The Fiery Era — HKU Students and the 1970s Social Movements (Chinese Language Campaign · Diaoyutai · Anti-Corruption · Boat Dwellers · Golden Jubilee)

Unofficial-history zone · Module 14 · One of the deep-dive entries. This article attributes statements according to the strength of evidence and places differing accounts side by side without adjudicating between them. Individuals involved are referred to uniformly as "Mr. [Surname]"; current office-holders are referred to by title only, with no name given; content touching on Hong Kong-independence/riot-related matters is, per §6.2, link-only (see Module 18). This article covers events of the 1960s–70s. For the century-long history of the student organisations themselves, see The Rise and Fall of the Student Organisations.

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# I. What Was the "Fiery Era"?

According to the Wikipedia entry on 1970s Hong Kong student protests^※, from the late 1960s into the 1970s, student movements in Hong Kong (including at HKU) entered their most active period, later termed the "Fiery Era" (Fiery Era / 火紅年代). Its main threads were: criticism of colonial governance, concern for grassroots and labour welfare, the push for legal status for the Chinese language, and influence from global left-wing student movements and political currents on the Chinese mainland. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry "1970s Hong Kong student movement"^※, this peak period of student activism is generally placed between 1969 and 1982.

To understand this intensity, one must first look at the ground it grew from. Hong Kong in the 1960s had just been through the 1966 Star Ferry fare-rise disturbance and the 1967 social unrest, which put the legitimacy of colonial governance and questions of language and class stratification on the table. In the same period, anti-war student movements in Europe and America, the French May '68, and political movements on the Chinese mainland reached this colonial city through the press and broadcast media. According to a 2024 Cogent Arts & Humanities study^※, 1970s Hong Kong youth activism formed a recognisable "repertoire" of action — petitions, rallies, hunger strikes, sit-ins/sleep-outs, and publication debates used interchangeably — and the student unions of HKU and other tertiary institutions were the main performers of this repertoire.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Undergrad^※, the HKU Students' Union publication Undergrad (學苑) "carried considerable influence over social movements" and "provided guiding ideas for the student movement," and was involved in the Diaoyutai campaign, the Golden Jubilee incident, the anti-corruption campaign, campus politics, and more. In other words, HKU in the Fiery Era was not only a university but also a workshop of discourse: the stance of a single student publication often preceded street action and set its tone. From the Chinese Language Campaign to the Diaoyutai movement, the anti-corruption campaign, the boat-dwellers' incident, and the Golden Jubilee incident, HKU students and their publication appear in almost every major event — this article uses these movements as a thread to trace, one by one, the roles HKU students played and the factional disputes among them.

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# II. "Know China, Care for Society": The Ideological Undertone of an Era

HKU students of the Fiery Era were not a monolith. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry "1970s Hong Kong student movement"^※, the slogan "Know China, Care for Society" (認中關社) — "know the motherland, care about society" — was current in student circles at the time and became the action programme of a generation of tertiary students. Whether "knowing China" or "caring for society" should take priority was debated at length within the student camp, and this debate planted the seeds of the later division between the Chinese-nationalist faction and the social-action faction discussed below.

This ideological undertone had several concrete vehicles. One was campus activities such as "China Week": student unions organised exhibitions, talks, and screenings introducing developments and policies on the Chinese mainland, attempting to rebuild an understanding of the "motherland" in the gap left by colonial education. A second was the return wave of the Diaoyutai movement from overseas students — according to the Wikipedia entry on the Defend the Diaoyutai Islands Movement^※, Chinese students studying in North America first launched demonstrations to defend the Diaoyutai Islands in late 1970, and news of this reached Hong Kong through the press and directly triggered a local student response. A third was debate in print: from Undergrad to student papers at other schools, polemics over "Hong Kong's future," "the colonial condition," and "socialism" formed this generation's political awakening.

This framework was not an abstraction; it pointed toward concrete action. "Knowing China" asked students to understand, and even identify with, the country to the north then undergoing sweeping change; "caring for society" turned attention back to this city's own wealth gaps, housing, corruption, and linguistic inequity underfoot. In practice the two often overlapped: a Diaoyutai rally was at once patriotic and anti-colonial; a boat-dwellers' petition was at once "caring for society" and implicitly a critique of colonial governance. For this reason the student movement of the Fiery Era resists a single label — it was at once nationalist, social-reformist, and anti-colonial.

Background note: In the Fiery Era, the two threads of "patriotism" and "localism" had not yet cleanly split apart. Some students looked north, while others insisted on "standing on Hong Kong ground and reforming society"; the two orientations stood side by side in the Diaoyutai and Chinese Language campaigns but gradually diverged after 1976 (see Section VIII). Understanding this tension within "Know China, Care for Society" is necessary to understand why the movements discussed below could march together and yet ultimately part ways.

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# III. The Chinese Language Campaign (1967 Petition → 1974 Official Languages Ordinance)

# Origins: HKU Students' Union Petitions First

According to research on the Chinese Language Campaign in The China Quarterly (Cambridge)^※, in 1967 the HKU Students' Union was the first to demand that the government make Chinese one of the official languages; the following year (1968) the Chung Chi College Students' Union of CUHK raised the same demand. According to the Wikipedia entry on Undergrad^※, Undergrad first proposed as early as the 1960s that Chinese should stand alongside English as an official language, "triggering the first movement in modern Hong Kong history to defend the Chinese language" — the Chinese Language Campaign.

# From Campus Demand to a Society-Wide United Front

The demand from academic circles quickly spilled over into a cross-sector social movement. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Movement for Chinese as an Official Language^※, in September 1970 the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) announced the formation of an "Action Committee for Chinese as an Official Language" and formed a united front with promotional and campaign groups from across society, extending the original student demand across the whole city. In the same month, the Hong Kong colonial government, under public pressure, made a concession and announced the establishment of a "Committee to Study the Question of the Use of Chinese in Official Business," to first study the feasibility of using Chinese in government operations.

Institutional loosening followed. According to the same entry^※, in 1972 a member of the Legislative Council became the first to speak in Chinese at a Legislative Council meeting, symbolising the Chinese language's formal arrival in the colonial legislature.

# Scale and Outcomes of the Campaign

According to the China Quarterly study^※, the Chinese Language Campaign as a whole "involved at least 330 organisations," spanning multiple sectors of society; after years of effort, the campaign led the colonial government to recognise the official status of Chinese in 1974. The study also notes that the campaign's focus was Cantonese (a different orientation from the mainland's Putonghua-promotion policy).

According to the text of the Official Languages Ordinance 1974 (Wikisource): the ordinance declared Chinese and English to be co-official languages of Hong Kong for communication between the Government or public officers and members of the public^※. The ordinance took effect in 1974, ending English's status as Hong Kong's sole official language, which had held since 1883.

Background note (according to the China Quarterly study): At the time, HKU's admissions rules explicitly limited entry to graduates of English-medium secondary schools, and English functioned as a "passport" into elite professions such as medicine and law; this linguistic stratification was a key driver of the Chinese Language Campaign. What students were contesting was not merely a piece of legislation but an entire structure of opportunity demarcated by language.

It is worth noting that this campaign carried a distinctly local character. According to the China Quarterly study^※, the "Chinese" that the campaign fought for was, in practical terms, centred on Cantonese — a different orientation from the mainland's contemporaneous promotion of Putonghua. Students raised the banner of "anti-colonialism," demanding an end to the English-language monopoly, while at the same time using the local language as their backbone, making the Chinese Language Campaign an early rehearsal of postwar Hong Kong identity. Why did students take the lead? One commonly cited explanation is that they stood at the very front line of the English-language threshold, felt linguistic stratification most directly, and possessed the organisational and rhetorical resources to become the first to translate personal experience into a public demand.

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# IV. The Defend the Diaoyutai Islands Movement (1971)

# Origins: From Overseas to Hong Kong

The spark of the Diaoyutai movement was first lit overseas. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Defend the Diaoyutai Islands Movement^※, the sovereignty dispute over the Diaoyutai Islands intensified around 1970, triggering a wave of protests among Chinese students studying in North America — from the U.S. East Coast to the Midwest, students organised marches, published journals, and formed networks, building a large-scale overseas Diaoyutai movement. News of this reached Hong Kong through the press and private networks and became the direct trigger for a local student response. For HKU students of the Fiery Era, the Diaoyutai movement was at once a patriotic mobilisation over territory and a concentrated release of "knowing China" sentiment — a border dispute concerning the motherland understood as a shared concern that Hong Kong youth could not stand apart from.

Hong Kong's response was not a single outburst but a succession of demonstrations beginning in early 1971, escalating in pace from protests outside the Japanese consulate to a large rally at Victoria Park. Student unions and the Federation of Students played an organising and coordinating role, weaving scattered indignation into street action with leadership and defined demands.

# February 1971: Formation of the Action Committee and the First Arrests

According to the Wikipedia entry on the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS)^※, on 14 February 1971 the "Hong Kong Action Committee for Defending the Diaoyutai Islands" was formed, with HKU students and the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) among its core participants. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Defend the Diaoyutai Islands Movement^※, the Action Committee then demonstrated outside the Japanese Consulate-General in Hong Kong, where police arrested 21 people, 7 of them tertiary students — the first direct clash of the Diaoyutai movement in Hong Kong, and the point at which "defending Diaoyutai" moved from overseas-student solidarity into local street action.

# The 7 July Victoria Park Clash (7 July 1971)

According to the Wikipedia entry (Chinese) on the Defend the Diaoyutai Islands Movement^※, on the evening of 7 July 1971 the Hong Kong Federation of Students held a large rally in Victoria Park to defend the Diaoyutai Islands. The Urban Council had rejected the application on the grounds that the assembly would obstruct public recreation and damage the lawn; because the Federation of Students was not at the time registered as a lawful society, police cited this as grounds to attend and disperse the gathering, and a number of students were detained.

According to multiple Chinese-language accounts: more than a thousand people took part in the Victoria Park Diaoyutai rally that day; police dispersed the crowd with a force roughly equal in number to the demonstrators, and a number of protesters were struck by police batons and left bleeding from the head. This incident is regarded as the emblematic clash that opened the wave of the 1970s Hong Kong student movement. The official then in charge of the Federation of Students' Diaoyutai student group (unnamed here) was among those struck on the head with a baton and left bleeding during the rally.

This clash is widely regarded as the turning point at which the Diaoyutai movement shifted from a marginal activity into a cross-class, cross-profession patriotic social movement. Accounts from different sides are presented side by side here; this article does not adjudicate the historical assessment. The name "7 July" subsequently became a shared point of memory in the Hong Kong student movement, invoked and commemorated over many years.

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# V. Anti-Corruption: "Catch Godber" and the Founding of the ICAC (1973–75)

The anti-corruption campaign was one of the few Fiery Era movements to bind students, the public, and public opinion into a single cord; its trigger was the flight of a British chief superintendent.

According to the Wikipedia entry on 1970s Hong Kong student protests^※, in the early 1970s tertiary students (led by the CUHK students' union, with HKU students also participating) launched large anti-corruption rallies aimed squarely at Chief Superintendent Peter Godber, who was implicated in corruption. According to the ICAC's official record of the "Godber case"^※, Godber fled back to Britain in June 1973 while under investigation; the public was outraged, and on 26 August 1973 large numbers of students and members of the public held a "Fight Corruption, Catch Godber" rally in Victoria Park demanding his extradition to stand trial. According to publicly available material, the unexplained assets attributed to Godber exceeded HK$4 million, an astronomical sum at the time, laying bare before the public the entrenched problem of corruption that the law seemed unable to touch.

The reason this incident ignited the whole city cannot be separated from the broader context of systemic corruption in the Hong Kong police force and public sector in the early 1970s. At the time "tea money" and under-the-table payments were almost openly practised, and the public had long resented a privileged class able to act with impunity; that a chief superintendent could leave the territory at ease while under investigation became the final straw. The student rallies focused this diffuse public resentment into a single slogan — "Fight Corruption, Catch Godber" — and turned it into a concrete demand for an independent anti-corruption body.

According to the ICAC's official record^※, the Godber case was the direct catalyst for the founding of the ICAC; public anger over corruption and privilege was amplified through the student rallies into political pressure for institutional reform. According to the Wikipedia entry on Undergrad^※, Undergrad also took part in the discourse and mobilisation of the "Fight Corruption, Catch Godber" campaign. For students of the Fiery Era, this episode demonstrated one thing: street pressure could be converted into institutional change — the movement was not mere posture.

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# VI. The Yau Ma Tei Boat Dwellers Incident (1971–72; 1978–79)

According to the Wikipedia entry on 1970s Hong Kong student protests^※, the "Yau Ma Tei Boat Dwellers Incident" occurred in two waves (1971–72 and 1978–79), with students and social activists pressing the colonial government to resettle boat dwellers into public housing. This movement reflected the Fiery Era students' shift from campus issues toward concern for grassroots livelihoods.

If the Diaoyutai and Chinese Language campaigns concerned nation and language, the boat dwellers' incident turned the lens on the least presentable corner of this prosperous city — families who lived their whole lives on boats, never truly setting foot on land. Students went into the typhoon shelters not to shout abstract slogans but to advocate, on behalf of specific people, for a public-housing flat with running water and electricity. This "getting down to ground level" orientation was the concrete street-level form of what the social-action faction called "caring for society."

# Five Thousand People Crowded into the Typhoon Shelter

According to the Wikipedia entry on the boat dwellers incident^※, around 5,000 boat dwellers lived in the Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter area, in extremely crowded conditions — an average of eight to nine people per household, crammed onto a small boat 15 to 20 feet long, with no running water or electricity, little room for children to move, recurring incidents of people falling overboard, and heavily polluted shelter water. Students and social workers turned attention to these "visible yet forgotten" residents and pushed the resettlement demand onto the agenda.

# The 1979 Cross-Harbour Tunnel Interception and "Unlawful Assembly"

The climax of the second wave came in early 1979. According to the Wikipedia entry on the boat dwellers incident^※, on 7 January 1979 around sixty-odd boat dwellers boarded two tour buses, intending to petition Government House; as the buses passed through the Cross-Harbour Tunnel at Hung Hom, police stopped them, and everyone on board was arrested on grounds of "unlawful assembly."

According to the Wikipedia entry on the boat dwellers incident^※, among the 11 supporters left with a criminal record were social workers who had voluntarily assisted the boat dwellers, and the incident became a turning point in the history of social work in Hong Kong — "social workers with a criminal record" entered public memory through it. After the 1980 amendment to the Public Order Ordinance, an assembly could proceed if organisers notified the Commissioner of Police seven days in advance and it was not prohibited, while gatherings of fewer than thirty people required no notice at all; this adjustment to the assembly-regulation framework is regarded as one of the indirect consequences of the boat dwellers' struggle.

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# VII. The Golden Jubilee Incident (1977–1978)

According to the Wikipedia entry on the Golden Jubilee Incident^※, Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School was founded in 1973. According to the same entry^※, one or two years after the school's founding, teachers and students already sensed problems with its finances, and a teacher began investigating the school's accounts, alleging that the sums involved reached as much as HK$250,000. From June 1977, teachers and students at the school, suspecting financial irregularities (allegedly including withholding staff salaries, profiting from mandated textbook purchases, and misappropriating funds), entered into a series of clashes with the school administration.

# Escalation and Support from Tertiary Students

According to the Wikipedia entry on the Golden Jubilee Incident^※, the Education Department was accused of favouring the school administration, which ignited a student movement, and a series of rallies, petitions, and hunger strikes followed. Student unions at tertiary institutions (including the HKU Students' Union) issued statements one after another, organised delegations of support, and held sit-ins and marches together with teachers, students, and parents, demanding that Golden Jubilee be reopened.

# The Commission of Inquiry and Its Two Reports

The incident ultimately ended with official intervention. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Golden Jubilee Incident^※, the then Governor appointed a commission of inquiry, chaired by the then Vice-Chancellor of HKU, to conduct hearings and issue a report. In its interim report the commission recommended setting up a separate secondary school to take in the affected students; the Government accepted the recommendation in July 1978 and established a new school, bringing the incident to a close. This inquiry report, known by the name of the HKU Vice-Chancellor who chaired it, became a significant case in the governance of Hong Kong education in the late 1970s, and an example of the student movement's involvement in a concrete livelihood-and-education issue.

The reason the Golden Jubilee incident could grow from an internal dispute at one secondary school into a movement affecting the whole city lies in a few sensitive nerves it touched: financial transparency in church-run schools, teachers' rights as workers, and the credibility of the colonial education authority's governance. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Golden Jubilee Incident^※, the Education Department's abrupt announcement — citing "disruption to students' studies, making continued operation impossible" — that it would close the school and reopen a new one on the same site was criticised as a way of sidestepping the dispute through administrative measures, and this provoked an even greater backlash. Tertiary students folded the situation of the Golden Jubilee teachers and students into the Fiery Era's familiar action repertoire — statements, delegations of support, sit-ins, mass rallies — giving this education controversy visibility beyond any single campus. It also bore out, once again, the logic running through the whole Fiery Era: students were not content to stay within campus walls, and any issue touching on justice and grassroots welfare might be taken up and amplified by them.

Accounts differ among the teachers and students, the school administration, and the Education Department involved in this incident; this article states the sequence of facts strictly according to sourced attribution and does not adjudicate right and wrong.

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# VIII. Factional Disputes: The Chinese-Nationalist Faction, the Social-Action Faction, and the Trotskyists

According to the Wikipedia entry on 1970s Hong Kong student protests^※ and the Chinese Wikipedia entry^※, the Hong Kong student camp of the Fiery Era can broadly be divided into several strands, whose divide centred on precisely the priority dispute within "Know China, Care for Society" described above:

• Maoists / Chinese-Nationalist faction (國粹派, Maoist): identified with the Chinese mainland and Cultural Revolution orientation, and held considerable influence in a number of student unions (including the HKU Students' Union) in the early-to-mid 1970s. According to the Wikipedia entry on the HKFS^※, the HKFS Standing Committee at one point during 1975–76 took a position supportive of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which provoked resentment among some students.
• Social-Action faction (社會派, Social Action): advocated grounding in local Hong Kong, concern for grassroots livelihoods, and social reform, without identification with any particular regime as a precondition, and was actively involved in the boat dwellers, anti-corruption, and Golden Jubilee campaigns. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry^※, the Social-Action faction likewise subscribed to the left-wing theory current at the time, but held that reforming Hong Kong's local society and "knowing the motherland" were not in conflict, and so stood in long-running opposition to the Chinese-Nationalist faction's line over which — knowing China or caring for society — should come first.
• Trotskyist / Anarchist faction: fewer in number but active in radical publications and theoretical debate.

The three factions were not sharply delineated organisations but rather loose camps that coalesced around lines and publications; even within a single student union, successive cohorts of leadership could swing between the Chinese-Nationalist and Social-Action positions. What tipped the balance decisively was an upheaval to the north. According to the Wikipedia entry on 1970s Hong Kong student protests^※ and a 2024 Cogent Arts & Humanities study^※, after Mao Zedong's death and the arrest of the "Gang of Four" in 1976, the Maoist/Chinese-Nationalist faction's morale suffered a heavy blow and its influence declined rapidly, and the Social-Action faction became the mainstream of the student movement thereafter. For many students who had once placed their ideals in the north, this was a disillusionment; for the Social-Action faction, it gave the "caring for society first" line greater legitimacy. From the 1980s, the various factions split again over the question of Hong Kong's future, and the once-shared language of "Know China, Care for Society" gradually gave way to a new round of debate over "1997" and localism.

Note on masking: Individuals discussed in this article, including factional leaders and Diaoyutai-movement participants, are in all disputed contexts left unnamed or referred to as "Mr. [Surname]"; proper nouns such as institution, publication, and movement names are reproduced as-is. Events of the 1970s are stated as recorded in the sources; assessments from different sides are presented side by side without adjudication.

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# IX. The Legacy and Echoes of the Fiery Era

The Fiery Era did not come to a clean close. According to the Wikipedia entry on 1970s Hong Kong student protests^※, many of the core figures in the student movement of this period later became significant figures in Hong Kong politics, journalism, and culture — the student movement is accordingly regarded as an incubator of postwar Hong Kong civil society and political talent. To avoid naming living individuals in a disputed context, this article does not list them individually and states only this collective historical outcome.

Institutional echoes are equally discernible. The Chinese Language Campaign gave rise to the Official Languages Ordinance of 1974, reshaping Hong Kong's language landscape thereafter; the anti-corruption rallies helped drive the founding of the ICAC in 1974, reshaping the baseline of public governance; and the boat dwellers' incident indirectly contributed to the 1980 adjustment of assembly regulation under the Public Order Ordinance. These three threads show that the energy of the Fiery Era did not all dissipate in the streets — part of it settled into lasting institutions. It also left behind a grammar of action available to later generations — petitions, rallies, hunger strikes, sit-ins/sleep-outs, publication debates — a "repertoire" repeatedly performed and rewritten in Hong Kong social movements over the following decades.

It is worth noting that the Fiery Era also carried its own historical weight and cost. Some were left bleeding from the head under police batons at Victoria Park; some supporters were left with a criminal record over the boat dwellers' petition; and some idealistic students experienced disillusionment after 1976. Recording these alongside the rest keeps the "fiery" from being romanticised into a youth with no shadows. This article states all sides faithfully according to its sources, adjudicates credit or blame for none of them, and leaves this stretch of years — in which students and the city shaped each other — for readers to weigh for themselves.

As for the movement's spirit — the dual proposition of "Know China, Care for Society" and the tension between patriotism and localism — it resurfaced, split, and was redefined repeatedly in Hong Kong's student movement over the following decades. The sequel to this lineage — including the rise and fall of the student organisations themselves, the 1989 solidarity movement, and the turning point after the 2010s — is covered in the relevant deep-dive entries of this module; this article does not overstep into that territory.

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# Related Reading

• The Rise and Fall of the Student Organisations — HKUSU, Undergrad, and the HKFS (1912–2026): the century-long institutional history of the HKUSU, Undergrad, and the Federation of Students, referenced repeatedly in this article.
• Overview of the History of HKU Student Movements (1912–2026): the timeline index and navigation for this module's deep-dive entries.
• The 1989 Tiananmen Solidarity Deep Dive: another large-scale episode of social engagement by HKU students after the Fiery Era.

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