Session Name: Transregional Hong Kong: Social and Political Nexuses from Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
1 - Battling for Hearts and Minds: State Security and Left-wing Education in Cold War Hong Kong, 1949-1970s
Monday, July 29, 2024
09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract Using archival records and leftist memoirs, this paper examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expanded its influence through left-wing schools in Hong Kong during the Cold War, and documents how the colonial state contended with this “security threat”. Influenced by unique geopolitical dynamics and under-developed educational infrastructures, Hong Kong’s colonial administration avoided using hard-line legislations to curb left-wing activities, which in turn created a relatively permissive environment, enabling the spread of Chinese nationalism and communist ideologies through a sizeable minority of left-wing schools. This paper argues that the CCP agents utilized Hong Kong’s capitalist environment to their advantage to win over young hearts and minds to the anti-colonial struggle. Such methods led the CCP to expand its influence in the education sector significantly. This paper also demonstrates how colonial authorities, to avoid provoking retaliatory actions from China, employed different strategies, ranging from ad hoc control measures to non-political reasonings, to constrain left-wing schools, which however were only outcompeted when free public schooling was introduced in the 1970s. This Hong Kong case study contributes to debates about the particularistic forms of Hong Kong’s Cold War, in contrast to strong suppression of left-wing educational activities in other British colonies in Asia.
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