"The city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting [Hong Kong] you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all of her parts." (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities).

The resumption of the controversial Central Reclamation project in Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour following a court ruling, the waterfront competition and ensuing debates have galvanized popular sentiments around the future of Hong Kong’s harbour.

Unsurprisingly, the language, narratives and cultural practices involved in the harbour makeover have received far less critical attention than they warrant.

A close analysis of the signification processes by which the interests of stakeholders are being converted into public interests is beyond the scope of this impromptu exercise, but is, in my opinion, long overdue. One need only grab a few of the glossy brochures that are handed out by property developers, and various government bodies to realize that behind the glorification of the harbour, a good example of Barthesian myth, lies something else. Behind any marketing effort must lie a commodity…The harbour?

“Our harbour, sitting at the heart of our economic success story, has become our most visible icon on the world stage. The time has now come to celebrate Hong Kong’s harbour and mark the transition from working waterway to a bountiful harbour that truly reflects our world city status.” (Swire Properties. A New Vision for Our Shores)

The invocation of a common interest and destiny is an old, worn-out rhetorical strategy. What is far more interesting is the reproduction and dissemination of the government’s vision of Hong Kong as World City to the point that it ultimately naturalizes its ideological meanings. And when one uses the term icon to describe a natural feature, we are certainly in the presence of a cleverly articulated sign system.

According to Peirce’s definition, an Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, whether any such Object actually exists or not. ¹

In keeping with the cultural logic of late capitalism, commodity and sign appear as one, but often so do commodity, sign and space.

The harbour thus becomes a commodity laden with mythical content. The countless representations of the harbour are inseparable from the commodity system in which this free-floating signifier operates.

Both the direct advertising message, tourism promotion narratives, and the motifs of landscape form are received and retransmitted as cultural signals by those who live there.

The harbour, as product or image of the new product, has become the protagonist of a marketing campaign directed not only at tourists but also at the inhabitants themselves.

From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. “The fetishism of the lost object, the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. The hyperreal manages to efface even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary. Unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy, or in the beyond, but in the real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself". ² Almost half of the harbour has already been lost to reclamation, and the remainder is in danger of the same fate.

Hongkongers inhabit a monological representation generated by this market orientation. The superimposed City of Architecture and Tourism is the dominant story being told suffocating the potential for other individual stories to be told.

The Friends of The Harbour, one of the harbour protection societies that have sprung up in face of extensive reclamation, would like to tell a different story, yet their rhetoric sounds eerily similar to that employed by Swire Properties. “Our harbour is in fact of such a significance and special attraction that it has become a symbol of Hong Kong and an international tourism hotspot. We believe that it is equally important for Hong Kong to have a decent front-garden to portray ourselves internationally. We believe the beauty of Victoria Harbour is a treasure of Hong Kong, an irreplaceable and irrecoverable special asset and natural heritage of the Hong Kong people. Victoria Harbour is the place we shall see Hong Kong to evolve in future.”

The harbour is a “treasure and an asset”, again the language used has clear economic connotations. The harbour is the site for a future capitalization and the stage where Hong Kong will play “world city”.

Like the paper boat floating out into the sea that ends Clara Law’s film, Autumn Moon, Hong Kong is conceived of as floating space, akin to Foucault's notion of the ship as heterotopia par excellence, given over to the infinite (global and local) relations that it is constituted and reconstituted from. Once shipping, today tourism!

Fruit Chan’s cinematic investigations of Hong Kong devoted very little space to the harbour, his vision of urban Hong Kong has nothing in common with the Tourism Board glossy images, but once in “Little Cheung” he turned his camera to the harbour. The main character’s rhapsodic bicycle ride along the HK harbour promenade, set against that inescapable Hong Kong skyline, ends with him and his illegal immigrant friend, Fan, flinging louder and louder shouts of "Hong Kong is now ours" into the harbour. This scene is set beside the film's most heart-rending moments, of Fan and fellow mainlanders rounded up and marched into police vans prior to deportation back to the mainland. The harbour as free-floating signifier can accommodate many meanings, but will never belong to people like them.

The old role of Victoria Harbour was undermined by modern shipping requirements and the need for a deepwater container handling port. When these activities were transferred to Kwai Chung, the Hong Kong Island harbourfront was converted into a prime location for office space. The administration continued its expedient policy of reclaiming land in the harbour to accommodate the growth. The policy of reclamation didn’t seem to upset anybody. It also generated large amounts of revenue when reclaimed land was auctioned off.

But now that mainland China is competing for foreign investment and attracts the regional offices of multinationals, Hong Kong must find a new way of capitalizing on her harbour.

The government planning department spells out the new strategy:

“Tourism is now a major driving force behind Hong Kong's economic development. Metropolitan Hong Kong offers big city attractions in a striking setting, with the harbour constituting a major resource and integrating feature. In order to maintain Hong Kong as a key tourism destination there is a need to expand attractions and facilities around the harbour.”

This repackaged Hong Kong harbour will be available for tourists’ visual consumption as an embellished landscape prepared for what sociologist John Urry calls ‘Revisited, aesthetic appropriation". ³ We can expect a sanitization and disneyfication of Hong Kong harbour aimed at attracting middle-class families: a few observation decks, a pink and jade green colour scheme for Miami-style street furniture, Italianate ice-cream parlours, the inevitable McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Huts, the usual fireworks display, and nostalgia as a stable, consumable product that the tourist expects to find and purchase. Tourism feeds on the remainder, the residual element of past customs, production processes, ways of life. The rickshaw that can no longer be found in the streets of Hong Kong becomes a prop for tourist photographs, the Chinese junkboat that no longer sails the waters of the South China Sea can be turned into a logo of the Tourism Board. Only when the previous uses of the harbour become obsolete can it be converted into a visual commodity. In delineating a theory of Hong Kong as a "space of disappearance," Ackbar Abbas points to this long-enduring representation, a Chinese junk in Victoria Harbour against a backdrop of tall modernistic buildings, and describes it as "decadent," since it manages to make complex space disappear into a one-dimensional image, structured on a facile binarism of old and new, East and West. ⁴

“What is real is not what appears at any moment, but what is conserved in memory”. ⁵

The harbour is definitely not real, a magnetic tape which has been erased and re-recorded so many times that nobody conserves it in memory anymore.

It is a hyper-real simulation which conceals the absence of a basic reality. It dominates our experience while 'reality is abolished'. It survives iconically as a “vista”, a bi-dimensional representation that adds value to real estate, and anybody who visited a showflat in Hong Kong couldn’t have missed the window light-boxes that replace plasterboards walls with a computer “enhanced” sea view from which highways, the container port, adjacent buildings, pollution haze etc. have all been erased. Reclaiming the whole harbour and replacing it with state-of-the-art diorama stations placed at strategic points, i.e, next to shopping malls and hotels, wouldn’t be too far-fetched, as heritage sites are routinely “re-developed” and their replicas stand for them.

In Cantonese, Hong Kong means "Fragrant Harbour" which was the original name of a fishing port near Aberdeen, known for producing incense, a fragrant commodity. From the beginning, the city was metonymically related to the harbour and inextricably linked to its fate. The city, as Hong Kong writer XiXi put it, “is forever floating between the ocean and the sky, held by some invisible strings, like a marionette.” ⁶