"Hong Kong Lesson One" Preface: Question Answering as a Dissent

The origin of this writing project is that I was invited by the School of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese University of Hong Kong eight years ago to teach Hong Kong society and politics in their master class. The master's program of the college is the same as other postgraduate courses in Hong Kong, and there are many students from mainland China. On the one hand, they may not have a background in social sciences, and they generally do not know much about Hong Kong issues. Therefore, the college thought of offering a public affairs analysis course, using Hong Kong as a case study, to cultivate their sense of social thinking required for journalists. I immediately agreed to the Academy's invitation. It is a good job to talk about Hong Kong with students from mainland China who come to Hong Kong to read news.

Although the students who are willing to come to Hong Kong to read news usually advocate freedom, it is not easy to talk about Hong Kong with them. After all, mainland China has its official narrative about Hong Kong. For students who have been familiar with Hong Kong in this system since childhood, they often encounter many gaps in reality after coming to Hong Kong, and everything has to be dismantled one by one. For example, in recent years, the Chinese identity of Hong Kong people has repeatedly hit new lows, and the number of young people who consider themselves Chinese has dropped to less than one percent. Most students from mainland China have never heard of this, and it is difficult to understand it immediately.

The differences in how China and Hong Kong know each other and themselves have their own origins, and they have grown even worse in recent years. In the current Chinese official discourse, it is emphasized that China experienced "a century of humiliation" after the late Qing Dynasty, until it entered the best era after the reform and opening up. There is certainly a basis for this statement, but when all kinds of things in society are put into this framework to interpret, many problems will arise: the more open and progressive aspects of China in the past will be obliterated; The problem will be downplayed.

Hong Kong has been given a role in this grand discourse: the British colonization of Hong Kong is regarded as a disgraceful page in China’s past, and Hong Kong’s return is a proof of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation; there are still people in Hong Kong today who criticize China for being obsessed with obsession and must be affected by foreign hostility. Instigated by forces. Today's Hong Kong, quoting the Global Times, is that young people have been "indulged for too long" and incited by "foreign anti-China chaos in Hong Kong". We should recognize and criticize their "sinister intentions" and "ugly faces".

Of course, these are seriously one-sided and even untrue statements. The facts are much more complicated than these patriotic words. But those who say these words do not want reality. To borrow a saying from recent years, the description of Hong Kong by mainland China's official media is basically "fake news". The purpose is not to sincerely explain what is happening in Hong Kong, but to pave the way for existing political positions. At the very least, when the object of explanation is not Hong Kong, or the time and space background is different, the same formula will suddenly disappear. Patriotism here is no more than a tool of the regime.

Facing the emotional hatred between the country and the family, I always tell the students in the first class of the school: When you enter the door of this classroom, your first identity is a scholar, a person who thinks independently, not a Hong Kong person Or Chinese or something. I welcome you to share your personal experience, we can learn from each other; but whether a point of view is worth supporting, we should only see whether it is academically tenable, let alone immediately think that it must be The opponent's motives are impure. Looking back at the truth and judging right from wrong has nothing to do with national identity, patriotism or not, and it has nothing to do with which side the conclusion leans towards. Academics are academics.

Regarding identity, the academic consensus in cultural studies in recent years is that although it may have a certain material basis (for example, the accents of communities across the mountains are usually somewhat different), but which cultural connections to amplify and which cultural divisions to choose Erase, in order to create a common centripetal force, is a political project dictated by society. Understanding it in this way can better explain the separation and separation of Hong Kong people's identity and Chinese imagination since World War II than talking about "blood is thicker than water" or "national righteousness".

Ask about government governance. In recent years, political science believes that in order to understand the gains and losses of a place’s governance, in addition to looking at the organizational system and legal provisions, it is also necessary to study the era and background in which they were established. Implementation, and how the differences between the two will make the same set of organizational systems and legal provisions have different social impacts. Using this to understand what is one country, two systems and a high degree of autonomy is more helpful than repeating "Hong Kong has been China's territory since ancient times" to clarify the focus of Hong Kong's political disputes.

When it comes to economic development, sociology has emphasized in recent years that the market does not exist abstractly, but is embedded in a specific social environment. Strengths and weaknesses do not necessarily come from innate or personal factors, and are often affected by the power relationship in which they live. Those in power can even create monopolies, so we cannot assume that the existence of buying and selling means that the market is functioning efficiently. Using this to understand issues such as housing and labor in Hong Kong, and even medical care and education, is more practical than superstitious belief in "under the Lion Rock" that hard work will always pay off.

The above-mentioned summary is not a great truth in the academic world, even students in the first year of university should have heard of it. These analytical methods are not limited to Hong Kong. If students are sent to South America to report news one day after graduation, they should be able to gain more depth by using the same series of social thinking consciousness.

As far as I am concerned, I am not concerned about whether the students’ political stance on Hong Kong has changed after the completion of this course. The point is that they know the methods and attitudes needed to understand social issues, and they can think independently instead of copying what others say.

From the perspective of learning, no matter how much you look down on "left glue", "stupid" or "little pink" (online labels for left-wing social movement participants in Hong Kong, nativists and nationalists in mainland China), you must first Objectively understand the social basis of their existence, what drives their presence. It is true that some people in Hong Kong are obviously irrational in their words and deeds to boycott mainland China, and vice versa, but this does not mean that we can ignore the reasons behind these phenomena. If we disapprove of some behavior because we don't like it emotionally, we're not necessarily rational ourselves.

Emphasis on academics is because I do not want the answers I provide here to be used to fuel more conflicts between China and Hong Kong. I have seen too many so-called discussions regress to "you are not from Hong Kong, I know better than you" or "you didn't grow up in mainland China, you won't understand" and so on. It's so boring. From my teaching experience, students who grew up in Hong Kong do not necessarily have a better grasp of various situations in Hong Kong than students in mainland China. Conversely, China has a population of 1.4 billion. Even those who grew up in mainland China would be overconfident if they want to claim to be familiar with the situation everywhere, let alone the influence of various information censorship and distortion.

Lest you be fooled by self-righteousness, the social sciences often emphasize learning to be a "professional stranger" to transcend the day-to-day squabbles. When you see a phenomenon, you don't need to criticize it immediately, it is more important to pursue the reason. This practice of turning familiarity into unfamiliarity is beneficial to both China and Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong people may be used to or take things for granted, but in fact need more analysis. For example, members of the Legislative Council are noisy all day long, and many Hong Kong people themselves feel annoyed. But looking away, it is not difficult to find the structure behind the noise, or the rationality behind the irrationality. Conversely, some things that have become customary or generally taken for granted in mainland China can also be subverted by the special case of Hong Kong. For example, the concept of "Hong Kong people" has gone through many twists and turns in just a few decades from its appearance to today. People in Hong Kong do not need to be familiar with academic classics to know that country, nation, and political power are three related but unequal concepts. Even if one day Hong Kong disappears from the map, all kinds of doubts about Hong Kong should remain for everyone in China and the world to continue to think about it.

Despite the emphasis on pedantry, I also understand the political implications of this writing project.

In today's Hong Kong, reasoning is already politics. When the government can invite a large group of experts and scholars to conduct land consultation for several months, but before the end of the consultation period, it proposes a plan whose parameter settings are not in line with the original consultation, which is tantamount to telling the world that they never care about any serious speculation; and When the government does this one after another, the response of the people has become more and more venting dissatisfaction than seeking serious answers. In this environment, slowing down and clarifying the truth is already an objection. To broaden things, in the past few years, as the political environment in mainland China has changed and the scale of speech has tightened, negative publicity about Hong Kong has become one of the means to incite national sentiment and consolidate political governance. Then, expressing the different faces of Hong Kong is also an objection.

It is precisely because of this political implication that I anticipate that the questions and answers I offer here will be subject to many challenges. In the academic world, it is not surprising that there are different understandings of the same thing. Knowledge grows through debate. If you took my questions to another scholar, he or she might give you another set of answers. What I can do is to provide extended reading for each of my answers (and this preface), so that everyone can know the origin of the discussion thread, and you can also follow this for further research.

As for the post-discussion, I am not looking for an inevitable common conclusion, but only hope to be able to pursue reasoning. After all, I can't persuade someone who doesn't intend to be reasonable in the first place, even if I write another hundred thousand words. In recent years, some views have claimed that for the sake of China's rise, when facing Hong Kong (or Taiwan), it is not necessary to consider the feelings of the local people, but to simply relocate and start over, which is the so-called "people stay behind". This statement is basically the same as the Nazi German Army’s Eastern European policy. If someone wants to discuss issues from this standpoint, what they have to deal with is no longer an argument but an issue of basic values or even human nature.

Thinking back to the Occupy Movement in 2014, I wrote a Q&A on the day the Occupy broke out, which was later called "17 Questions of Occupy Central", explaining the political background of the outbreak of the movement. Some citizens printed a large number of this article and distributed it in the occupied areas, and some netizens reposted it and circulated it widely on the Internet to help people in other places understand the antecedents of the occupation movement. After publication, many Taiwanese media came to me for an exclusive interview. The article was also circulated under the Internet censorship in mainland China, and the official responded with "Ten Questions about Hong Kong Occupy Central".

Although the Occupy Movement is gone, the story of Hong Kong is not yet finished, and the distortion and misreading of Hong Kong continue. The following 100,000 words can be understood as a continuation of the day's defense. Justification is not just for Hong Kong itself. It is not uncommon in China or even the world to distort facts to serve politics and use emotional accusations to fool the public. There are many, many people in China who raise objections by answering questions based on other themes, and their situation is far more difficult than mine. The following questions and answers can be regarded as a tribute to them.

Extended reading:
Gao Mark (2013): "A Brief History of Hong Kong - From Colony to Special Administrative Region", Hong Kong: Zhonghua Book Company.
Xu Chengen (2016): "Old Stories of the City-State: Twelve Books on the Local History of Hong Kong", Hong Kong: Red Publishing Aomori Culture.