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. 79 3 H O N G K O N G : P R O B L E M S O F I D E N T I T Y A N D I N D E P E N D E N C E stephan ortmann O n Ju n e 4 , 2 0 0 9 , tens of thousands, perhaps up to 150,000 people, attended a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong in remembrance of the violent crackdown on student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square twenty years earlier. The Hong Kong student movement, which also had participated in solidarity protests in 1989, was a leading organizer of the memorial. In addition to the vigil, eleven student activists conducted a sixty-four-hour hunger strike. Two months earlier, in April 2009, students of the Hong Kong University Student Union had voted 92.6 percent in favor of a motion demanding that Beijing vindicate the 1989 protest movement and hold accountable those responsible for the crackdown. While this outburst of activism demonstrates that student activism is still relevant in contemporary Hong Kong, it also is sobering to know that fewer than 20 percent of the members of the student union participated in the vote. Many students are apathetic or afraid of politics as Leo Yau, a university student and member of the Young Civics (the youth wing of a prodemocracy political party), realized when he wanted to talk about what happened on June 4, 1989. He remarked: “When I tried to talk to my classmates about it, most didn’t care” (Yin 2009). The history of Hong Kong student movements demonstrates that collective identities are a crucial variable in understanding the rise and fall of student activism. This chapter argues that two interrelated identity problems have shaped student movements in Hong Kong. First, there is the changing identity of students themselves. Students were only regarded—and regarded themselves—as an independent strategic group for a very short period of time between the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. After this, while student activists still continued to participate in politics, they increasingly aligned themselves with other 80 . S T E P H A N O R T M A N N political groups that shared their interests. The diminishing power of student identity resulted from the increasing openness of the political system, the massification of higher education, and a persistent apathy fueled by a prevailing sense of powerlessness. Second, Hong Kong’s territorial identity as an autonomous but not independent entity led to divisions within the student movement, which manifested in a split into two distinctive camps and significantly weakened the organizational capacity of the movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the most vocal student activists believed that the most important goal was unification with the mainland. A faction of the student movement, however, believed in reforming the colonial government and demanded improvements to the lives of Hong Kongers. Once the former group lost its interest in politics after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the importance of student activism declined. The hope of a united democratic China reignited massive student activism in 1989, but the violent crackdown by the Chinese government that year quickly demoralized students once more. Since then, activist students have been closely aligned with the democracy movement and their identity has been closely linked to prodemocracy groups in Hong Kong politics . It is, therefore, not surprising that students played a leading role in the massive July 1 protests that called for democratic reform in 2003 and 2004. They were, however, embedded within a much larger societal context and cannot easily be separated from the other political groups that joined the student activists in the antigovernment mobilizations. Even though some observers saw a return of a more active student movement , this period was rather ephemeral, and today students are again perceived to be unwilling to participate in politics. The Origins of Student Activism in Hong Kong The student movement in Hong Kong can be traced almost to the beginnings of the first university. Only one year after the Hong Kong University (HKU) was established in 1911 to educate future bureaucrats, the Hong Kong University Union was founded. Renamed the Hong Kong University Students’ Union, the group was registered as an independent student-run organization in 1949. Three years later, in 1954, the students published their first edition of the Undergrad, a student newspaper that emphasized social issues and was instrumental in the mobilization...

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