Brief Report/Dispatch The Hong Kong protests in anthropological perspective: National identity and what it means Gordon Mathews The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Abstract This brief report discusses the Hong Kong protests of 2019–2020 in terms of cultural and national identity. It examines how Hongkongers have had no concept of what it means to belong to a nation throughout their history; but because of the ham-handed efforts by the Hong Kong government to enforce Chinese national identity, many young Hongkongers have reacted by embracing a different “nation”: Hong Kong. It also examines how many young Hongkongers have embraced a civic rather than an ethnic concept of who can be a Hongkonger, one that may lead, paradoxically, to a rejection of mainland Chinese as Hongkongers and to an acceptance of those who are not mainland Chinese. Keywords Hong Kong, protests, national identity, ethnic identity, civic identity Western news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have tended to describe the current wave of protests in Hong Kong as a matter of young Hong Kong protesters valiantly fighting for democracy against an authoritarian and dictatorial Chinese regime. This is true to a significant degree but neglects the Corresponding author: Gordon Mathews, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Email: cmgordon@cuhk.edu.hk Critique of Anthropology 0(0) 1–6 ! The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0308275X20908303 journals.sagepub.com/home/coa