From Uncles of Victoria Park to the Net Generation Square People: National Identity and Student Movements in Hong Kong

Abstract

Recent protest movements in post-colonial Hong Kong have exposed a divided society that is grappling with an identity crisis. This study looks at the co-evolutionary trajectories of Chinese identity and Hong Kong student movements and analyses the mechanisms that have conditioned perceptions of Chinese identity since the 1960s. Using a structured process-based approach to identity, we argue that, same symbolic resources can be combined with organic boundary mechanism in one movement while with the voluntarist boundary mechanism in another, contingent on population structure, political system and the nature of social conflicts at a given time. Thus, through decades of student movements, ‘being Chinese’ has been articulated in relation to the oppressed in the British colony, Chinese nation, local society, and mainland Chinese. The outcome of each movement has redefined the connotation of ‘being Chinese’ and this updated connotation has in turn redirected the next wave of activism.