Understanding youth activism and radicalism: Chinese values and socialization

Abstract

In the past decade, there has been an evident surge in political activism in Hong Kong, especially among the youth. This paper seeks to explain this development by adopting an emerging framework, the Activism–Radicalism Intention Scale (ARIS), that distinguishes between activism and radicalism and demonstrates how past and current intentions relate to each other. To explain how young people become politically motivated, we borrow from existing literature and test three dominant explanations, namely the liberal education thesis, critical network analysis, and value-systems explanation. Using results from a survey conducted with tertiary students in Hong Kong, we find the critical network to be an important explanation of participation. Interestingly, the Chinese values of trustworthiness and social harmony also play a role in shaping youth activism and radicalism, but in less predictable ways. This study contributes to the literature by providing an innovative way to systematically analyze youth activism and assess the influence of Chinese values.

Keywords:

• Youth
• Tertiary students
• Political participation
• Activism
• Radicalism
• Chinese values
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

This project is funded financially to Professor Wing Hong Chui by the internal research grants from City University of Hong Kong (Grant Nos. 9380077 and 7004956). The authors would like to thank Dr Lawrence Ho of Education University of Hong Kong for providing assistance with the recruitment of survey participants. Furthermore, we would like to extend our thanks to our anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Notes

1 Information regarding household income and trustworthiness (a Chinese value) accounted for most of the missing observations. Although they are significant in some models, removing them from the estimation does not affect the effects of the other variables.

2 A 4–16 scale (created from four 0–4 variables) should be more accurately regarded as an ordinal scale, and a logit model would be more appropriate. Robustness tests with logit models are shown in Supplementary Appendix and results are largely similar.

3 Items in the CVS were shown in both Chinese and English in the survey.

4 Note that “Chinese values” are not exclusive to a certain group of people. However, the CVS items were developed by generations of scholars based on their relevance to the Chinese value system and worldview.

5 Supplementary Appendix A is available at the article’s journal webpage.

6 The respondents’ ages ranged from 17 to 25 years old, fitting with our aim of studying those in the “post-90s” generation in Hong Kong (the survey was conducted in 2015–16).

7 Multicollinearity is not a concern here. Tests of variance inflation factor (VIF) show that Chinese values variables have high scores of less than 3 for all the models, which is far lower than the general rule of thumb of 10.

8 While this figure can potentially be tested with a structural equation model, it fails to converge, likely due to the complexity of the pathways and sample size.