Shopping for a new identity?
Hong Kong's favourite leisure activities are shopping, eating out and going to the cinema. So one would assume that consumerism is now a self-defining activity here, as it is in the United States. Is that why an economic downturn, which threatens purchasing power, can cause a mass identity crisis?
No doubt consumerism represents an important symbol of success, and any threat to the ability to consume freely does have a profound effect on Hong Kong people, just as it does in other affluent, materialistic societies. Consumer confidence has become a measure of how sure a society is about its prospects.
Take away the average American's credit cards and you take away a good deal of his sense of power and freedom, or even his sense of who he is. Can the same be said about a Hongkonger?
The standard view about such matters is that societies can be placed somewhere along a continuum, with modernisation - and everything it implies - at one end, and tradition at the other. So, for example, the mainland would be far closer to the traditional end of the scale, while Hong Kong would be near the other end. It makes sense that the bulk of advertisements on the mainland emphasise the performance and the reliability of products or services, while in Hong Kong, 77 per cent of adverts appeal to hedonistic desires.
However, as appealing as the continuum idea is, surveys about how Hong Kong people view their spending habits do not support it. In fact, it gives a totally wrong picture about what consumerism represents in Hong Kong society, according to the authors of The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese. They believe that Hong Kong people have not abandoned traditional values and replaced them with new ones like 'work hard and play hard' in the way that many Westerners have. Instead, they seem to have found a way to hang on to both.
This may partly explain why, despite appearances, most Hong Kong people in surveys reject consumerism as an end in itself, while Westerners act as if they see it as a way to be happy and to express themselves. How they spend their money gives them a sense of fulfilment. In contrast, Hong Kong people say they regard shopping, eating out, going to the cinema and so on as a reward for hard work and as a tool for building or maintaining family ties and social relationships.
High levels of consumerism may have caught on in Hong Kong for different reasons than in the West, but can Hong Kong's identity crisis be explained partly by the fact that its people have begun to attach the same sort of significance to consumerism that Americans do? A world brand and the price that goes with it define a person as globally significant. Most Hong Kong people don't own a Rolex watch, just as not everyone can be in the upper echelons of society. But people compare how they are doing to other folk. The lowliest Hong Kong worker takes as much pride as the big fish, if not more, in knowing they are swimming in a big pond.
Hong Kong people are survivors. But to thrive, they need to form a series of identities that are modern and traditional, part collectivist and sometimes individualistic. To tap into and celebrate its particular psychological pluralism - and to encourage more of it - is how Hong Kong can best compete in the world arena as it needs to: on its own terms.
Jean Nicol is a Hong Kong-based psychologist and writer
