Hong Kong protests: democracy doesn’t fill your rice bowl

As hundreds of thousands of young citizens took to the streets of Hong Kong in late September, braving tear gas and violence to protest against Beijing’s restrictions on the city’s democratic elections, I turned on my laptop one morning to find an email from a Chinese acquaintance. He was asking people, mostly mainlanders who work in Hong Kong, for their “take on the student protests."

Out of the several hundred members of this email discussion group, five responded. The protests, one commented, were fuelled by “hormones” and “heroic self-pity.” “People who think they are fighting for something more abstract are just deluding themselves,” another opined. Do students themselves really believe in their cause, a third wondered, because “democracy sometimes seems like a cover for something else.” Still others admitted their interest lay primarily in the spectacle. Western observers of the Hong Kong protest, moved by its democratic appeal and spirit of civil disobedience, have compared it to the Tiananmen Square protests. However, among young and educated mainlanders—the demographic group that led the protests in 1989—empathy towards their Hong Kong counterparts is largely absent. On popular social media platforms like Sina Weibo and Wechat, despite censors’ heavy-handed meddling, it is still possible to discern prevailing public sentiments towards the Hong Kong protests. Most of them, echoing those expressed in the email group, range from disapproving to cynical. “Democracy doesn’t give you the rice in your bowl. Being practical and plowing ahead is the hard truth,” one web user wrote in a comment that captured a widely shared opinion on Weibo. “The Occupy Central students are hoaxed by outsiders and unable to think for themselves.”

These comments, though disheartening, are indicative of the views that mainland youths hold towards Hong Kong. Envious of the living standards, education levels and career opportunities there, they nonetheless find themselves identifying little with local citizens’ liberal ideals and political activism.

Chinese millennials can hardly forget the joyous tenor of the state media in 1997, when patriotic singers belted out “Pearl of the Orient” and television announcers declared “a lost child’s return to her mother’s arms.” During the earliest years after the handover, however, the city remained a vague blur to my friends and me. We first began to think about it seriously in the early 2000s, when Hong Kong universities opened their doors to mainland students. Since then, a growing number of Chinese students have flocked to the city to study, often giving up admission offers from top-ranked mainland establishments.

In chats with high school classmates who attended Hong Kong universities, they have marvelled at the institutions’ academic rigour and strict honour code—plagiarism, widespread on Chinese university campuses, is severely punished in Hong Kong—while largely staying aloof from the vibrant civil society that characterises the city at large. When a friend mentioned to me the prevalence of Falun Gong protestors in a major city district of Hong Kong, I asked if she ever spoke to them. “Why would you do that?” she asked, arching her eyebrows.

The greatest symbol of open political expression in Hong Kong is the annual vigil at Victoria Park, where tens of thousands gather to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Few of my mainland friends have participated. “Yes, a lot of people show up,” a high school classmate who studied law in Hong Kong acknowledged after a moment of hesitation when I raised the subject. “But I was kept busy by school work.”

Still, Hong Kong remains a mecca for young, aspiring middle-class Chinese. Its name bestows a prestige similar to that associated with developed western economies. Many see jobs in Hong Kong investment banks as a shortcut to local citizenship; others treat education experience there as a springboard to graduate schools in Britain and America. In recent years, despite the escalating tension between the mainland and Hong Kong, fuelled by what Hong Kongers perceive as the mainland’s political and economic encroachment on their society, the desire among mainlanders to share in its prosperity has only grown.

“I don’t plan to stay in Hong Kong all my life. It is not home, after all,” confessed a college friend from southwestern China, who works in Morgan Stanley’s Hong Kong office. “But at the moment, the social environment doesn’t matter so much to me. I spend all my time in the office anyway,” he shrugged. “Plus, Hong Kong has more financial jobs available than Beijing, and the tax rate is much lower than New York.”