Proud and Angry

Abstract This book addresses the question of what drove 2 million Hongkongers to the streets in 2019 in the largest protest in this postcolonial society. It answers this question by examining Hong Kong’s unique postcolonial political culture where the former colonists left but the succeeding power was unable to establish itself under the institutional design of One Country, Two Systems. In this political vacuum, local Hongkongers desperately searched for a new political identity rooted in its traditional culture; they felt angry about being abandoned by the British but were too proud to be associated with the Chinese Mainlanders who were perceived as newly rich but unsophisticated. They accepted Chinese sovereignty in Hong Kong but resisted being integrated into the Chinese state. They demonstrated a strong populist tendency to protest on the streets even after the passage of the Hong Kong National Security Law. This study draws solid empirical evidence from a territory-wide public opinion survey. Through multiple embedded survey experiments and an innovative statistical weighting technique, this study could detect a large amount of public resistance to the Chinese state that was otherwise hidden due to the respondents’ fear of political retribution. In addition to improving public opinion survey methodology, this study contributes to the political culture literature by presenting a distinctive transitional postcolonial culture that follows neither the colonial mentality nor the will of the new ruler.