Scholarism on the March

My parents come from Hong Kong’s lower class, who mostly live in public-housing estates or villages. But they studied hard, did well in their exams, and got into Hong Kong University. With their degrees they were able to find jobs in middle-class occupations—my father with an it company, my mother in family counselling. So I was brought up in a typical Hong Kong middle-class family, on a private housing estate. I was born in 1996, the year before Hong Kong’s handover. My family is Christian, and I went to a Christian school. The culture of the city was very conservative, built around the idea of individual success. Once when I asked a teacher how we could contribute to society, she told the class: ‘You can join a multi-national corporation and when you are wealthy you can give donations to the poor.’ That was a typical outlook.

My family belongs to the Christian Tsung Tsin Mission of Hong Kong. The denomination of the church is not important, because Hong Kong people do not choose church membership for theological reasons. My parents went to this church because it was close to home, and because I went to the kindergarten affiliated to it. I started going to church when I was three years old. Christianity teaches me that the most powerful being is God. No human being can have supreme power over other human beings, and no one is perfect because all of us have original sin. There are many high officials and legislators who are also Christians, so religion does not have the same effect on everyone. For me, the teaching of Christianity has laid a good foundation to be concerned about elderly people who live alone, and many other social justice issues. In addition, I saw the film Jesus Christ in China. From the time I was in primary school, I realized that it was very difficult to have religious freedom under a Communist regime, and that quantifiable material things should not be the goal of our lives. Rather, we should be prepared to make sacrifices for values and beliefs. The church has also had a big impact on my organizational capacity. Every Christmas and Easter there are large-scale activities, parties, shows and cell groups. When I was a senior high student, I had to lead junior high students in Bible classes. I learned how to lead small group meetings and games, as well as public speaking. I got these skills by being involved in the church. It so happens that there are about two or three hundred high-school and college students at my church, out of about a thousand members in all, because it’s located in the Central and Western District, with a high density of the so-called ‘famous schools’.

When I was fourteen, there was a campaign in Hong Kong against building a high-speed rail link to China. That was in 2009–10, and caught my attention. I read the news about it, and followed the arguments on the internet but as an observer, not a participant. The turning point for me was the announcement in the spring of 2011 that a compulsory course in ‘Moral and National Education’ would be introduced into the school curriculum over the next two years. In May, I founded an organization with a few friends that we were soon calling Scholarism, to fight against this. We began in a very amateur way, handing out leaflets against it at train stations. But quite soon there was a response, and opposition built up. This was the first time in Hong Kong’s history that secondary-school pupils had become actively involved in politics. We opposed the new curriculum because it was a blatant attempt at indoctrination: the draft course hailed the Communist Party of China as a ‘progressive, selfless and united organization’. Secondary-school students didn’t want this kind of brainwashing. But they also didn’t want an additional subject of any kind, on top of their already heavy course loads, so even those who didn’t care much about the content of Moral and National Education were against it, and came out in large numbers on the demonstrations we organized.