From One Brand of Politics to One Brand of Political Culture

The discussion of politics and political stability in Hong Kong has been broached in a number of ways. This paper delineated three such attempts, which, taken together, represent stages of the trajectory of the discourse in the post-war period. All three attempts are found to be unsatisfactory; in particular, the absence of a rigorous understanding of social structure, and the concomitant failure to acknowledge and elucidate the embeddedness of the political dimension in that structure, have resulted in either normative explanations or declamatory remarks, neither of which could fully grasp the nature of political action or political stability and their attendant contingencies. This paper argues for the need to restore the structural context of political orientation and action, by first describing the Hong Kong class structure, and then producing findings which suggest a typology of such orientations, conceptualized in terms of both interests and resources, and germane to different domains of social life. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications of the proposed approach for the understanding of not just stability but also the emergent political mobilization and possible changes unsettling the existing political order.