To conclude, I sum up the major implications of whiteness discussed in this paper. The Hong Kong focus group considered whiteness not as a discriminatory practice, but as an essential categorizing mechanism alongside other social stratifying agents such as class, gender and age. In this respect, the groups opinions reinforced the myth of skin whiteness with their almost instinctual preference for a pale complexion and its associated social connotations, be it in positive admiration or damning stigmatization.However, it is important to point out that by whiteness the participants were referring to a particular kind of whiteness that was specific not only to the construction of the identity of the participants self, but also to the socio-economic milieu or habitus of Hong Kong.
The scale of whiteness, which mirrors the way different populations are located hierarchically in the minds of the participants, exemplifies how this implicit structure comes to be reinterpreted into practical guidelines for gauging social capital in everyday life (for instance, to identify the social class of certain individuals). According to this scale, the whiteness of the Chinese was associated with the whiteness of the Caucasians,but more with the whiteness constructed by comparing Hong Kong Chinese to other East Asian populations, who were considered less white, and inferior. Such precision in categorizing whiteness indicates and reflects the deep-seated enculturation and naturalization of skin colour or race in formulation of the self/other dichotomy.It reflects the social groundedness of whiteness as a source of social capital on Whos the Fairest of Them All? 177 the one hand, and the distribution of power in terms of gender and social class on the other.This comes in stark contrast to the UK focus groups perspective. Here, even with the phenomenon of the tanned complexionwhich the participants considered to be the equivalent of whiteness in terms of its desirabilitythe associations of age, class and gender with dark-skinned people that participants made in their comments were much less structured and coherent than those of their Hong Kong counterparts.
This demonstrates not only the cultural specificity of whiteness in the Hong Kong context, but also the significance of being white in the cultural paradigm prevailing in HK. Given this, the meanings of skin-whitening cosmetic products are complex, as they imply not only simple aesthetic preferences, but also racialized (Miles, 1989) statements when considered in a wider sociopolitical context. Fusing traditional and modern ideals of beauty, these advertisements are, on the one hand, effectively equating fairness of skin or whiteness with modernization (Johansson, 1998) and, on the other hand, they are racializing the aesthetics of beauty. Whiteness is becoming a complex notion that transcends class and wealth and now extends into the realm of race and ethnic identities.
White skin no longer signifies class and wealth in a domestic context but is now also used to construct identity in a globalized culture. Instead of signifying identity in relation to an internal other, it now constructs a difference with an external other, namely the west. The quest for beauty is made into an international beauty contest where western women, whose pale skins are supposedly admired by Chinese women, in turn are said to admire the tenderness and smoothness of the skin of the Oriental woman. (Johansson, 1998, p. 64) While much of literature on the identity of Hong Kong (e.g. Ma and Fung, 1999) has concentrated on the binary relationship between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese,where the Mainland Chinese were perceived as the significant other, this paper has explored the same issue of the Hong Kong identity but in terms of race. Through triangulating three different perspectives on the notion of whiteness, we are able to observe that sustaining the Hong Kong identity has depended as much on identifying the racial other as realized by skin tones, as it has on identifying the cultural other of the Mainland Chinese.
