Kongers are finally taking the time to consider the city they have built. Many see, in such everyday places as street markets, old market halls, trolleys and old ferry terminals, the manifestation of Hong Kong’s local identity, the things that set it apart from every other city in the world, and especially every other city in China. For Hong Kong’s governing class, though, these things are little more than obstacles to development, preserved only if they have some intrinsic market value (as a tourist attraction, say). They would rather see a new highway, shopping mall or office tower than something like the Wan Chai Market, a 1937 market hall now threatened by demolition.
Hong Kong might be technically post-colonial but its governing mentality is still very much one of a colonial city, ruled by an unaccountable, undemocratic elite that exists mainly to serve the interests of Beijing and Hong Kong’s biggest corporations. Some Hong Kongers support this, but many don’t — witness the huge protests in support of full democracy over the past several years. The new Star Ferry pier — universally loathed and responsible, according to the Star Ferry Corporation, for a 15 percent drop in ridership — is a perfect symbol for the parochial vision of Hong Kong’s leaders. Its design, befitting a theme park more than the waterfront of a world city, is gaudily faux-historic, a smarmy rebuke to the clean, optimistic lines of the 1957 predecessor.
The government doesn’t seem to have learned from the Star Ferry controversy, either. Apparently, when the Central reclamation project is completed, the public spaces adjacent to the old Star Ferry pier will give way to a giant shopping mall. Hong Kong’s large Filipino community is upset: those spaces, including two small alleyways, plazas and the World Wide House, an old, Filipino-dominated mall, form its cultural heart in Hong Kong. Every Sunday, thousands of Filipinos — most of them women who work as maids — flock to Central where they hang out and socialize.
“The parks and walkways of Central are filled with Filipinas who have no qualms about rolling out their mats on the sidewalk so that they could mingle together, eat their baon, play the music of traditional Filipino dances for their anniversaries, play tong-its or just exchange the latest gossip,” reports the Inquirer, a Filipino broadsheet. Unwelcome in Central’s shopping malls and other privately-controlled spaces, the public space near the Star Ferry pier is the only place in the district where Hong Kong’s Filipinos can gather in great numbers.
According to the Inquirer, the activists behind the Star Ferry protests will be teaming up with Filipino community organizations to protect Central’s public space. We’ll see how that goes.
Protest banners inside the old Star Ferry pier, last December. Photo by laihiu
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Olga Schlyter says:
That pier building was really beautiful! Another giant shopping mall - yeah, that’s just what the world needs… :(
I’ve been wanting to go to Hong Kong for a long time, now I feel I have to hurry! Thanks for an interesting article.
October 30th, 2007 at 3:38 pm