The making of an alienated generation : the political socialization of secondary school students in transitional Hong Kong

Abstract

In this thesis, we argue that the four presuppositions of the consensus model of political socialization are empirically unfounded. Neither are Marxist approaches to political socialization supported by empirical evidence. We thus propose our dissensus model of political socialization: due to process variation, life cycle variation, generation variation, and social variation, the outcome of political socialization could be dissensus. Likewise, socialization of alienation is as equally possible as socialization of allegiance. The so-called socialization of alienation, our theoretical framework, refers to the accentuation of the socialization process by political events such that people are sensitized to political reality and thus feel alienated. From a historical review of political socialization in Hong Kong in the past four decades, we found that because of the immigrant nature of Hong Kong population, there was an anti-Communist China sentiment which was kindled by a series of political confrontations between the Chinese Government, the Hong Kong Government and local Chinese during the transition of Hong Kong from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region Government under the sov~r.eignty of China. Growing up in this turbulent transitional period, the young generation of Hong Kong has been socialized to be alienated from the Chinese Government. To study this process, we conducted a case study of a secondary school (including interviews of the teachers and the students), a society-wide survey of secondary school students, and a mail questionnaire survey of sampled school teachers in 1988 and obtained four data sets. On the basis of analyzing these four data sets, we found that there was a benevolent image of the Hong Kong Government but a malevolent image of the Chinese Government. However, the event effect on the socialization of alienation was only salient in a subsample, which thought the most important contrast between Hong Kong and China was the market system, but not visible in three other subsamples. There were hints that students might be socialized to be alienated by parents and stereotyping. Because of the depoliticization and trivialization of civic education in secondary schools, we found that secondary school students were not implanted with any political identity. Interestingly, in the "market system" subsample, more civic education helped to heighten the alienation from the Chinese Government. We also found that a prestige school environment, a senior secondary education, and the school subject, Government and Public Affairs, are three saljent factors in producing political alienation. From the eight strata of our sample, we found that the most alienated group of students were Form 7 arts students from symmetrical schools. The widespread alienation from the Chinese Government was found to be related to students' pessimistic view of Hong Kong's future, an atrophying sense of political community (more opted for migration and took an apathetic attitude towards future political participation), and a rising sense oflocalism (more identified with Hong Kong and rejected Chinese officials taking up positions in both the public and private sectors of Hong Kong). After the June 4th 1989 Incident, this widespread alienation must be fueled to the extent that the legitimacy of the SAR government and the political identity of the younger generation of Hong Kong would be in doubt. Show more