Re-Re-Branding Hong Kong: Of Brands, Laws, and Public Diplomacy

The idea of “branding" Hong Kong was first conceptualised in 1996, shortly before the UK retroceded Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. This need for a Hong Kong brand stemmed from a general anxiety that the city would lose its distinct identity after reunification, and policies were subsequently put in place to frame the new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as an international hub for finance, trade, investment, tourism, transport, and communications. Hong Kong was thus positioned as "Asia’s world city" and the “gateway city [for the West] to the East”. Since then, however, the visual imagery news agencies have brought to our screens have painted a different picture of Hong Kong in our mind’s eye. The bright coloured umbrellas and sit-in street protests of 2014 have rendered Hong Kong synonymous with the so-called “umbrella movement” and the more violent protests of 2019/20 with its teargas filled streets and standoffs between students and riot police on campuses signalled to the rest of the world that this is a city in crisis. Against this background, the distinct role that law and the Hong Kong legal system have played in the branding, nation-building, and public diplomacy of Hong Kong will be explored. It will be shown that rule of law discourse has, and continuous to be invoked as a distinguishing feature of Hong Kong. Also, claims about core values representing the “true identity” of Hong Kong and its people are often premised on Hong Kong’s laws and legal system. How did the laws and legal system of Hong Kong come to represent its identity and the basis upon which much of its branding and public diplomacy are built? What does this say about the brand of this nation, and what does it mean for its laws and legal system?