Proud and Angry: Political Culture in Post-British Hong Kong

Proud and Angry addresses the question of what drove two million Hongkongers to the streets in 2019 in the largest ever protest in this post-colonial society. It answers this question by examining Hong Kong’s unique post-colonial political culture where the former colonists left but the new ruler was unable to establish itself under the institutional design of One Country Two Systems. In this political vacuum, local Hongkongers desperately searched for a new political identity based on Hong Kong’s indigenous culture; they felt angry about being abandoned by the British but were too proud to be associated with the Chinese mainlanders who are perceived as newly rich but unsophisticated. They accepted Chinese sovereignty in Hong Kong but resisted being integrated into the Chinese state. They demonstrated a strong populist tendency to protest on the street even after the passage of the Hong Kong National Security Law. As for the factors that encouraged the development of this political culture, the book shows that the resistance to mandarin education, the pro-Western legal system, the anti-China media led by Apple Daily, the refusal to implement patriotic education in schools all contributed to the hostility of Hongkongers toward Beijing. Large-scale protest can still be triggered unless changes are made in language policy, school curriculum, the media environment and the legal system.

This study draws solid empirical evidence from a territory-wide public opinion survey. Through multiple embedded survey experiments and an innovative statistical weighting technique, the book detects a large amount of public resistance to the Chinese state that was otherwise hidden due to the respondents’ fear of political retribution. In addition to improving public opinion survey methodology, this study contributes to the political culture literature by presenting a distinctive transitional post-colonial culture that follows neither the colonial mentality nor the will of the new ruler.

Wenfang Tang is Presidential Chair Professor and Dean of School of Humanities and Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His research interests include public opinion survey, political culture, and mass politics. His book Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability (OUP, 2016) won the CHOICE Best Academic Title Award.

Ying Xia is Professor and Chair in the Department of Political Science at Sun Yat-sen University. Her research and publications focus on social movement and mass politics in Hong Kong.