The return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 has reworked the contours of Hong Kong’s literary landscape, from which more and more writers are moving northward, some physically but more in terms of publishing works on the mainland. The access to a gigantic readership in the north is obviously the major pull factor for such movement. It invites writers and the publishers to employ different strategies to attain success, involving not simply the switch from the traditional form of Chinese to the simplified one but something much more complicated. On the one hand, the publishing houses require writers to reduce their use of local expressions and to adhere to standardized Chinese, not to mention the editorial censorship of politically incorrect subject matter and expressions. On the other hand, mainland readers seem to maintain keen interest in seeking what they consider to be exotic, either content- or language-wise, in Hong Kong writing. This has led to the emergence of different types of Hong Kong writers—compromising and uncompromising clusters—in terms of their responses to the imposed publication restrictions. More importantly, the so-called ‘Hong Kong identity’ remains a subject of negotiation and constant reformation.
