TNAG-0003-FCO40-39-Commission-of-Enquiry-into-the-Kowloon-disturbances-addition-1968 — Page 163

PART VI CONCLUSIONS

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youth. The same note was struck by LO Kei who talked of forming a youth party. In these circumstances, it is unlikely that older persons would be encouraged to take an active part.

(iii) The excitement of demonstrations, street marches and the petty vandalism which later developed have a more potent appeal to certain types of young people.

(iv) The probability that young people in Hong Kong are affected to a greater degree than their parents by changing values and by the cross currents set up by the contact of the two cultures in Hong Kong.

540. The preponderance of young people in our population enhances the importance of examining the general matters referred to in the preceding sections and those areas of strain which particularly affect young people; although we are not unmindful of the dictum of one experienced social worker that too much talking about them may tend to create more problems than it solves.

541. The comments of some social scientists stressed a growing awareness amongst young people of social and economic conditions in Hong Kong and a growing sense of frustration at their limited chances in life and the apparently wide gap between their aspirations and their achievements. In speculating as to the causes of this situation, they pointed to changes in traditional values, in attitudes towards structural divisions in society and in growing aspirations of young people as a result of their contact with Western values and Western modes of thought. It was held by some that the riots were an expression in a deviant way of youthful discontent at the current social system and a defiance of authority similar to that which has already found expression in a number of other countries.

542. We are not qualified to judge on the validity of these observations but they seem to us to provide important and profitable fields for further study. Experience elsewhere and the evidence before us point to the probability that young people are less likely to put up with conditions which their parents accepted without complaint. However, it is generally admitted that very real improvements in conditions have recently been achieved in Hong Kong and that discontent with those now existing is certainly not universal and may not be widespread. The proportion of the young people, even amongst those living in the area of the disturbances, taking an active part was small, and the evidence suggested not only that these criticisms of conditions in Hong Kong owed much to the limits of their own actual experience and to a lack of standards of comparison with conditions in other countries at a similar level of development, but also that social criticism was a much less common motive for participation amongst young people than feelings of boredom, a desire to draw attention by demonstrating false bravado, and a lack of or refusal to accept alternative outlets for their surplus energy and emotion.