Abstract

Set against the backdrop of the arguably disquieting relations between Hong Kong and mainland China, as can be partially ascertained through the recent student-led Occupy Central Movement, in this paper I consider the identity constructions of 31 undergraduate mainland Chinese (MLC) students in a Hong Kong university. Drawing on two rounds of in-depth interviews as well as written accounts of the participants collected in a nine-month ethnographic stint, in this paper I argue that there emerges a complex elite identity amongst these students. I explicate an array of attitudes and responses to the elite identity, from outright assumption to uncomfortable ambivalence to direct refutation; I then pinpoint the reproductive capacity of generational privileges as characterised by these students’ educational, inter-generational and cosmopolitan capitals.