New Left without Old Left: The 70’s Biweekly and Youth Activism in 1970s Hong Kong

Abstract

Taking the radical youth magazine The 70’s Biweekly (hereafter The 70s) as the main thread, this article investigates how the content of the magazine in tandem with its activism created an “in-between” subjectivity and a “dissent space” by and in which were broken down the binaries in the grand narratives of the Cold War and Left–Right politics in Hong Kong. The article first offers an overview of the magazine’s content. Next, it elaborates on the two most historically important protest campaigns that The 70s was involved in: the “Chinese as an Official Language Movement” (1970–1971) and the “Defend Diaoyutai Movement” (1971). Both campaigns illustrate The 70s’s significant role in the history of Hong Kong’s social activism. In the generally politically apathetic social atmosphere of the 1970s, The 70s illustrates an alternative “New Left” approach of social thought and activism that complicated relations between Hong Kong and its colonizer and understandings of the nation, imperialism, and the Global South.