Young Activists and the Anti-Patriotic Education Movement in Post-Colonial Hong Kong: some insights...

Citizenship, Social and Economics Education Volume 12 Number 3 2013 www.wwwords.co.uk/CSEE

148 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/csee.2013.12.3.148

Young Activists and the Anti-Patriotic Education Movement in Post-Colonial Hong Kong: some insights from Twitter

CHITAT CHAN Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

ABSTRACT An extraordinary large-scale student movement in Hong Kong successfully forced the government to withdraw a patriotic education proposal in 2012. The student group has attracted serious scrutiny from the pro-government camp because of the students’ unusually young age and remarkable mobilising power. This study aims to explore the community structures and identify significant members in the student network, and to shed light on understanding of the formation of young activists’ sense of civic identity in the Internet age. Techniques of social network analysis were employed. It is argued that the role of adult activists and the role of social media are inadequately researched in civic education studies. Moreover, it is further argued that the post-colonial city presents a kind of phobia of talking about the adult–student relationship in civic action, which may risk hindering rigorous discussion of youth civic engagement.

In post-colonial Hong Kong, the political-cultural identity of the people inevitably has various facets, such as the Hongkonger identity, the pan-Chinese identity, the citizen identity of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the global citizen identity (Vickers & Kan, 2003; Fung, 2004). Although a sense of Chinese ethnicity is a strong element of local identity, it does not necessarily transfer into local support for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) or the PRC. Citizens’ national identity is therefore a political project that the ruling regime cannot allow to fail, and this leads to a never-ending struggle for identity taking place in the city.

The ruling regime has focused not on adults, but on students. The school curriculum, therefore, is one of the most important arenas. Since the handover in 1997, the HKSAR government has been trying to promote a comprehensive sense of being Chinese via school curriculums (Chan, 2002; Vickers & Kan, 2003; Ma, 2010; Kan, 2011; Kam, 2012; Leung & Yuen, 2012). Despite these efforts, the Hong Kong people’s sense of national identity fluctuates, and their identification with ‘Chinese citizens’ has dropped to a level which is unacceptable to Beijing. In June 2012, the Public Opinion Programme of the University of Hong Kong (2012a) showed that the percentage of those identifying themselves as ‘Hong Kong citizens’ had reached a record high since the 1997 handover. The identity index of the survey (ranging between 0 and 100, with a higher index indicating stronger identity) shows that the Hong Kong people’s feeling was strongest as ‘Hong Kong citizens’, followed by ‘members of the Chinese race’, then ‘Asians’, ‘Chinese citizens’, ‘global citizens’ and, finally, ‘citizens of the PRC’. That said, the feeling of being ‘citizens of the PRC’ was the weakest among all identities tested. At that time, the HKSAR government proposed a stand-alone patriotic curriculum under the banner of ‘national education’ (guominjiaoyu), triggering an extraordinary large-scale student movement. The Education Bureau of Hong Kong initially declared that ‘moral and national education’ would be an independent and stand-alone subject, which would be introduced in a progressive manner through a three-year initiation period.

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The curriculum was seriously criticised by the public and academics as brainwashing and legitimising the Communist Party of China’s (CPC’s) single-party authoritarianism. A collaboration was formed between different forces against national education in the society, and a mass protest took place on 29 July 2012, with organisers reporting a turnout of 90,000. There was also an ‘Occupy’ movement when protesters took over the government headquarters in early September 2012 (with a reported turnout of 120,000). The action lasted for more than a week, and the government backed down on 8 September by cancelling the three-year initiation period and promising that national education will not be introduced as an independent subject within the term of the current Chief Executive (Associated Press, 2012; British Broadcasting Corporation, 2012b; Cable News Network, 2012; Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, 2012; Kan, 2012).

The alliance behind the movement consisted of students, parents and teachers. One of the core organisations in the alliance, Scholarism (Xueminsichao), was founded by secondary school students; its leader, Joshua Wong (JW), was only 15 (Ting, 2012; Yuwen, 2012). Because of the members’ unusually young age and extraordinary mobilising power, the group attracted much attention, as well as serious criticism and scrutiny – for example, Asia Television (ATV), a Hong Kong-based broadcaster, went so far as to characterise Scholarism as a pawn manipulated by (local) politicians backed by foreign powers in London and Washington. On 3 September 2012, an episode of ATV Focus labelled the student activists as ‘ruffians’ who were manipulated by politicians (see Cheung & Zhou, 2012). South China Morning Post columnist Alex Lo (2012) wrote that Scholarism operated like ‘a radical cult involving young children’ and that ‘we should not let our children decide what goes into their curriculums’. Takungpao, a pro-government newspaper, criticised the students as being ‘Red Guards’, who were manipulated by ‘black hands’ – powerful political forces operating behind the scenes (Guan, 2012; Liang, 2012; Takungpao, 2012a, b). The mainland media outlet Global Times stated that students were ‘being pulled into this political wrangle’ and that those students lacked even ‘a glimmer of understanding of the politics of the adult world’ (Chen, 2012). An editorial on 10 September 2012 stated that Hong Kong was behaving like ‘Cairo one year ago’ (Global Times, 2012). The Blue Book of China’s Society 2013, a publication of a state-run think tank, explicitly referred to the Scholarism case and warned that the experience in Hong Kong showed how effective the use of social media could be in organising protests (Ip, 2012; Lu et al, 2012; Mingpao, 2012). Scholarism’s account on the social media site Sina Weibo was probably blocked by the central government in the mainland. In September 2012, a search for Scholarism returned the following: ‘According to relevant laws and policies, the search result for “Scholarism” cannot be displayed’ (Lee, 2012). Pro-democratic camp critics put forward counter-arguments, saying that the ‘black hands’ label was nothing new. They noted that the same tactics were deployed against students in the 1989 Tiananmen Square event, in which the Chinese government depicted the students as puppets, and that the ‘black hand’ claim had also been commonly applied to democracy advocates, such as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Liu Xiaobo (Chang, 2012; Kan, 2012). Nevertheless, critics from both sides of the debate have not really explained in what ways the student group is (not) related to adult politicians or activists.

The Question: who has helped construct the students’ civic identity?

While the ‘black hands’ thesis may sound more like a clichéd propaganda tactic than an evidence-based assertion, the role of ‘adults’ hands’ in an adolescent activist group is undoubtedly a pedagogical question worth asking.

At a basic level, it is a basic pedagogical concern. On the one hand, adults having a commitment to youth voice usually tend to adopt a detached stance, whereby they encourage students to develop their own ideas about the origins of and solutions to societal problems. Some groups strive to address power inequalities between adults and youth by placing constraints on adult roles (Camino, 2005; Larson et al, 2005). On the other hand, activist educators such as Paulo Freire would question the notion that teachers should withhold their socio-political beliefs, and tend to suggest that youth participants might require some form of educational intervention by adults (Kilgore, 1999; Freire, 2000; Ginwright & James, 2002). The leadership structure of the student activist group may contribute to this debate.

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However, in the Scholarism case, the role of teachers or activists is not prominent. The pro-government camp suggests that the students were manipulated by politicians, whereas the pro-democratic camp tends to celebrate the young citizens’ voice in post-colonial Hong Kong. I argue here that the position of the young activists is neither manipulated by the anti-government camp nor purely constructed by the youth themselves. It is possibly that the social activist network, which is largely enhanced nowadays by social media, functions as a ‘learning community’ which provides a trajectory of civic identity.

There are increasingly more studies revealing that young people’s learning and civic identity can be constructed in civic action communities (Torney-Purta, 2002; Levinson & Brantmeier, 2006; Hoskins et al, 2012). A core concept in these studies is the idea of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), where experienced members in a network function as role models for more peripheral members. It is believed that practitioners’ identity can be developed via opportunities which build a sense of belonging, such as engagement in real activities, further alignments with other groups, and even hypothesising social connections through time and space by extrapolating from one’s own experience (Wenger, 1998, pp. 173-174). For example, the pleasure of discussion with teammates can be seen as a kind of activity contributing to a mode of belonging via engagement; the pleasure of meeting a variety of social activist groups and then positioning one’s own group can be seen as a kind of activity contributing to a mode of belonging via alignment; and the pleasure of reading and thinking can be seen as a kind of activity contributing to a mode of belonging via imagination, since the process involves seeing connections by extrapolating from one’s own experience.

It is worthy to note that interactive online communities may have provided students with opportunities to further these various modes of belonging. Recent studies show that young people’s engagement with the Internet may result in a sense of citizenship which is somewhat different from previous generations (Blasco & Krause Hansen, 2006; Bennett et al, 2009). One important aspect of the Internet is that it helps provide students with a much wider frame of reference, in which they can meet a diverse range of people in a global context. The student activist group has registered accounts on several social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, as well as an official website.[1] All these platforms serve as interfaces between the students and other adult users on the World Wide Web. The case of the student activist group can therefore help illustrate in what ways social media sites may play a role in developing young citizens’ social networks and sense of civic identity.

As such, this study aims to provide a preliminarily exploration of the community structures and identify significant members in the student network, and to shed light on our understanding of the formation of young activists’ sense of civic identity in the social media environment.

Studying the Student Activist Group on Twitter

This study analysed the social network of the student activist group on Twitter. The study of relational data has a rich history among social scientists and mathematicians, and various methods and metrics have been developed to characterise different types of social networks and to identify subgroups and key members in a social network (Freeman, 1977, 2004; Wasserman & Faust, 1994). Until recently, social network analysis has remained a difficult kind of research study that has been performed by academics or professionals in highly specialised fields, such as intelligence analysis. As large-scale social media data sets and user-friendly software are becoming more available, making sense of the data produced by social media sites has become increasingly popular (Christakis & Fowler, 2009; Hansen, 2011; Rogers, 2013).

The Twitter account of the student activist group was chosen for the analysis for several reasons. First, the group’s account on Twitter is one of the most frequently updated platforms among the various online platforms used by the group, such as Scholarism’s official website and YouTube. Second, compared with other social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, Twitter is more commonly used by the core members for strategic communication, such as announcing activity news or discussing onsite strategies during social actions. Third, the data structure of Twitter has largely facilitated meaningful research studies. A growing number of researchers have been using data from Twitter to develop their research (Huberman et al, 2009; Segerberg & Bennett, 2011; Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013), partly because the structure of Twitter


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distinguishes the relationship between ‘following a user’ and the ‘follower of a user’. This asymmetrical and directional relation structure can help add more layers to the analysis – for example, user A may want to follow user B, but user B may not necessarily need to follow user A, and user B may have other connections which are unrelated to user A. Thus, the ‘following’ and ‘follower’ relationships can provide us with a set of data to better understand the popularity of a member in a network, and therefore facilitate the identification of significant members in that network.

By analysing Scholarism’s Twitter account [2], this study aims to: (1) identify the significant members and subgroups in the Scholarism network, and (2) shed light on our understanding of the formation of young activists’ sense of civic identity in an age of social media.

Methods: social network analysis

This study adopted techniques of social network analysis, in which the concept of the sociogram – a representation of social links – is central to the analysis. A sociogram consists of two primary building blocks: nodes and edges. Nodes (which are also called vertices, entities or items) can represent many things, such as people, groups or even countries. Edges (which are also known as links, ties, connections or relationships) are the building blocks of networks. An edge connects two nodes together. Edges can represent many different types of relationships, such as collaborations, kinship, friendship or citations. Directed edges have a clear origin and destination – for example, a Twitter user following another user or someone sending an email to another person. Undirected edges do not specify the direction of a relation – for example, mutual friendship on Facebook is a kind of undirected edge.

The analysis basically measures the popularity of a member in the Scholarism network on Twitter. Since Twitter distinguishes the relationship between ‘following a user’ and the ‘follower of a user’, the popularity of a member can be reflected by the total number of followers owned by that member within the network.

Another level of analysis, which is more complicated, is to cluster the members and reveal subgroup structures. A key metric used in this study is betweenness centrality (BC), which is a quantified measure of the centrality of a member (node) in a particular network based on calculating the paths passing through a node (Freeman, 1977; Hansen et al, 2011). A path is measured as the distance from a member to another member in terms of the number of hops. The BC of a member in a network is the total number of shortest paths from all members to all others which pass through that member. That said, the greater the BC of a member, the greater the number of other members relying on that member. After calculating the BC of all the members in the network, the members in the network were further clustered. The idea is to identify subgroups based on members’ common friends – for example, if the class monitors of two classes are mutual friends, but most of the students in the two classes are only friends with their own classmates, then the relation (the edge) between the two class monitors will be very important, since their relation functions as a bridge between the students in the different classes. If an algorithm can quantify the weight of all relations (edges) between pairs of members in a set consisting of all students from the two classes, the weight of the relation between the two monitors should be the highest. If a network contains subgroups which are interconnected by certain key members among these subgroups, the relations between these key members will become relatively important. Theoretically, by removing these edges, the subgroups will be separated from one another and the underlying community structures of the network can be revealed. The technical details of the algorithm will not be illustrated here due to the nature and word limit of this article. The data import, analysis, clustering and graphical presentation were conducted using NodeXL (Hansen et al, 2011), which is an open-source extension of Microsoft Excel that has been increasingly applied in social media studies (Doran et al, 2011; Hansen, 2011).[3]

This study has several limitations. First, there are several social media platforms used by the group; Twitter is just one of them. Second, this study assumes that Twitter networks are more or less a veridical representation of real-life influence, but online relationships do not necessarily correspond to relationships in reality. Third, the user profiles of the Twitter accounts may not truly represent the actual identities of the users. Fourth, the study merely analysed the structures of

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communication, instead of the contents of communication. Fifth, the data only represents the members’ relationships at a particular moment, and, in fact, the history of the relationships cannot be addressed in this study. Notwithstanding these limitations, I hope that the discussion here can open up possibilities for future research and debate.

Results

Overall Metrics

The data was imported on 3 April 2013 via NodeXL. It was observed that the Scholarism account on Twitter had 333 nodes (members) and 2589 edges (relations). The sociogram of the entire Scholarism network on Twitter is presented in Figure 1. The nodes are represented as disks, triangles or squares, which represent memberships in the respective subgroups that will be further discussed in the subsequent sections. The size of a node is proportional to the popularity (number of followers) of that node. The edges are represented as lines. A mutual relationship is indicated by a line; a follower relationship is indicated by an arrow pointing from the follower node to the one being followed. The top members in the entire group are listed in Table I.

Figure 1. The sociogram of the Scholarism network on Twitter. Among the 333 nodes, 300 are followers of Scholarism and 35 are followed by Scholarism. The analysis shows a reciprocated edge ratio of 0.29. A relation between member A and member B is considered to be reciprocated if both of them follow each other. A reciprocated edge ratio of 0.29 means that in the entire Scholarism network on Twitter, there are 29 reciprocated relations in every 100 relations.

Three subgroups are identified based on the density of common friends (see Figure 2). The shapes of these subgroups are further revealed by removing the edges of the key members between these subgroups (see Figure 3). A summary of the key features and top 10 members of each group are presented in Table II.


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Table I. Members in the Scholarism network on Twitter ranked by descending order of the number of followers owned by the user in the Scholarism network alone (only the top 20 members are listed due to space constraints).

Observation 1: JW is the most popular member in the Scholarism network

The analysis indicates that the account joshuawong1013, which belongs to JW, occupies a very significant role in the social network of Scholarism on Twitter. However, among the top 10 members of the entire network (see Table I), only JW is a secondary school student; the other members on that top-10 list are adult activists or activist groups.

User scholarismhk is the official account of the group and is supposed to have the highest number of followers. User joshuawong1013 – JW’s account – has the highest number of followers among all other users in the Scholarism network. Even popular users who, respectively, have many more followers than JW throughout the entire Twitter network (such as user wenyunchao or hu_jia) have far fewer followers than user joshuawong1013 in the Scholarism network alone. Moreover, it is worthy to note that JW has many more followers than the official account of Scholarism. At the time of data collection (3 April 2013), joshuawong1013 had 3228 followers, while scholarismhk had only 300. This is partly because Scholarism’s account started much later than JW’s account, and JW joined Twitter much earlier than Scholarism and many of the other

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members. Scholarism’s account started on 1 December 2012 – two months after the large-scale protest in September – and JW’s account started on 9 January 2009 – two years before the founding date of Scholarism. It is also worthy of note that this starting date is even earlier than many of the other adult activist users in the top-10 list, such as hu_jia (23 July 2011), HKA1989 (9 March 2010) and Yujie89 (4 January 2010) (the identities of these users are discussed in Observation 3).

Figure 2. The three subgroups identified in the Scholarism network on Twitter.

Group Nodes Total edges

Reciprocated edge ratio

Top 10 members in order of popularity (number of followers in the Scholarism network)

Whole group

333 2589 0.29 scholarismhk, joshuawong1013, wenyunchao, hu_jia, HKA1989, Yujie89, charlesmok, sidekickick, ptreporter, kursk

Subgroup 1 148 400 0.05 scholarismhk, joshuawong1013, instagram, facebook, yukman2012, hkupop, weather_hk, hksingtao, Peter_90sfoto, hkstream

Subgroup 2 116 481 0.19 wenyunchao, hu_jia, HKA1989, Yujie89, charlesmok, YaxueCao, cddm0011, ngkeehow, ooo0oo0oo, shiunghanching

Subgroup 3 69 818 0.58 sidekickick, ptreporter, kursk, singsit01, cowcfj, lamkayblog, BachLau, dr_fat, netmediau, wildwong

Table II. A summary of the features of the whole group and the three subgroups.

Observation 2: Subgroup 1 – leaders and spectators

Altogether, there are 148 members clustered in Subgroup 1, forming 400 edges within the subgroup and having a reciprocated edge ratio of 0.05 (see Table II). The nodes of Subgroup 1 are represented by disks in the sociogram (see Figures 2 and 3). A reciprocated edge ratio of 0.05 means that there are only 5 reciprocated relations (mutual connections) in every 100 relations in this subgroup. The analysis suggests that most of the members in Subgroup 1 are opinion leaders and a mass of spectators. First, compared with the reciprocated edge ratio of the entire group (0.29), Subgroup 1 has a much lower ratio (0.05), meaning that the members generally have loose


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connections. Second, among the 148 members, 60% of them have no followers in the Scholarism network, meaning that these members are very peripheral and the connections between other people in the network would not be disrupted if these members were removed. That said, instead of multidirectional information sharing among members, information usually flows from core members to other peripheral members.

Figure 3. The three subgroups identified in the Scholarism network on Twitter (inter-subgroup edges removed). Among the top 10 members in Subgroup 1 (see Table II), user scholarismhk is naturally the most connected member in the whole group and the subgroup because the analysis is based on the sociogram of that account. User joshuawong1013 has the second-highest number of followers in Subgroup 1, indicating that JW is the most important node in this subgroup. Peter_90sfoto (a young Hong Kong-based activist) and yukman2012 (a Hong Kong-based politician) are also on the list, but their popularity is incomparable with that of JW. Other major key nodes in this subgroup are popular news groups or media-sharing platforms, which do not usefully help illustrate Scholarism’s membership structure.

Observation 3: Subgroup 2 – Chinese dissidents and critics

Altogether, there are 116 members in Subgroup 2, forming 481 edges within the subgroup, which is the second-largest subset in the network. The nodes of Subgroup 2 are represented by triangles in the sociogram (see Figures 2 and 3). Subgroup 2 has a reciprocated edge ratio of 0.19 (see Table II), meaning that there are 19 reciprocated relations in every 100 relations in this subgroup. Compared with Subgroup 1, Subgroup 2 has fewer members but a higher number of reciprocated relations, meaning that the members generally have closer connections.

It is worth noting that many of the top members in Subgroup 2 (see Table II) are well-known Chinese dissidents and critics, who are commonly covered by the international media – for example, user wenyunchao is the account of Yunchao Wen, a Chinese critic and online activist who is often cited in the media (Larmer, 2011; Yuan, 2012).[4] User hu_jia is the account of Jia Hu, an activist and dissident in the PRC who focuses on the democracy movement and environmental and HIV/AIDS issues (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2011; Cable News Network, 2011).[5] User HKA1989 is the account of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, a pro-democratic organisation established in 1989 during the demonstration

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for the students’ protest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which is still extremely active today (Li, 2012; Liu, 2012).[6] User Yujie89 is the account of Jie Yu, a Chinese writer, democracy activist and dissident.[7] Yu was arrested and tortured in 2010 for writing a critical biography of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, China’s Best Actor (Yu, 2010), and his friendship with the winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, Xiaobo Liu (Cable News Network, 2010; British Broadcasting Corporation, 2012a). Moreover, these Chinese dissidents produce many more tweets (messages) than JW or Scholarism. Up to 3 April 2013, wenyunchao had produced 51,384 tweets, hu_jia 4749 and Yujie89 10,226, but JW had produced only 2672 and Scholarism only 348 (see Table I). This suggests that these adult members are, in general, much more active than the student members, and that JW is more active than the student group.

Among the 116 members of Subgroup 2, over 90% have specified their location as a city in China or another country, and only 9% have specified Hong Kong as their location. Similar results may be observed for the time zones the users have set for their accounts. Among the 116 members, approximately 88% have set their account to the time zone of a city in China or another country, and only 12% have set their account to the Hong Kong time zone. A brief analysis based on the self-introductions and the forms of Chinese characters used (mainlanders usually use simplified Chinese characters, whereas Hongkongers and Taiwanese usually use traditional Chinese characters) also suggests that many of the users in Subgroup 2 are mainland Chinese.

Observation 4: Subgroup 3 – local critics, teachers, parents and students

Altogether, there are 69 members clustered in Subgroup 3, forming 818 edges within the subgroup and having a reciprocated edge ratio of 0.58 (see Table II). This means that, in Subgroup 3, there are 58 reciprocated relations in every 100 relations, making it the subgroup with the most interconnected members. The nodes of Subgroup 3 are represented by squares in the sociogram (see Figures 2 and 3). Vibrant and multidirectional information sharing among members can be expected. Over 70% (49/69) of the members have set their account to the Hong Kong time zone; the rest have set their account to time zones in other countries or regions of China. A brief analysis based on the self-introductions and the forms of Chinese characters used also suggests that many users in Subgroup 3 are based in Hong Kong.

The top 10 members in Subgroup 3 (see Table II) are local teachers, critics and activists – for example, user sidekickkick does not reveal much about his/her background, but he/she joined Twitter much earlier than JW, and the contents of the tweets do not reflect any issues concerning secondary school life.[8] User ptreporter claims to attend university and is an independent reporter.[9] User kursk openly states that he is a school teacher, independent reporter and columnist in several local newspapers and magazines.[10] User singsit01 is the account of Jeff Au Yeung, a medical doctor and active member of the local political group People Power.[11] Similarly to the situation in the Chinese dissident group, these top nodes produce many more tweets (messages) than JW or Scholarism. Up to 3 April 2013, sidekick had produced 61,323 tweets, ptreporter 62,424, kursk 5023 and singsit01 7373, which is far more than the tweets produced by JW and Scholarism (see Table I).

The general members of this subgroup are likely to be students, parents and the general public, and their popularity is far less than that of the local activists and Chinese dissidents – for example, Francisfong, who works in the information technology industry in Hong Kong, ranked 50 in the entire Scholarism network [12]; Dennis__Li, an ordinary university student, ranked 55 [13]; Madegg, a father of two, ranked 61 [14]; and jollyshanie, who likes to use the term ‘Hongkonger’ to address himself/herself, ranked 122.[15]

Discussion

Youth Civic Identity, Role Models and Communities of Practice

The findings undoubtedly indicate that JW, the 15-year-old student leader, has occupied a very significant role in starting and developing the Scholarism network, but that JW is the only secondary school student in the top-10 list of the entire network (see Observation 1 and Table I). The analysis also reveals that there is a small inner circle working with JW and Scholarism, in


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which the adult members are more popular and active than the vast majority of the student members (see Observation 4). Moreover, there are well-known Chinese dissidents and critics connected with Scholarism, including Yunchao Wen, Jia Hu and Jie Yu (see Observation 3). On the periphery of the network there is a mass of spectators who have merely followed the official account of Scholarism (see Observation 2). The findings also indicate that there are core adult members with clear public images in the international context who probably serve as role models for the young members – for example, Jia Hu (user hu_jia), Jie Yu (user Yujie89) and the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China (user HKA1989) all present a kind of transnational or global citizen image, tending to consider themselves as citizens at the global level and holding universal values such as justice, democracy and human rights (see Observation 3). In fact, there are not many student leaders in the Twitter network who really function as opinion leaders. The adult activists and dissidents, according to the concept of communities of practice, may possibly function as role models for more peripheral student members in the network. However, a follow-up question would be: How have they been clustered together and formulated a community with some common themes? This turns us to a closer look at the mechanisms of social media sites.

Social Media as a Powerful Civic Education Curriculum

It is argued here that social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, can be an invisible curriculum which is far more penetrating than the school curriculum. Social media users do not merely use social media sites to convey pre-existing ideas; social media sites may have partly constituted the users’ ideas and even their sense of self. For example, in the context of Twitter, a user may have initially expressed some personal views; these views will then be ignored, replied or retweeted by other users, and these valued or devalued views will then be reappropriated by that user. It is possible that a young person may have arbitrarily chosen something convenient to say in an initial expression, but in (re)considering what he/she has said and how others responded, another position can be consciously formulated. Moreover, in contrast to websites where people are limited to the passive and static viewing of content, the Internet is increasingly becoming more interactive and intelligent. Terms like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 denote the quantum leaps the Internet has made, where many websites currently have semantic and personalisation features, using autonomous agents to perform some tasks for the user (Candace, 2009; Tasner, 2009). For example, Twitter, as well as many other social media sites such as Facebook, will pop up the latest news feeds for users based on their profiles and networks of friends. The clustering techniques used in this study have been pioneered by analysts of social media sites to identify users’ close friends and personal interests in order to better channel their online advertisements. Search engine results are also calibrated based on users’ profiles and geographical locations. This ultimately means that young citizens do not merely exploit social media technologies to connect with users they intend to contact, but that social media sites may actively help develop their connections and networks.

Earlier it was noted that the Hong Kong people’s identification with the ‘Chinese citizens’ identity dropped to a historically low level in June 2012 (Public Opinion Programme, The University of Hong Kong, 2012a). It is worthy to note here that among all the age groups, the youth group was, in fact, the group that identified least with the ‘Chinese citizens’ identity. In the measurement of the strength of the ‘Chinese citizens’ identity, the survey shows that the overall population has an index rate of 7, the over-30 age group 7.4 and the 18-29 age group 5.1 (Public Opinion Programme, The University of Hong Kong, 2012b). It should be noted that citizens in the 18-29 age group are so-called ‘digital natives’, born in an era following the birth of the Internet (the 1990s). Moreover, as social media sites began to blossom (in the 2000s), the ‘digital natives’ entered their adolescence – a developmental stage where peer influence occupies an extremely significant role in identity formation. I am of the view that the role of social media in civic identity formation may be an area which is inadequately addressed by the government, as well as academic studies. Although the post-colonial regime has tried to advocate a sense of Chineseness via school curriculums, social media sites have provided students with a much wider frame of reference in a more penetrating manner, such that students can encounter a diverse range of role models in a global context (see Observation 3). School-based methods might have worked well in the pre-

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Internet British colony, and propaganda-like curriculums might be widely accepted in the firewall-bound mainland, but it is highly questionable whether these approaches work equally effectively in a well-connected international city like Hong Kong. If activists’ online communities and the technical media can effectively influence young participants’ identity development, the formal school curriculum will cease to be the only arena that the ruling regime will focus on. This partly explains why the Blue Book of China’s Society 2013 has referred to the Scholarism case and suggested that the central government strengthen Internet regulation (Ip, 2012; Lu et al, 2012; Mingpao, 2012). It is also worthy to note that the surging ‘online angry youth’ phenomenon in contemporary China is already of great concern to the central government (Shan & Guo, 2011; Yang & Zheng, 2012). It can be expected that the regulation of social media will be further tightened in the mainland (and likely in Hong Kong). However, whether strict Internet regulation is a plausible policy measure in a region with a blossoming knowledge economy is questionable.

Black Hands or Free Hand, but Not Hand in Hand?

In Hong Kong, the discussion about the role of adults in youth civic engagement tends to go to extremes. On the one hand, the ruling regime has repeated the clichéd ‘black hands’ thesis without presenting any solid evidence. On the other hand, the pro-democratic camp critics tend to trumpet the purity of a student-led network without addressing any existing adult–student collaborations in the network. As presented, the scenario is a false dichotomy between ‘black hands’ manipulation or giving the students a completely free hand (laissez-faire), and leaves no space for experienced citizens and younger citizens to go hand in hand. Students’ connections with adult activists should not be rashly interpreted as a problem or a threat, and the findings here, in fact, do not prove anything about ‘black hands’; I simply suggest that there are adult opinion leaders in the online network who are worth studying. In my view, the city seems to present a kind of phobia of addressing the adult–student relationship in civic action, and this phobic attitude may hinder rigorous discussion.

In the West, there has been an overwhelming concern about young people’s apathetic political attitudes (Putnam, 2000; Youniss et al, 2002), and these worries have productively triggered the development of rigorous studies trying to explore reasons behind youth (non-)participation (Gordon & Taft, 2011; Manning, 2013) and pedagogical studies aiming to shed light on effective civic engagement (Kirshner, 2008; Lopes et al, 2009). Some educators believe that adults should adopt a detached stance, but others suggest that there are times when the complex demands of campaigns merit some participation and guidance by adults. While some adult support may be necessary, too much involvement might end in a slippery slope, where adults end up replacing students’ roles. The core question is: What types of ‘hands’ (adult interventions) should be considered problematic, legitimate or necessary? However, this type of rigorous discussion is almost absent in the Chinese context.

This lack of academic discussion about participatory civic education probably has its root in the social-historical context of the region. In order to discourage colonial Chinese citizens from touching on sensitive nationality issues, the former British colonial government implemented a depoliticised strategy in the school curriculum (Luk, 2001; Yuen, 2007) and its overall approach to citizenship (Lo, 2001; Lam, 2005). Many government officers and adult citizens in Hong Kong are insensitive to political matters, not to mention pedagogy in civic education. In the mainland, youth work (including youth civic education and all forms of youth services) is led and coordinated by the Communist Youth League of China, and China, to the present day, does not have a centralised governmental unit (such as a ministry of youth affairs) which is independent from the CPC (Zhou & Wang, 2010; Ngai et al, 2011). Therefore, in the mainland, youth civic engagement is a duty belonging to the CPC rather than an academic matter that can be openly discussed. If pedagogical issues cannot be discussed rigorously and openly, constructive civic engagement strategies may go unexplored and unexamined, while counterproductive populist ideas may go unchecked and gain prevalence. This lack of research and discussion also partly explains why the national education controversy occurred, and why the alliance was successful. Is it not possible that the conflict was caused by a reckless political decision based on a wrong perception of public opinions and poor knowledge of pedagogical design? The ruling regime expected Hongkongers to gradually embrace


159

a totalising sense of Chineseness and identify with the country via some awkwardly designed propaganda-like curriculums. However, it is likely that when the policy enforcement strengthened, the reaction of the public and youth also went further, and it eventually pushed initially unallied parties and individuals to cooperate in opposition.

This study does not aim to provide evidence for or against either side of the debate about the student movement in post-colonial Hong Kong, but it simply aims to point out that the ‘student-led’ component in a social media age is much more complex (and possibly fragile) than many of us have presumed. In the age of social media, the Internet is increasingly interactive, cross-regional political forces penetrate further, and young citizens encounter more and more diverse role models in their everyday life. Under these circumstances, nurturing young Hongkongers’ civic identity is certainly a complex project which goes far beyond what a school-based patriotic campaign or a laissez-faire approach can handle. In the absence of rigorous research and policy design, this identity war is almost certain to reoccur.

Notes

[1] See http://scholarism.com [2] https://twitter.com/scholarismhk [3] See http://nodexl.codeplex.com/ [4] See http://twitter.com/wenyunchao [5] See http://twitter.com/hu_jia [6] See http://twitter.com/HKA1989 [7] See http://twitter.com/yujie89 [8] See http://twitter.com/sidekickick [9] See http://twitter.com/ptreporter

[10] See https://twitter.com/kursk [11] See https://twitter.com/singsit01 [12] See http://twitter.com/francisfong [13] See http://twitter.com/Dennis__Li [14] See http://twitter.com/madegg [15] See http://twitter.com/jollyshanie

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CHITAT CHAN is a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong, researching in identity, new media, youth cultures and social work practice. Chitat received his PhD from the Institute of Education, University of London. He was a school social worker in the 1990s, a secondary school teacher in the 2000s, and he started teaching social work in tertiary education settings in the 2010s. Correspondence: [email protected]

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