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 embedded-ness 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.
香港的政治及政治穩定性問題，曾經在不同的角度下被提出來討論。對於其中三個不同的討論角度，本文作出描繪，而這三個觀點正好代表了戰後有關香港政治問題論述的發展。這些論述其實都並未能對問題作出令人滿意的分析。在對社會結構缺乏深入瞭解，同時又未能掌握到政治活動基本上都是在特定社會環境之中進行此一特點的情況下，這些論述結果都流於成為規範指向的解釋或演辯式的陳述，都未能充份掌握政治行動或政治穩定性的特質，以及這些問題的臨時多變性格。本文認為有需要重新考慮政治取向及行動的處境因素。在對香港社會的階級結構作出勾劃之後，本文根據「香港社會流動調查︰1989」的部份資料，建立一套政治取向的分類法，此分類法在概念上以利益及資源作為準則，對不同領域的社會生活都適合。本文結構指出︰這個突現社會結構及處境因素的觀點，不但有助於理解政治穩定的問題，而且可以幫助我們認真地考察冒現中的政治動員以及動搖現有政治秩序的各種可能變化。 Copyright © 1992
Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.