Making a Tricontinental Liberalism: Hong Kong Student Press in Colonial Hong Kong
Cho-kiu Li & Kin-long Tong
16.00-17.00 (BST)
While liberalism has long been understood as a pro-US hegemony in contrast to the global south solidarity, not many studies has been conducted on how liberalism emerged as a transnational activism in the non-Western world. This paper aims to understand how tricontinental liberalism could possibly be made through print media by analyzing the Federation, a student press published by the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS), during the Cold War. As a British colony in South China, Hong Kong was caught in the frontline of great politics and ideological wars. The city state secured political stability and maintained a delicate balance between the capitalist and communist powers by hiding behind a cloak of geopolitical ambiguity. Meanwhile, different political forces, from western state agents to Chinese Communists and exiled nationalists, attempted to leverage such in-betweenness to advance ideological agenda, turning the city into a field of discursive contestation. HKFS was founded by the student unions of four higher education institutions in Hong Kong in 1958, and associated with the International Student Conference, a nonpartisan alliance allegedly funded by the Central Intelligence Agencies of the United States. However, in practice, while the Federations rejected Chinese communism by denouncing the 1967 Leftists Riots for destroying Hong Kong’s prosperity, it was also critical of the British colonialism and emphasized the responsibility of students in achieving world peace and social justice. The press projected different connections to Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, forging a global solidarity with student movements across the globe in pursuit of freedom. We argue that historicizing the complex and transnationality of liberalism would be useful to broaden the current understanding of liberalism, which tends to attribute the desire for liberty only to European thinkers and Western hegemony.
Cho-kiu Li is a lecturer in Asian Studies in the Department of Social Science at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in Cultural Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and MSSc from the National University of Singapore. His research interests include public affect and cultural memory in Asia during and after colonialism and the Cold War. His writings on affect can be found in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Radical History Review, Critical Asia Archive: Events and Theories, and The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas.
Kin-long Tong is a PhD student in the Department of Information Studies at UCL. His research interests include information politics, media activism, DIY culture, self-publishing, and independent archives in transnational contexts. His PhD project investigates how Hong Kong transnational protesters use independent publishing for advancing social changes. His articles were published in peer-reviewed journals, such as, Sociological Forum, Radical History Review, Japanese Journal of Political Science and ZINES Journal. Before joining the academia, Tong worked for publishing press, university libraries and independent archives.