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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines how netizens and the state narrate the financial past, present, and future of Hong Kong amid radical political transformation in 2019. Taking narration as a form of doing and undoing of politics, this paper proposes online narrations of time-space as a contested political field.

Paper Abstract:

Building on the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope and Blommaert’s discussion of their scaling (2015), I examine online politics of time-space in the context of the post-2019 authoritarian overhaul of Hong Kong, specifically cross-border relations and state-society relations with mainland China. Based on digital ethnography, I compare the recently emerged chronotope “financial relic” (gamyung waizi 金融遺址) on social media with the more historical one, “financial center” (gamyung zungsam 金融中心). They signify two time-spaces of Hong Kong demarcated by the radical political shift of 2019, encapsulating different sets of political outlooks, refusal, ascertainment, self-identifications, and affective ties. Originated from social media in mainland China, the term “financial relic” has gradually been reclaimed by Hong Kongers. I first compare how mainland Chinese and Hong Kong netizens have attached different affective, political, and historical meanings to “financial relic,” reflecting changing cross-border relations. Then, I investigate how Hong Kongers have challenged the chronotope of “financial center” that the local government has repeatedly narrated in mainstream media outlets, forming a contested discursive field. In the Chinese context of authoritarian politics, online venues have become instrumental in voicing dissatisfaction and opposition (Yang 2009), which can circulate through the porous physical and digital border between mainland China and Hong Kong. Tracing multiple chronotopic narrations and their narrators’ varied positionalities, I show that politics are mobilized and destabilized through such narrations. As such, this study identifies a multi-scalar field of regional, national, and geopolitical politics in chronotopes as “chronotopic politics”.