Democratization and bureaucratic dominance in Hong Kong: Perspectives from a short-lived university students' movement

Abstract

“Democracy” and “democratization” are among the most widely invoked terms of the post-cold war era. Their meanings are debatable, however, despite Western insistence on narrowly defining democracy in terms of specific political freedoms and rights. It thus remains useful to examine democratization concretely, as an evolving set of practices, mediated by culture, history, and place. Accordingly, this paper presents an account of the struggles over democratic practice that took place on Hong Kong university campuses beginning in the transitional mid-1990s, on the eve of the hand-over of the former British colony to China. The author argues that the activist students' attempts to launch a public dialogue about the level of political representation available to them reflected wider societal concerns about Hong Kong's future autonomy and local people's political voice. At the heart of the students' critique was the conviction that the representative democracy practiced on campuses in Hong Kong was a form of bureaucratic dominance whose aim was to depoliticize the universities through the micromanagement of dissent.