Posters reveal rift with China
Tensions rise as students engage over civil rights
HONG KONG — The banners and posters were quietly hung in universities across Hong Kong, often appearing overnight, with bold white lettering calling for change and testing the limits of the freedoms that Beijing will allow this freewheeling city.
“Hong Kong Independence!” one banner declared. “Fight for Our Homeland!” said another.
To students from Hong Kong, the banners were a defiant insistence that their city is different from the rest of China, and that they can express themselves in ways unimaginable on the mainland.
But to many mainland students, the calls for independence were unpatriotic insults. Some pushed back in anger, ripping them from university bulletin boards and setting off shouting matches caught on videos that spread quickly on Chinese social media, exposing the widening gulf between Hong Kong and the mainland, which rules this former British colony.
The series of September clashes over the banners not only rekindled a debate over Hong King’s relative rights to free speech and protest — freedoms unseen on the mainland — they have also revealed deeper tensions between students from the city and those from the mainland. The issues are exacerbated by anxieties among Hong Kong’s youth over a perceived loss of job prospects to their mainland peers and the chilling effect the ruling Community Party has on campus discourse.
The student spat is one part of broader tensions surrounding Beijing’s relationship with Hong Kong as the city undergoes an increasingly tense 50-year transition to Chinese rule. Beijing created a special status known as “one country, two systems” for Hong Kong following its 1997 handover from Britain to mainland China, giving it wide autonomy and civil liberties. At the city’s universities, student union bulletin boards called “Democracy Walls” became filled with politics, polemics and youthful anger.
In the years since then, increasing numbers of mainland students have come to the city to study, laying the groundwork for tensions. In the last academic year, mainland students made up 76 percent of international students in public university programs, according to the government.
“Hong Kong students think that mainland students are taking their learning opportunities and degrees from them,” said Chris Chan, an economics student at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Many locals like Chan fear that large companies and banks are more likely to hire mainland Chinese graduates, since Hong Kongers often don’t have as many connections to the mainland-dominated business community.
This anxiety over job prospects stems from deeper, systemic problems about skyrocketing rents and high costs of living. The influx of mainland Chinese has contributed to soaring housing prices.
Many young people believe that in contrast to their parents’ generation, “we do not have any upward social mobility,” Chan said.