The Causeway Bay Books incident of 2015 made headlines worldwide. International media were first surprised by the scale of the banned-book industry in Hong Kong and then regarded the event as a blow to the freedom of information. Four years later, millions of Hong Kong citizens took to the streets to protest a planned bill to allow extradition to mainland China. This unprecedented mobilization provoked the Beijing authorities to redesign the ecology of the special administrative region. Both events reinforced the notion that the “old” Hong Kong had faded away. Notwithstanding the veracity of these holistic accounts of the ineffectuality of Hong Kong's political institutions in shielding the territory's civil society, the vibrant debates of its public sphere and the ebbs and flows of its democratic movements two decades after the handover remained unexplained. Established by the Crown colony and inherited by the Communist sovereign, there existed a hegemonic discourse which posited the territory as merely an economic powerhouse, with a cultural desert of a public life and a migrant population of apathetic subjects. Through this structural-functionalist lens, the roles of ideas, agency and their contestation are overlooked.
To challenge this hegemonic discourse and trace the sociocultural origins of a counter-public sphere in China's offshore, this paper surveys the process of discursive contestation initiated by intellectual agents in Hong Kong in the late-colonial era. The process transcended the political agenda of opposing forces, negotiated space for public debates and gave concrete meaning to citizenship.Footnote 1 First, I examine the ecology and actors of colonial Hong Kong to explain the roots and space of discursive contestation. Second, I discuss how Chinese intellectuals in exile leveraged the colony's geopolitical ambiguity and imagined a displaced community of loyalists (yimin 遗民) and dissenters (yijianzhe 异见者) to support independent publishing venues and engage in cultural resistance in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 2 Third, I explain why a new cohort of homegrown, left-wing (zuoyi 左翼)Footnote 3 intellectuals and activists constructed a local identity in the 1970s to articulate their cosmopolitan (shijiexing 世界性) desires and appropriate their social history. These public intellectuals negotiated an alternative, multifaceted and independent public sphere which not only preserved the dissenting voices against official discourses in China's offshore but also reduced the social distance between intellectual communities in the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The significance of Hong Kong's counter-public sphere thus goes far beyond its geographical presence. While the contention between political forces in the Cold War and the logic of print capitalism in a migration hub permitted the creation of this counter-public sphere, I argue that a temporal process of diffusion created the penetration and resilience of that platform. This process featured disagreements between intellectual factions, the rise of a cosmopolitan identity and the participatory practices of a democratic struggle specific to the locality. The idealized rational discourse and public/private distinctions posited by Jürgen Habermas are contested by bringing ideational contestation, social configuration and cultural identity back to the study of the public sphere.Footnote 4
The Public Sphere Revisited
Habermas famously argued that print capitalism in 18th-century Europe set the conditions for the emergence of a public sphere. Rational and critical debates among the bourgeoisie create a realm for the critical discussion of issues of common concern that collates public opinion and informs political action. In this open realm, the state engages with associations through free speech and free assembly, enabling the institutionalization of civil society.
This paper will adopt Habermas's notion of “publicness” but will revisit some of its problematic specifics. As an analytical lens, the public/private distinction categorically distinguishes the rational and open from the pertinent and hidden. Nonetheless, this discourse undermines the role played by conflict and agency and is highly static. Craig Calhoun reminds us that when groups and individuals engage in collective action, they are often negotiating for “standing and recognition.”Footnote 5 Nancy Fraser contends that such groups seek a “discursive arena” for staging conflicts by disputing the class- and gender-biased notions of publicity.Footnote 6 In these contentious episodes, the boundary between public and private is precisely the impetus of and target for contestation and displacement. Public visibility indeed increases in semi-private and semi-public settings such as reading clubs, learned societies and student associations or during social protests. Discursive and behavioural contention becomes a crucial mediating factor of publicness – one that determines who is eligible to engage in public discussion, what content is of common concern and which channels constitute the prestigious publications widely circulated and read by the public.
Furthermore, Habermas states that bourgeois democracy and print capitalism laid the foundations for the spread of the public sphere.Footnote 7 While this analysis captures the historical roots of public discourse, it disregards the fact that any public discourse is both public and social. Socio-political configurations often shape the form, symbolism and resilience of the public realm. In an authoritarian context, James Scott reveals that subaltern groups often comply with the authorities while concurrently whispering about family mishaps, sharing political jokes and practising non-cooperative acts.Footnote 8 These “hidden transcripts” are pervasive in social life, engendering broader participation without involving major costs. Agnes Ku argues that the notion of the public is clarified in pseudo-democracies through democratic deliberations and struggles among equals that give purpose to political participation. The consciousness of being part of a political community symbolizes and adjusts what engaged counter publics are fighting for and how to appropriate their collective actions.Footnote 9 Newspapers, journals, bookshops and salons constitute spaces through which political events are interpreted and public agencies are socialized.
This case study of the discursive contestation that occurred in colonial Hong Kong analyses the above debates concerning the public sphere's socio-spatial configurations. It also provides an account of the cultural roots of resistance and counter-publics in a territory which has witnessed unprecedented social protests in the 21st century and which remains at the frontline of democratic struggle in China's offshore.Footnote 10 I argue that this counter-public sphere is more fluid and contentious than just a dichotomy between official and alternative discourses; in practice, it is a multi-layered space which has nurtured a collective sense of belonging and experienced an upsurge of discursive contestation and social activism. While homegrown/left-wing intellectuals gradually contested the influence of Chinese exiled intellectuals, they did not replace them. In contrast, they have coexisted in the counter-public sphere by exploiting the territory's geopolitical ambiguity and seeking a higher degree of autonomy and publicity. These groups have accommodated a diversity of elite and plebeian experiences and debated priorities of national revival, civic identity and distributive justice. Their cultural capital and social capital have helped to establish schools, churches, mass media and trade unions, and have also helped to embed these social institutions in local society.
The Ecology and Agency of Hong Kong's Counter-publics
Hong Kong has long been characterized as a liberal, capitalist enclave perched on the southern periphery of Communist China. The territory's geographic advantages and political uncertainties are said to have created an affluent population apathetic to activism. Lau Siu-kai's famed thesis of the “minimally integrated social-political system” posited that colonial Hong Kong was a refugee society whose inhabitants had fled communism to settle in a liberal enclave.Footnote 11 Accordingly, the ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese, who were mostly victims of political movements, was geared towards resolving livelihood issues and making money by developing business networks, rather than towards social activism. Further, the colonial regime instigated a governing mechanism that co-opted elites and institutionalized grievances through the administrative absorption of politics. This “boundary spanning” consensus between the colonial state and Chinese society ensured the coexistence of stability and prosperity in post-war Hong Kong.
This hegemonic discourse has, however, been contested as being too structural and frequently at odds with reality. Steve Tsang argues that Hong Kong's special enclave and modern infrastructure are sources of inspiration for China's reformers, providing them with a working governance model as much as a safe haven in which to advocate their revolutionary ideas.Footnote 12 John Carroll and Priscilla Roberts maintain that as a meeting place for opposing forces on the edges of different empires, Hong Kong has developed multifaceted identities and conflicting loyalties.Footnote 13 From a movement perspective, Wai-man Lam and Ngok Ma record the scope and intensity of the riots, strikes and movements in Hong Kong that made claims against both the Communist and British regimes between the 1950s and 1980s on a variety of issues such as China's modernization, Hong Kong's decolonization and the rights of workers and women.Footnote 14
The geopolitical ambiguity of colonial Hong Kong, the trading of information, goods and capital, and the “hedging” of weak spots in imbalanced political relationships produced a regulatory yet pluralist polity.Footnote 15 In the post-war period, the US, Communist and Nationalist regimes financed academic institutions, publication venues, broadcasting channels and social institutions in a bid to extend their influence. For example, the United States Information Services (USIS) funded the popular Today's World and University Life magazines to promote anti-communist discourse. While the British colonial regime shared the interests of the capitalist bloc, it tried to maintain an image of neutrality and keep a balance between these political forces.Footnote 16
Structural-institutional analyses, however, have so far neglected the sociocultural origin of the counter-public sphere,Footnote 17 or what comparative theorists call the difference between permissive and productive conditions.Footnote 18 Permissive conditions are necessary conditions that loosen constraints on agency or increase the causal power of contingency in a specific temporal frame. Productive conditions, on the other hand, occur within the context of these permissive conditions to produce divergence and diffusion. The interests of the British and Chinese regimes in preserving the colony's status as an open economy and a centre for information dissemination offered the permissive conditions that facilitated the emergence of Hong Kong's public sphere.Footnote 19 The character of its public sphere, however, would not have developed to become alternative, multifaceted, critical and, above all, independent without the productive conditions that gave concrete meanings to citizenship which relied on its informed publics’ political consciousness and equal participation. Although British authorities have conceded that it was the Berlin of the East, Hong Kong's enclave was more cultural and multifaceted. Its counter-publics were structured by the sovereign order and print capitalism but sprang from the sociability of its dissenting communities and global connectivity.
I adopt a two-fold methodology in this research to capture the temporal and spatial dynamics of the counter-public sphere. First, I survey the intelligentsia and their sense of place to examine how open discursive contestations have mediated their contractions between physical proximity and social distance as well as between their functional usage of the liberal enclave and their evolving affection for the cosmopolitan city. Second, I present a more focused analysis of representative periodicals, selected according to their popularity, accessibility, diversity and permanency criteria – i.e. how they acted as mass forums for exchanging ideas, facilitated the dissemination of dissenting voices or political actions, reflected diversity in intellectual communities, or if they endured for a relatively long period of physical or discursive time.Footnote 20 Such periodicals include Ming Pao Monthly (Mingbao yuekan 明报月刊), City Magazine (Haowai 号外), Seventies BiWeekly (Qishi niandai shuangzhou kan 七十年代双周刊), Seventies/Nineties (Qishi niandai/ Jiushi niandai 七十年代/九十年代), The Undergrad (Xueyuan 学苑), Chinese University Student Press (Zhongda xueshengbao 中大学生报), and several other alternative publications. These publications gave space to new ideas among different generations and factions of public intellectuals, including the exiled and homegrown communities as well as a cohort of young activists divided into factions of liberals (ziyoupai 自由派), nationalists (guocuipai 国粹派), Trotskyists (tuopai 托派) and social democrats (shehuipai 社会派). This study also incorporates document research as well as data from 17 interviews with the editors and contributors to these publications to examine how they perceived each other and promoted their ideas in the public sphere.
The Intelligentsia and Their Sense of Place
Chinese intellectuals first began to gravitate to the Southern Lingnan (Nanlai wenren 南来文人) region in the late Qing period, with numbers peaking during the Republican era.Footnote 21 Figures such as Liang Qichao 梁启超, Sun Yat-sen 孙中山 and Ye Gongchao 叶公超 contrasted Hong Kong's orderliness and prosperity with the chaos and backwardness of their homeland. At that time, the enclave accommodated a wide variety of political views. Notably, in 1874, Wang Tao 王韬 founded the first Chinese daily newspaper, the Universal Circulating Herald (Xunhuan ribao 循环日报), which advocated the reformist idea of a constitutional monarchy. Paul Cohen traces the link between the Western influence on Wang's political thoughts on full-scale education to the legal and political reforms adopted in the Hundred Days Reform.Footnote 22 In 1892, Yeung Ku-wen 杨衢云 established the Furen Literary Society to “open up the people's minds.” Two years later, the society was incorporated into the Revive China Society in Hong Kong, which would soon become an important base for Chinese revolutionaries.Footnote 23 The Chinese exiles in Hong Kong were able to retain their connections with their hometowns through the regular and extensive exchange of ideas, information and capital.
After the Communists took power in China in 1949, Hong Kong lost much of its earlier role as an offshore revolutionary base. Nonetheless, it continued to shelter exiled intellectuals from the spectre of communism, providing a cultural space in which they could exercise free expression and reflect on their multifaceted loyalist identity. In a pessimistic sense, these exiles were survivors of a destroyed civilization, living on a southern periphery that was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the new communist polity. In a progressive sense, they were the bastions of modern civic virtues and traditional Chinese heritage who aimed to transform the polis or re-engage with the Chinese nation.
Some of these intellectuals withdrew to the semi-private realm to teach Chinese opera, compile their memoirs, start book clubs or work as private tutors. Others entered the public realm to establish tertiary colleges, write popular fiction, launch literary societies and serve as public intellectuals. Notable examples of such ventures include New Asia College (Xinya shuyuan 新亚书院), Chung Chi College (Chongji xueyuan 崇基学院), Chinese Students Weekly (Zhongguo xuesheng zhoubao 中国学生周报), and Literary Current Monthly (Wenyi xinchao 文艺新潮). New Asia College and Chung Chi College both emphasized the universality of Confucianism and Christianity, while the Chinese Students Weekly and Literary Current Monthly, respectively, adopted modernist and nationalistic positions to reach out to overseas students and scholars. In either form, these enterprises nurtured social capital and shaped the cultural front.Footnote 24
The nature of Hong Kong's public sphere, however, is preconditioned as much by its geopolitical proximity as by its social conflict. The 1956 riots mobilized by pro-Kuomintang (KMT) organizations resulted in more than 60 deaths and caused widespread social instability. The colonial regime's decisive suppression of the riots unexpectedly broke the KMT's networks, diminishing the threat of an organized force using the colony as a base for subverting Chinese communism.Footnote 25 In the aftermath of the 1966 and 1967 riots, Hong Kong's state–society relations experienced another wave of crucial changes. Strikes and attacks coordinated by pro-CCP forces in Hong Kong caused significant economic damage and political threats.Footnote 26 The British regime's earlier plans to surrender the colony were shelved following strong public support for its ability to restore order. After that, the colonial regime exercised greater political autonomy, from both London and Beijing.Footnote 27 The colonial government implemented social reforms to assuage popular discontent while cracking down on the activities of KMT and CCP-sponsored organizations. Although the CCP did not abandon its rhetoric of fighting the imperial oppressor, its local operatives’ strategic errors led Mao Zedong 毛泽东 to sanction the policy of “long-term planning to maximize the utility” of Hong Kong (zhangqi dasuan, chongfen liyong 长期打算、充分利用). This united front policy, which endured until recent times, aimed to capitalize on Hong Kong's open economy while evading trade and information embargos.Footnote 28
Subsequently, the contention in Hong Kong's public sphere transformed from open and political to discursive and cultural. The cultural front became equally contentious but less overt, thereby creating a false image of apathy. In 1957, Hong Kong had 168 local newspapers, of which 34 were published daily.Footnote 29 By 1979, it had more than 400 newspapers, including four English-language and 112 Chinese-language dailies, or 1,000 readers per 312 papers – this publication-to-population ratio was second only to Japan at the time.Footnote 30 The 1970s are labelled the “fiery era” (huohong niandai 火红年代), and during that decade, learned societies and their periodicals, magazines and newspapers flourished. Public criticism and monitoring were then accepted and practised by the political forces, intelligentsia and populace.
Intellectuals in Exile: Geopolitical Ambiguity and Independent Publications
Modernist and nationalist publications such as Literary Current Monthly and Chinese Student Weekly began to emerge in the 1950s. By the 1960s, there were over 200 literary societies and 100 bookstores, including Qianmo 阡陌, Fengyu 风雨, Nantian 南天 and Xinya 新亚, Shenzhou 神州, Qingwen 青文 and Tianyuan 田园, whose titles reflect their cultural and diasporic aspirations.Footnote 31 It was not until the founding of Ming Pao Monthly in January 1966 that a popular and independent platform was established, enabling the exiled intellectuals to exchange views and communicate with the public. Launched by writer and publisher Louis Cha Leung-yung 查良镛 and editor Hu Ju-ren 胡菊人, the journal aimed to preserve traditional Chinese culture and promote an independent voice on cultural and Chinese affairs.Footnote 32 During the Cultural Revolution, Ming Pao Monthly was accused by various CCP mouthpieces of being a revisionist stronghold. Cha was one of the three most-wanted men during the 1967 riots. Boosted by its critical stance and synergies with its sister publications, Ming Pao Monthly's inaugural issue sold more than 10,000 copies and the journal boasted a circulation of more than 35,000 in the late 1970s, one-third of which was in overseas subscriptions.Footnote 33 In 1981, Cha, a symbol of public intellectuals, was received by Deng Xiaoping 邓小平, ahead of any colonial officials and business elites, to discuss global and local issues.
Among the many seminal articles published in the journal, it was Zhang Guotao's 张国焘 memoirs that provoked a debate which captured the proximity and distance of Hong Kong's counter-public sphere to political and social forces. Zhang had distinguished himself as a founding member of the CCP, a leader of the Red Army and a rival of Chairman Mao. His memoirs provide first-hand accounts of the CCP's early activities. He sparked intense debate at home and abroad with his accusations that Mao caused the division between the First and Fourth Red Armies and had invented the counterrevolutionary label to destroy his rivals within the Party.Footnote 34 First published in serial form in Ming Pao Monthly from 1972 to 1974 and subsequently re-issued as My Memoirs (Wo de huiyi 我的回忆) in 1974, Zhang's memoirs were clearly self-serving. To encourage critical dialogue, experts on Republican military history and CCP history were invited to review the memoirs and present their arguments.Footnote 35 Although this move antagonized Zhang, the journal's reputation was enhanced by its commitment to peer review and public accountability. Esteemed writers and scholars began to have faith in the journal's impartiality and rigour, joining its readership and contributing articles.Footnote 36
Zhang's memoirs soon became a bestseller within and beyond Hong Kong, leading the wave of criticism of Mao's personality cult and the populist nature of the Cultural Revolution. According to veteran publishers, Zhang's memoirs were reprinted several times and were the seeds of a “banned book” industry in Hong Kong.Footnote 37 Publishers began to establish connections with exiles and dissenters overseas and on the mainland. The profitable sales of censored books supported the expansion of independent bookstores and satisfied different niches.
Although the party-state attacked Zhang's memoirs for being duplicitous and fictitious, hundreds of copies were smuggled into the PRC.Footnote 38 In 1980, the People's Publisher published the memoirs, without permission, in its contemporary bibliographic series. Although intended for internal reference (neican 内参) and circulation only, Zhang's memoirs offered Chinese liberals the primary evidence they needed to contest the official verdict on Mao according to The Resolution on Several Historical Questions for the Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China.Footnote 39
Hong Kong's dissenting voices have endured partly owing to the creative resistance of publishers who used tactics such as registering shadow publishers to obscure money flows, anonymizing writers’ names, concealing times and places to protect sources, purchasing warehouses and printing houses to secure distribution and storage, and maintaining a distance from the authorities.Footnote 40 The CCP's factional politics also facilitated the dissemination of information through unofficial channels. Via the strategy of “exporting [news] in order to re-import it” (chukou zhuan neixiao 出口转内销), the political boundaries and public credibility of Hong Kong's publications provided a channel through which to leak new policies, foster conspiracy theories and attack Party opponents. Hu Ju-ren, the longest-serving editor-in-chief of Ming Pao Monthly, explained how the journal leveraged its cultural platform to influence Chinese affairs:
Compared with other Chinese societies, Hong Kong enjoyed much more freedom to examine cultural, academic, ideological and political issues. Moreover, statements made, or essays published, in Hong Kong would quickly capture the attention of the political elite and Party organizations in the mainland and Taiwan. Their representatives, left or right, will always reveal the messages to the top … Since 1949, Hong Kong has become a cultural dissemination centre for Chinese worldwide.Footnote 41
Perceiving that its audience included the leaders of the PRC and the ROC as well as the educated masses worldwide, the journal appraised the policies of the party-states while preserving its readers’ affection for the nation-state. A survey of 36 issues published between 1966 and 1969 reveals that debates largely hinged on three contradictions, each corresponding to the political regimes’ campaigns and policies. The first was between historical materialism and traditional Chinese culture, with many writers systemically documenting the loss of cultural heritage in the mainland and portraying Hong Kong as the last line of defence and potential seed for regeneration. The second contradiction concerned national revival and communist ideology, viewing class struggle and the PRC's central planning strategies as sources of injustice, low productivity and social disruption. The third contradiction was between free speech and state propaganda, as both the CCP and KMT censored information and publications.
Publishing political satire became another intellectual response to the Cultural Revolution and leftist violence in Hong Kong. For example, Quotations from Man Yan-kit (Wan renjie yulu 万人杰语录, Man's Quotations hereafter), published by Chen Zi-jun 陈子隽, is a parody of Quotations from Chairman Mao. Using humour and metaphors, Man's Quotations lampoons leftist radicalism as a form of capitalist rationality and its economic activities, focusing on how organized strikes were financed by local Party organs and why piece rates incentivized the violent attacks.Footnote 42 As follow up publications also became local bestsellers, Chen's name rose to the top of the leftists’ hit list and he was targeted in several bombings.Footnote 43 His readers rallied to form the Man Yan-kit Association, which, at its peak, had tens of thousands of members and institutionalized such resistance. While Chen was at the time seen as a cultural icon and symbol of anti-communist resistance, he insisted on his political independence:
I am not what the leftists called America's or Chiang's agent. I have practised journalism in Hong Kong for 30 years and didn't get in touch with the American imperialists nor receive an allowance in US dollars. Nor did I have any affection for Chiang's regime, visit Taiwan, or know any Taiwan officials, hence leaving no way to be co-opted. I am living a bourgeois, middle-class life merely because Hong Kong's stability and freedom authorize my endeavours.Footnote 44
Although sharing a background with other intellectuals-in-exile, the contributors to Man's Quotations were different from mainstream cultural elites in regards their repertoire, audience and sense of belonging. First, Man's Quotations featured affective economics that spoke to the exiles’ fear of riots and their desire for stability. Their mocking of the leftists was both rebellious humour and a disciplinary function of preserving the capitalist order. Second, Man's Quotations adopted a more popular stance to make sense of the ideological struggles. The Chinese exile's emotions and their seemingly irrelevant everyday practices were used to support the print industry and counter political propaganda.Footnote 45 Third, Chen's plebeian perspective marked the beginning of a defiant and potentially inclusive notion of cultural identity. Identification with the liberal enclave rather than adherence to Chinese heritage became an impetus for describing Hong Kong citizens.
The exiled intellectuals’ loyalist aspirations for a national revival became a double-edged sword. As David Wang argues, loyalists are essentially post-loyalists who are both survivors and bastions trying to keep the memory of their imagined community or national heritage alive among the diaspora.Footnote 46 The awareness of a historical mission helped these cultural elites to resist censorship and threats from the political regimes and preserve these independent venues. The colonial government's political bureau, like the CCP's New Asia Agency, took pre-emptive action by repeatedly pressurizing the elites to censor material and threatening their donors.Footnote 47 Furthermore, the self-imposed prioritization of national affairs and high culture accounted for the challenges of these established venues. A new generation of local-born intellectuals regarded their hybrid identity and social injustice as more conducive to critical dialogue and engagement with the masses.
Homegrown Intellectuals: Social History and Cosmopolitan Hybridity
City Magazine was founded in 1976 by four young intellectuals who had previously worked as playwrights, essayists, journalists or directors and had studied in Paris, Boston or London. The journal introduced a cosmopolitan culture and middle-class lifestyle to Hong Kong's baby-boomer generation.Footnote 48 The term lifestyle needs to be taken seriously to avoid omitting its radical and transgressive elements. Beneath a façade of embracing the capitalist logic of the market and the lifestyle of the petty bourgeoisie, the magazine consciously sought to remain self-sufficient and independent. Each issue included poetry, fiction, film reviews, interviews and cartoons.
The magazine thus represents an organized but passive form of resistance to the strong nationalist and elitist elements embedded in the established publications, thereby contesting the nature and scope of the issues admissible for public discussion and dissemination. Moreover, the magazine conceived a new and profound formulation of Hong Kong's hybrid identity in which civic values, popular symbols and everyday memories were intertwined to relate their intersubjectivity unfolding from a sense of belonging to Hong Kong. Chan Koonchung 陈冠中, a founder and long-serving chief editor of City Magazine, traced the emergence of the generation's anxieties and aspirations:
Qiling's [Lai Chak Fun 黎则奋] article “Wanchai: my native place, my land, my people (woxiang, wotu, womin 我乡我土我民)” was a breakthrough. After that, we [the editors] were not afraid of describing and imagining Hong Kong's hybrid identity and its grassroots life. We were prepared to develop a platform to tell Hong Kong's stories.Footnote 49
In his essay, Lai describes his identity transformation in relation to what he considers his native place. Referencing Lin Yutang's 林语堂 My Country and My People (Wu tu yu wu min 吾土与吾民), he reflects nostalgically on a static, distant and conceptual China, which contrasts with his dynamic, intimate and authentic life in Wanchai. Influenced by the intellectual elite, he used to write Chinese poems to express his homesickness and mourn the loss of the nation and its society after 1949. When asked about his native place, he instinctively replies it is “Nanhai, Guangdong,” a township he has never visited. He then describes how he developed an interest in socialism at leftist schools, had his first experience of love against the background of the Beatles’ visit to the colony, how US soldiers revived Wanchai's red-light district during the Vietnam War, and how Wanchai's coastline disappeared as the city developed. He then declares that his native place is “Wanchai, Hong Kong.”Footnote 50 Wanchai became the settled homeland as well as the sphere of action for these homegrown intellectuals. Chan Koonchung, Lai Chak Fun, Tsang Shui-ki 曾澍基 and Chan Manhung 陈文鸿 opened the bookstore Mount One (Yishan shuwu 一山书屋) in Wanchai in 1976. They networked with activists and publishers on the mainland and in Taiwan, organized salons and published and pirated books.Footnote 51 The only criterion used to determine what works to pirate was if they were banned by the CCP or KMT.Footnote 52
By the same token, although the colonial authorities in the post-1967 era tried to construct a local identity that emphasized meritocracy and economic prospects, this official narrative failed to take root in the minds of university students and young intellectuals.Footnote 53 For these young liberals, who were eager to reflect on their changing values and affections and voice an alternative vision of their homeland, the patriotic and unsettled cultural elite of the previous generation seemed to be a most qualified and appropriate target. The cultural elite were, nonetheless, supportive of the young intellectuals’ endeavours and willing to share their networks and channels.Footnote 54 The ideational contestation, therefore, constituted an accumulation rather than a replacement of these independent intellectual venues. The editors of City Magazine recalled that the editors of Ming Pao Monthly always reminded them to “write more on history and culture, less on architecture and fashion” and yet continued to offer support to their alternative, if not transgressive, magazine.Footnote 55 In an issue entitled “The good old days,” City Magazine declares:
Nostalgia is not reserved for the grey … over the past 25 years, Hong Kong has transformed from a shelter for refugees to a modern metropolis of local character and cultural diversity. To revalue their history and pursue their future, a new generation of homegrown young intellectuals has pierced the prejudice of valuing the past and belittling the present or worshiping the distant and neglecting the intimate.Footnote 56
Subsequent issues published in the 1970s and 1980s covered new symbols, products and events such as Lin Dai, the Beatles, Woodstock, Cantonese Pop, Michael Hui, bell-bottom jeans, disco, Red A Plastics, Brigitte Lin, the Hong Kong Brands and Products Expo, Temple Street cuisine, Hollywood Road antiquities, Cuore, Playboy magazine, kufu comics, TVB dramas, Hong Kong's New Wave movement, advertising slogans, and Nomad. Previously, these themes and their history were considered to be too grassroots, trivial or transgressive to be worthy of serious public dialogue. The inclusion of traditional rituals, everyday activities, pop culture and leftist legacies, however, intentionally contested the norm of discussing only purportedly significant and national issues in established publications. This vanguard and plebeian orientation did not depoliticize the public sphere but recognized that private lived experiences constituted an authentic portrait of the territory's past and present. The magazine's extensive references to the collective memory of the Brand and Products Expo, a United Front and propaganda podium for the CCP, indicated a left-wing revisionist yet factual orientation.
Although the homegrown intellectuals challenged the cultural elite, they did not displace them to become the new hegemony. The homegrown intellectuals were mainly critical of the cultural elite's functional use of Hong Kong's liberal enclave without being attentive to its grassroots history and social injustice, despite its physical proximity. City Magazine's inaugural issue dealt with community activism and was followed by a series of special issues devoted to gay rights, gender equality and critical theories.Footnote 57 Unlike in other popular magazines, female celebrities and critics were not portrayed as objects of capitalist and masculine consumption but as subjects of liberation and admiration; many of these women appeared on front covers, wrote columns and served as guest editors. Following the Tiananmen Incident of 1976, some of the magazine's editors steered the first direct action to take place in Hong Kong, which involved painting graffiti on the walls of Chinese-funded enterprises. To quote Jeff Weintraub and Jane Jacobs, the wealth of public life “lies not in self-determination or collective action, but in the multithreaded liveliness and spontaneity arising from the ongoing intercourse of heterogeneous individuals and groups that can maintain a civilised coexistence”Footnote 58 or is exercised by “allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilised but essentially dignified and reserved terms.”Footnote 59 The emergence of a local identity helped to reduce the social distance between different intellectual communities and nurtured the diversity of public life.
Sales of City Magazine topped 100,000 a month on average in the 1980s thanks to its unique orientation.Footnote 60 Public support and identification with the leanings of the magazine elevated it to a networking platform for the vanguard and creative communities that promoted feminist theatre, science fiction, Cantonese opera, investigative journalism, grassroots rights, and above all, a cosmopolitan culture featuring indigenous characteristics. Literary societies, dance clubs, orchestras, bookstores and think-tanks were drawn to and identified with the magazine.Footnote 61 Salient examples range from the elitist Hong Kong Observers to the grassroots Society for Community Organization. Many of the magazine's core contributors also served as the producers, directors, scriptwriters and actors of Hong Kong's New Wave Cinema, whose influence extended beyond the Greater China region into East and South-East Asia. By presenting themselves as the vectors and practitioners of popular culture and by contesting the boundaries of such a categorization, they broadened the public sphere.Footnote 62 In Lui Tai-lok's 吕大乐 words, the idea that “nothing seems impossible” (you mie wudezhi 有咩唔得啫) defined the “Zeitgeist of the 1970s.”Footnote 63 While this cohort of editors, directors and playwrights did not specifically adopt the term cosmopolite, they featured its essence in everyday life. They engaged in open debates, bridged the gulf between high and popular cultures, admitted plebeian lived experiences into the public realm, and constructed a sense of equal citizenship through their growing sense of “belonging” to Hong Kong.
Contention and Identification across Time and Space
The transformation of Hong Kong's public sphere in the 1970s resonated with the concept of identity as an “imagined community” constructed through print capitalism, social interaction and symbolism.Footnote 64 By debating what was permitted in the public sphere and which subjects could make reasonable contributions, homegrown and left-wing intellectuals reified discursive power in terms of the solidarity and equality of citizens. The decay of the functional use of an offshore enclave and the growth of participatory experiences through urban life were mutually reinforcing. This cultural identity of the counter-publics depicted a mediating process between longing for the homeland from afar and belonging to a civic community.Footnote 65 Beneath the above shift in the content and agency of Hong Kong's counter-public sphere was a process of ideational and social contention. Apart from publishing articles, an increasing number of intellectuals took their ideas and spread their agendas into the grassroots.
The nationalist faction and its community of dissent
The nationalist faction, which had close links with the underground CCP apparatus, aimed to secure a cultural stronghold for political ends. Channelized through influential publications such as Panku 盤古 and The Seventies and having penetrated local student organizations and overseas communities, the nationalist faction engaged in discursive contention and collective action.Footnote 66 Founded in February 1967, Panku showed strong traces of the nationalist sentiment associated with the 1966 and 1967 riots. However, it also maintained a degree of editorial autonomy by responding to local political crises and exploring intellectual resources. For instance, early issues commemorated the 56th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, produced investigative reports to counter the colonial authority's narrative of the riots, and addressed youth anxieties over identity.
In 1969, Panku published a series of articles that revisited the imagining of China from within Hong Kong.Footnote 67 In “Study all China,” the contributor promotes a New China against capitalist exploitation and imperialist disenfranchisement by criticizing the exiled intellectuals’ inability to appreciate new phenomena and their obsolete images of the “bandit area.” Using modernist and neo-Marxist theories that deconstruct the relationship between power and ideology and which embrace dynamic changes, the work reveals a new angle from which to contest the cultural elite's cultural-philosophic cum static analysis. Another article, “The separation, union and anti-independence of the overseas Chinese,” reinvents the nationalist discourse and argues that human emancipation cannot be detached from its “national history, culture and heritage.” The notion of “reunion” (huigui 回归) is established as a “proactive choice” to accommodate rational decisions in the face of political reality and a sense of belonging with the national community.Footnote 68
Although this notion did not become popular discourse during the political transition, it succeeded in attracting some progressive youth to imagine a different way of engaging with the mainland. However, similar to its USIS-sponsored counterpart University Life, contributors’ and readers’ contestations at times led to greater attention being paid to social justice and political activism. The political regimes’ original intention to foster a rigid ideological conflict between the communist and capitalistic blocs was contested and disrupted. With a change in editorship and contributors in the early 1970s, Panku became a leftist mouthpiece. The publication endorsed Mao's policy of condemning imperialists and revisionists (fandi fanxiu 反帝反修), arguing that any negative reports of the socialist experiments being conducted on the mainland reflected nothing but containment (weidu 围堵) of New China, and that the Cultural Revolution represented a real democratic future through mass participation.Footnote 69
Founded by critics Lee Yee 李怡 and Fong So 方苏 in February 1970, The Seventies aimed to offer a platform that would unite Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and overseas Chinese under nationalism and socialism by adopting a more flexible stance and allowing for more diversity. The Protect the Diaoyu Islands movement (Baodiao yundong 保钓运动) of 1971, however, provided an opportunity for the journal to appeal to an imagined Chinese community. It published investigative reports that traced the spontaneous and collective outbreak of Baodiao actions. In subsequent issues, intellectuals from the left and right as well as cross-disciplinary writers and scientists were invited to analyse China's claim to the islands and to reflect on their personal participation in the movement. Patriotism seemingly crossed the political boundaries between the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities. Seen as a rival to Ming Pao Monthly, The Seventies received official recognition from Premier Zhou Enlai 周恩来 and was censored by the KMT.
Ironically, it was the freedom of speech permitted in Hong Kong and the journal's attempts to revisit China's past that led to The Seventies falling out of favour with the party-state.Footnote 70 As the Mao era drew to a close, the journal's editors and contributors reflected on whether the Cultural Revolution was a mass movement or an elite power struggle.Footnote 71 In 1977, the journal defied the Party line and disobeyed Party command by publishing reports on the Democracy Wall incident.Footnote 72 Despite the party-state's customary censorship of such sensitive issues, the journal continued to enter the PRC from time to time.Footnote 73 It was not until the publication of an article on the “CCP's privileged class” in 1979 that the journal was met with complete censorship. Thereafter, the journal became autonomous and self-sufficient, advocating “the independent mind and free expression.”Footnote 74 Renamed The Nineties in 1984, it continued to build on its reputation as a platform for transitional dissenters, appealing to a readership whose loyalties and issues diverged more than they converged.Footnote 75 Its extensive coverage of Taiwan's Tangwai movement (dangwai yundong 党外运动), including Lei Zen's 雷震 memoirs and the Formosa incident, and its analysis of world events and critical theories were widely regarded by Taiwan's intellectuals as the cradle of their democratic and liberal ideas.Footnote 76 During the 1980s, the journal boasted a circulation of more than 40,000 copies and its ownership was in the hands of 1,000 shareholders.Footnote 77
The Nineties transformed from a party-state and nationalist mouthpiece to an independent and transnational podium. This trajectory demonstrates how discursive contestation and intellectual reflexivity can magnify the counter-public sphere.Footnote 78 The publication cultivated an oppositional view of various illiberal regimes in Chinese communities and nurtured a displaced but connected community of transnational dissenters. While public debates may not have reconciled contributors and readers’ ideological differences, the journal's popularity shows that evidence and credibility mattered in public communication.
The Trotskyist faction and its social activism
While the nationalists attacked the exiled intellectuals and liberals, they themselves faced challenges from the leftist and liberal left. Inspired by the 1968 social movements worldwide and by radical theories prevalent at the time, a segment of university graduates became radical. Ideologically, they extended the notion of the “left” in Hong Kong to include Trotskyism, anarchism and critical theories. In practice, these radical youth were interested in analysing as well as revolutionizing the world.Footnote 79 The Seventies BiWeekly, co-founded by Ng Chung-yin 吴仲贤, Mok Chiu-yu 莫昭如 and Chan Ching Wai 陈清伟, became the Trotskyist faction's discursive and mobilizing platform. Subjected to internal division, the magazine survived from 1970 to 1974 and republished in 1978, but achieved a circulation of 15,000 at its peak, a remarkable record for a radical intellectual publication.Footnote 80
The journal positioned Hong Kong's decolonization within the broader global struggle for political representation and against economic disenfranchisement. First, each issue introduced the claims of new social theories and gradually stressed their local relevance.Footnote 81 Although the ideologies of anarchism and Trotskyism had originated in the Republican political elite, they flourished in this economic city. The magazine's follow-up investigation of the My Lai Massacre established its reputation. Second, each issue published comments from fellow students, workers, photographers, artists, journalists and scholars, whose opinions often deviated from the editorial stance but were backed up by sound logic or convincing evidence. Topics included relations between existentialism and anarchism, China and Hong Kong's democratization, the Vietnam War, imperialism and civil rights movements, the French New Wave and its global diffusion, and the cultural legacy of Woodstock.Footnote 82 Third, the editors offered their readers a discounted rate to subscribe to what they considered “top-quality magazines” that had hitherto been unavailable, including Sign & Sound, The Spokesman, Le Monde, Avant Grade and Dissent, whose seminal articles were translated, reviewed and discussed. Fourth, the journal regularly published interviews with activists at home and abroad featuring their social programmes. Some networked with the Fourth International and set up a local branch in Hong Kong. Others studied in France, where they absorbed progressive ideas. These lived experiences added a human face to social activism.Footnote 83
Table 1 shows the crucial role played by Seventies BiWeekly in Hong Kong's major social movements in the 1970s. It not only served as the communicative platform for circulating and deliberating on critical issues of the time but also acted as the mobilizing agent to organize and disseminate protest and protest tactics. Specifically, its founding editors and contributors initiated or organized the Chinese language campaign, anti-corruption protests, the Baodiao movement and education reform. Some of them formed action groups, such as the Revolutionary Marxist League and April Fifth Action, and exchanged information with other publication venues and activist networks. They endorsed discursive persuasion attempts by signing petitions, distributing pamphlets, networking with grassroots associations and organizing neighbourhood forums; they practised noncooperative repertoires such as wildcat assemblies, spontaneous sit-ins and mass demonstrations. These unprecedented repertoires were strong enough to force the authorities to respond, but not radical enough to induce heavy penalties. The social activists ultimately managed to solicit government concessions to nearly all of their protest claims and to amass public acceptance of social activism.Footnote 84 The radical youths’ stories featured in various films, plays and literary anthologies, and the agencies they inspired continue to practise politics and to support creative industries in the mainland and Hong Kong and have provided the biographical notes and cultural roots of Hong Kong's social activism.Footnote 85
Table 1: Seventies BiWeekly and Major Social Movements in Hong Kong
Source:
Author's synthesis. #No. refers to the issue.
The social faction and its democracy programmes
In the 1980s, negotiations between London and Beijing over Hong Kong's political future created deep anxieties among Hong Kong citizens. While majoritarian public opinion preferred to maintain the status quo,Footnote 86 progressive forces nurtured in the counter-public sphere considered the change of sovereignty as an ascension in the political opportunity structure.Footnote 87 Whereas grassroots activists, social workers, teachers and lawyers rallied to form political commentary groups and think-tanks, new graduates and university students also used student journals to promote their frames of contention. The Undergrad and Chinese University Student Press served as two prominent examples.Footnote 88 The nationalist faction, which had adopted a Maoist and anti-imperial stance, initially dominated these publications. However, with the reform and opening up of the mainland from 1978 onwards, the faction lost its spiritual guidance and political relevance. The social faction then began to dominate these student journals and promote its own ideas.
To frame is to select certain aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text among participants and align personal experiences with a movement's collective goal. Social-faction students such as Tsang Shu-Ki 曾澍基 raised the “1997 question” in an article published in The Undergrad in as early as 1975.Footnote 89 A series of articles written in Chinese also advocated prioritizing the well-being of “the Hong Kong people” in its analyses of public affairs.Footnote 90 Thereafter, two dominant frames of Hong Kong's democracy movement emerged to serve as a communicative discourse to inform participants what to fight for and as a coordinative discourse through which to appropriate their collective actions.Footnote 91
First, the young elite formulated a set of coherent arguments, known as the “reunion with China by democracy,” to address the confidence crisis and make sense of their political participation, arguing that as the handover of Hong Kong back to China was inevitable, ensuring that they had a say in their future should be a rational choice for those who could not and would not consider exiting. Fighting for Hong Kong's political representation through democratic reforms, or “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong,” would not only help them to cope with the uncertainty but would also raise the prospect of fully exercising their citizenship through equal, civic and proactive participation.Footnote 92 By reunifying, this master frame would help resolve the inherited contradictions between the order of the sovereign and the entitlements of citizenship that have accumulated among different factions.Footnote 93
This alternative was attractive to the rising young elite and to university students but received lukewarm public attention and support. A highly encouraging letter from the open-minded Premier Zhao Ziyang 赵紫阳 endorsing Hong Kong people's freedom to choose their political system generated hope and added legitimacy to this framing.Footnote 94 This interaction did not imply that the CCP had successfully co-opted the student bodies. The HKU and CUHK student unions insisted that university students must be allowed to popularly elect the seats allocated to them on the Basic Law Consultative Committee. Eventually, the party-state agreed to make an exception and allowed them to elect their own representatives on the committee.Footnote 95
In parallel, Meeting Point, which was formed out of an alliance between nationalist and social faction activists, was one of the two largest pro-democracy political parties of the 1980s and 1990s to support this cause. Not all political actors accepted the linking of decolonization and democratization, but this master frame of Hong Kong's democracy movement enabled activists to attribute the source of inequalities to the autocratic-corporatist structure and to mobilize the moderate middle class to engage in collective actions to secure their political representation under Chinese rule.Footnote 96
The Tiananmen Incident of 1989, however, in which Hong Kong residents were deeply involved, reframed the cause of their democracy movement to one of “resisting communism through democracy.” To pro-democracy supporters, the necessity and urgency of having democratic institutions to defend the liberal enclave's existing freedoms and lifestyles from an authoritarian sovereign could not be more self-evident. The Democratic Party pressurized the British government to guard against attempts to reduce Hong Kong's autonomy and worked closely with the last governor, Chris Patten, to speed up democratic reforms implemented in the legislature and at the grassroots.Footnote 97 A popular annual vigil has taken place uninterrupted in the territory since 1989, reinforcing the precedent of assembling a massive rally to mobilize democratic participation and portraying a dissenting character.Footnote 98 In response, Beijing worked towards greater co-optation of the elite and increased control of the public sphere to maintain stability during the transition. The pace of decolonization and democratization was disrupted, and the inherent contradictions between sovereignty and citizenship continued to accumulate.Footnote 99
Certainly, these competing notions on deepening Hong Kong's democracy struggles within and beyond its border evolved through the events described above. If the meanings of the counter-publics and the solidarity of various political communities had not been widely articulated in the public sphere since the post-war era, they would not have been admitted into the public realm and diffused among different civil society organizations.
Conclusion
This paper surveys the process of discursive contestation that nurtured Hong Kong's counter-public sphere. In the post-war era, China's exiled intellectuals leveraged the colony's geopolitical ambiguity to review their nation's past and present. These intellectuals founded independent venues to provide alternative voices to the official discourses prescribed by colonial, communist and other political regimes. By the 1970s, a cohort of homegrown and left-wing public intellectuals contested this cultural elite's functional use of the liberal enclave and favoured a heuristic attitude, enabling them to articulate their evolving identity and appropriate their alternative imagination. This group increased the number of independent yet relatively popular and inclusive left-wing magazines. Social history, grassroots rights and popular culture were recognized as public concerns that steadily reduced the social distance between the different communities residing in close physical proximity. Heterogeneous groups of writers, artists, activists and film stars were admitted as public intellectuals, querying the masculine and elite orientations of reputable publication venues. The displaced loyalists/dissenters of the nation-state finally settled and became congruent, accommodating the need to address the cosmopolitan city-state's social injustices.
The presented process tracing also revisits Habermas's idealized framework by returning cultural identity and social configurations back to the study of the public sphere. First, the hybrid identity bridges the gap between the social and the public. While Hong Kong's counter-public sphere was built on the interplay of opposing political forces, it was consolidated through a series of efforts by the intelligentsia. These agencies’ efforts gave concrete meaning to citizenship, one that deliberates identity consciousness, equal participation and a community of a shared future among the informed public. An inclusive counter-public sphere has been preserved not owing to the presence of a common identity, rational discourse and private/public distinction, but precisely because these socio-political actors could agree on who they were, what they were fighting for and how to appropriate their collective actions.
Second, this recurring ideational contestation stimulates public debates and mediates the political behaviour of the counter-publics. While these homegrown intellectuals secured their public realm by rebelling against the exiled intellectuals, their own agendas have been further contested by the new generation. These new agencies’ loyalty is static (nationalist), their audiences are transnational (liberal), their repertoires are revolutionary (Trotskyist) and their agendas are instrumental (social democrats). The publishers, editors and contributors of these periodicals built their reputations by securing independent theatres and promoting dissenting voices. Hong Kong's counter-public sphere, therefore, does not end up in the dichotomy between official and counter discourses but is rather among the multilayered manifestations of left-wing ideas, cosmopolite identity and social activism. Public intellectuals also appropriate the credibility and capital to be recognized as the opinion leaders of Hong Kong's democracy movement and its countermovement. As no political faction or ideology is strong enough to subvert another, the cultural front has become less ferocious but equally contentious. In playing an indispensable role in public communication, these intellectual vectors have defined and negotiated their realm. In this light, the ecology of colonial Hong Kong is by no means apolitical but instead plays a vital role in Chinese cultural and political life. Acknowledging that the discursive field's embeddedness stemmed from colonial Hong Kong also helps us to articulate how the post-handover publics perceived the threats of the erosion of their freedoms and liberties and why they tended to resist any unitary grand narratives.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tim Pringle, Sebastian Veg and two referees for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the AAS conference in Toronto and invited workshops at Academia Sinica, City University of Hong Kong and EHESS. Thanks go to the organizers and participants for constructive feedback and, in particular, Craig Calhoun, May Bo Ching, Eugenia Lean, Denise Ho, Tammy Ho, Christopher Rea, Helen Siu and Jieh-min Wu. All errors are mine. Particular thanks go to the interviewees, particularly Koonchung Chan, Yee Lee, Margaret Ng and Tai-lok Lui, and Anthony Cheng and Hiu-Fung Chung for research assistance. This work was partially supported by a grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (Project No. 22608518).
Conflicts of interest
None.
Biographical notes
Edmund W. CHENG is associate professor of the department of public policy and director of the Political Analysis Lab at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include contentious politics, political sociology, political communication, Hong Kong politics and Global China. His articles have appeared in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Political Studies, Information, Communication & Society, International Political Science Review, Mobilization and Social Movement Studies.
