postcolonial studies became one of the most popular critical trends in the Euro-American academic community in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the "postcolonial" wave began to dominate the cultural studies of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong too. Due to the different historical contexts, the bones of contention related to postcolonial discourse in the three areas have been rather different. This article proposes to investigate the critical debates related to anti-hegemony, local consciousness and identity politics. The controversial issues of "neo-conservatism","local consciousness" and "marginality" in the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively can well be attributed to the problem of interpreting "China". This paper attempts to direct these debates towards the important notion of "Chineseness", hoping to shed light on the discourse on China in the age of globalization. This will hopefully bring forth another perspective to reflect on the notion of "flexible identity".