Researching second-generation Chinese Hong Kong immigrants’ identity in the UK

In this thesis, second-generation Chinese Hong Kong immigrants self-identification will be examined in a British context. The research aim is to document a current portfolio of Chinese Hong Kong immigrants self-identity in familial, societal and national spheres. Having employed the situationist framework, this work will attempt to move beyond the previous theoretical assumptions that generalise Chinese immigrants as a whole. Instead, the target research population s self-recognition in different areas - language and accent, gender, class and employment, etc - will be examined. The research draws on two different sets of data: four focus group discussions and five semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis (TA) as the analytical approach has been employed to examine the audiotape data (transcribed). The findings and conclusions have been drawn in three analytical chapters by the dominant themes. First of all, how the different choices of language have constructed second-generation Hong Kong immigrants sociocultural identity in Britain will be explored and analysed. The choice of using different languages according to various cultural contexts will reveal the research population s overlapping identities under a historical dimension. Secondly, the research data will be examined on familial and societal levels through parental, gender and class perspectives. The findings of gender and class stratification in this section will draw conclusions which might potentially change some existing academic assertions in the literature. Finally, the research data will be looked at from the national level, focusing on community cohesion and neighbourhood diversity. The conclusions will suggest how Hong Kong immigrants integrated into the British society quietly with a lack of a united sense of Britishness. It might indicate an effective effort to promote national identity in the UK. In the end, there is a possibility that second-generation Hong Kong immigrants have started rethinking their self-identification under the new Sino-British relations.