“After colonial”: A case study of the national identity paths of intellectuals in Hong Kong and Taiwan

This article, based on the views on China of Wan-chu Lee and his son Prof Peter N S. Lee, attempts to explore the colonial and post-colonial social development in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and explain the intellectuals’ national identity paths Through official literature, biographies, research findings, oral histories, and comments of contemporary figures, this article suggests that there is a complex relationship between intellectuals themselves and " the ideal China”, and the implementation of the universal values of “democracy” and “science” was the one theme that had affected post-colonial intellectuals’ decision to construct the subjectivity of the constructive/destructive essence This article reveals that the intellectuals attempted to maintain a dialogue between their own situation and the politics above them, and use western “universal values” to overcome (de-colonize) the dialectical contradictions As such, both groups could get rid of the sad context of the colonized role, a causality of the overcome process of the post-colonial dialectics in Hong Kong and Taiwan This article is a rare study of the development in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the context of (post)colonial issue studies, as well as a part of post-war history of East Asia.