Written for friends who no longer wish to be ‘Hong Kongers’…

We live in a society full of strangers, marked by many differences among us. On social media, bitter emotions such as fear, anger, rivalry, jealousy, irritation, factionalism, and conflict are overflowing.

What social media seeks is the instant reaction of its users (the “attention economy”). In this sphere, joy, peace, care, comfort, and mutual understanding—those qualities that allow us to sense each other’s humanity—seem to be gradually disappearing.

No, in fact we can still feel one another, but often only when there is a common enemy. In 2019, the enemy seemed clear. Were Hong Kongers merely a “community of resistance”? In 2025, in the search for friends, have we instead treated former companions as enemies, fighting to the death? Those once “unacceptable brands” seem to have returned to daily life.

Are we still relying on the energy of negative emotions to search for new forms of commonality?

A careful look at social media reveals it clearly: fear, hatred, and bitterness are coming to define Hong Kongers.

This semester I am teaching classical sociological theory, rereading Marx and Durkheim. Though I haven’t yet returned to Weber, I already have many reflections.

Marx said that in a capitalist society, capitalists use money to purchase commodities as investments to gain more money. This is the so-called feeling of “financial freedom” enjoyed by the successful.

By contrast, the poor can only keep selling their own labor as a “commodity,” in exchange for a bit of money, which they then spend on the necessities of daily life. The feeling is like playing a survival game simply to stay alive.

So today, in the attention economy of social media, who are the capitalists? Who are the working class? When money and attention are directly linked, our emotional reactions as users become the “currency” of social media. These ever-expanding negative emotions propel us into a cycle of “fear → seeking an echo chamber → more fear.”

As for content creators, they rely on their existing followers to build echo-chamber structures, treating current attention as the fuel that burns emotions, which in turn brings greater response and more attention. Who can resist this law of attraction?

There was once a journalist who later reinvented himself as a social media influencer (what in Hong Kong is often called a “KOL”—Key Opinion Leader). When a friend tried to dissuade him from certain actions, his response was: “But if I do this, I can get more traffic.” Has the Hong Kong community continued to survive in a whirlpool of emotional traffic?

Durkheim said we live in a community of strangers full of diversity, and if people can generate some emotional resonance through the identity of being “Hong Kongers,” they will continue, almost like religious rituals, to repeatedly practice these rituals.

On social media, our back-and-forth exchanges become bustling flows of emotional traffic, creating daily emotional connections even without knowing who each other is.

And yet, precisely because we assume everyone is a “Hong Konger,” the most fundamental differences keep being magnified, turning into one conflict after another.

On a more concrete level, three years ago I held two public talks at Daybreak Bookstore and Nowhere Café in Taipei, Taiwan on the topic of “Not Severing Ties?”. Even then, I felt the term “diasporic Hong Kongers” was nearing its end. After the wave passed, people collectively forgot—not only forgetting those who had made sacrifices, but even treating them as enemies or irrelevant strangers. Three years ago it was so; three years later it remains so.

Thus the ultimate outcome of real political games is often this: don’t imagine there can be a long-lasting community. One can only be satisfied with those fleeting moments of temporary convergence. What still lingers is the inner demon clinging to the identity of “Hong Kongers in 2019.” Many have already moved on, searching for new allies, new lifestyles, new visions of national glory, new strongman idols. Those spontaneous, leaderless “be water” strategies have also become collective relics, abandoned by history, gradually turning into something the new generation finds both unfamiliar and outdated—“the previous, old generation’s” resistance.

In recent years I have also learned to be quiet. There’s no need to keep fighting battles that don’t matter. Some ask whether Hong Kongers are especially prone to factional strife, whether there’s some kind of “Chinese DNA.” But in fact it isn’t so. It is only that we cling to too many illusions and idols, and so every day we end up fighting one religious war after another among ourselves.

Perhaps seeking one’s own peace—making sure not to become a stranger to oneself—means tending to a small garden of one’s own, a little space one can actually care for.

The words ‘Hong Konger’ may sound light when spoken, but carrying them feels heavy. Don’t let an identity become your whole self; find some space to breathe, and perhaps you’ll realize it is nothing more than a man-made belief.