HELEN F. SIU
social networks, they allied with top government officials to support the status quo. They had benefited the most from Hong Kong in the last few decades. Their conservatism was backed by owners of small-scale enterprises who desperately tried to keep their hard-gained independence. Another 37 percent of the working population were topped by a professional elite of lawyers, engineers, educators, administrative civil servants, and business executives. They were supported by a cast of technical staff with post-secondary education. Both strata belonged to the post-war generation, received and accepted the Western-style value system as provided by the colonial environment. Li argued that they had also benefited from the general prosperity of Hong Kong. The last 52 percent of the working population consisted of a labouring stratum with varying skills. The skilled workers gained more from the demands of an increasingly technical-intensive industrial sector, while the unskilled not only faced the prospect of becoming redundant, but also faced competition from the influx of Chinese immigrants in the late 1970s.10
Therefore, between the first wave of immigrants in the late 1940s and the last wave in the late 1970s, a generation of local residents grew up in Hong Kong to become its social mainstream, though polarized. The elites had Western education and a cosmopolitan outlook. They were tuned to urban living and worked comfortably within a modern economic infrastructure, the construction of which the Hong Kong government (despite its hands-off attitude) had taken a major part in.11 By the late 1970s, they had assumed important positions in the media, educational institutions, business, and the civil service. They also took for granted the role of the government as "provider" of many public services, however inadequate the services had been.12 Their outlook and life-styles shaped and were shaped by an emerging but unique Hong Kong culture they identified with and to an extent were defensive of. They were farther removed from the uprooted cultural values of their parents, and were most nervous over their futures at the time of political redefinition.
In sum, Hong Kong culture and society in the 1980s have been characteristically "Chinese" but not quite so, owing to adaptations to unique historical circumstances. This is the reality recent