As authorities in Hong Kong continue removing student occupiers from ‘protest camps,’ a Virginia Tech Professor remembers her experience teaching at Hong Kong University.
Sara Jordan, Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech's Center for Public Administration & Policy, discusses the city’s fascinating transition after its 1997 return to China by the British.
“When I arrived to Hong Kong the elevators spoke to you in only two languages, they spoke in Cantonese, the language of the area and English. And by the time I left they spoke to you in Cantonese, Putonghua or, Mandarin and English. So as I lived there for the last 6 and half years it became much more of a Chinese place rather than Hong Kong as such.”
Sara Jordan remembers watching something of an identity crisis unfold as Hong Kong struggled to keep its own special character, a capitalist, cosmopolitan city, now part of a much larger country with a different political culture. It became more expensive to live there and, more polluted she recalls and there were subtler symbolic changes as well..
“So for example the place where some of the students are protesting on the Tamar government site in the Admiralty—it’s all very recently reclaimed land. They’re encamped on the change that is Hong Kong presently. It’s new land, it was newly created and for this very large, government site – building, riddled with all sorts of complications on its opening. And the process is sort of taking over the Tamar site and taking over the section of Admiralty; The students have made a statement: ‘We’re standing where Hong Kong has changed and we’re not sure whether or not we like the change.”
Jordan remembers, students in Hong Kong were eager learners about the concepts of democracy, while Mainland China had an entirely different set of traditions and political culture. She believes it will be difficult for the authorities to come up with a good solution to what she sees as a clash between a political protest movement and an economic imperative. The students want to see democratic and free elections; the authorities are determined to support financial growth. But she points out, in Hong Kong; those lines don’t break down so neatly.
“The people who I feel the worst for, so for whom my heart would bleed, would probably be the young, front line police officers in the protest. They would be trying to clear the streets of their friends. The people they would have gone to secondary school mere years ago or may even be trading classroom seats with at the end of the day. So it would not be unusual in my teaching at University of Hong Kong that I would have taught an undergrad class til say 5:30 in the evening and then my Master’s students would be coming in for a 6:00 class and they may be trading conversations between each other just on the way out the door.. so you’ve got student protesters coming out and people who would have been police line officers coming in. They would be friends. And this must be just an agonizing time for young Hong Kong police officers, as well as their commanders to make the decisions that they must have had to make in some of the early protest clearings, indeed the decisions that they’re going to have to make in the next couple of days, are going to be agonizing. From the lowest police officer, to mid grade, even all the way up to the second in command, Carrie Lam, she must be losing massive amounts of sleep. It’s got to be an agonizing time for them.”
Sara Jordan is Assistant Professor at the Center for Public Administration & Policy at Virginia Tech. She taught public admin and research ethics at the University of Hong Kong from 2007 to 20013.
