Arts and Culture Without Policy: Spontaneous Initiatives by Non-governmental and Civil Society Groups in Hong Kong

Positive non-interventionism was the economic policy of the British colonial government, and a similar laissez-faire cultural policy governed the development of the arts and cultural sector in Hong Kong. Policy-informed cultural governance emerged after the handover of Hong Kong to China, centralizing power over cultural governance and advocating the use of arts and culture to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to their homeland. Approaches including new public management and creative industries have been introduced that instrumentalize culture for economic and governance purposes; at the same time, the government began to withdraw financial support and attention from local arts and culture. While government policies have been limited to macro-level management and economic contribution, the non-government sector and broader civil society have spontaneously proposed arts and cultural initiatives to meet citizens’ needs for leisure, enjoyment, and cultural experiences. Such initiatives are unbounded by any conventional frameworks of policy studies, or by arts education curricula, and seek to develop a multimodal and distributed network to sustain the bottom-up development of local arts and culture. This chapter examines the contextual backdrop of the arts and culture ecosystem in Hong Kong civil society, and how spontaneous initiatives by non-governmental and civil society groups are possible without top-down policy and planning.