Protest movements and generational politics

“I can’t keep calm because Hong Kong is dying.” I’m sympathetic to Hong Kong’s student protestors, who are doing what their leadership has failed to do—press China to respect the self-determination that it promised Hong Kong. And it strikes me that should Hong Kong’s democratic movement succeed, many of its people’s concerns, like public housing and retirement adequacy, will make Hong Kong much more leftist than China is today. But that is not something I can usefully write about.

In keeping with a long tradition of comparing Hong Kong and Singapore, I’m thinking about the difference between the Occupy Central movement and this weekend’s widely-condemned Central Provident Fund (CPF) protest, and how it sheds some light on Singapore’s politics. Of all the ways that the two movements differ, one stands out: Occupy Central is driven by young people, while the CPF protestors are overwhelmingly old people. I think that has implications for politics in Singapore.

From the coverage of Occupy Central in the media like SCMP and BBC, it’s struck me that the vast majority of interviewees are in their 20s and 30s. I’ve read several cases of young people defying warnings from their parents. Even senior high school students are attending the protests. And it must be a typo, but SCMP reported that “13-year-old Matthew Chau” was smarting from the tear gas. Meanwhile, the mainstream pro-democracy leadership seems to be scrambling to keep up with the momentum. Though middle-aged protestors do exist, disapproval seems concentrated among the older generation, with a few isolated reports of anti-protest actions (for instance, the update from 11.40am on Monday on this live feed). The comparison in Singapore is the scrutiny over the NUS Student’s Union finances, but even that’s all been conducted by keyboard warriors, and I can’t tell if the vast majority of students care. You’d have to go back to the 1960s to find comparable student mobilisation in Singapore.

The news out of Singapore is that there was a confrontation between a Return Our CPF rally and a YMCA event held at Hong Lim Park at the same time. Accounts of what happened are confused and partisan, but it seems that the CPF protest set up its equipment at an area different from the one they were allocated, and following either innocent or malicious miscommunication, decided to march towards the YMCA event. This confrontation frightened a group of special-needs children who were about to perform at the YMCA event. Everyone and their grandmother will have something to say about what happened. Clearly, since I wasn’t there, I can’t do that, which is why I’m reflecting on a different aspect of the event.

Could demographic change drive values change?

Summary: values change is often argued to push fertility rates down. But what about the reverse? That is, low fertility rates could drive values change. Fertility rates could recover in a generation if (for instance) more religious or conservative people have larger families, and their children go on to have larger families as well. But this would have implications for what we might think of as liberal, progressive values.

Some demographers have argued that people in North America, Europe, and East Asia are having fewer children because value systems have changed (for instance, people prize career and independence over family; some articles that argue this are Atoh 2001, Goldstein et al. 2003, McDonald 2000, 2006). This can be explained either purely through cultural change, or with reference to changing incentives. For instance, it’s plausible that having large families in some societies today invites stigma—that’s an example of cultural change. On the other hand, the fact that divorce has become more widespread and acceptable means that women want to ensure financial stability in case of a breakdown in the marriage, which in turn encourages them to stay in the workforce and discourages them from taking breaks to have children—that’s changing incentives. These two sorts of explanations are not mutually exclusive. But what they have in common is that a demographic outcome is a result of changing views on the good life.

And the result? According to Goldstein et al. (2009), in 2002 about 700–900 million people lived in areas with total fertility rates below 1.3 (that is, based on birth rates that year, women would have 1.3 children on average), including many countries in Europe, most of developed East Asia, as well as anywhere between 6–12 provinces in China.

But how about looking at things in reverse? What I mean is, could changing family structures have an impact on value systems? Last Saturday the New York Times carried an article about the disappearance of the liberal Jewish voter bloc—60% of Jewish children in the NYC area live in Orthodox Jewish homes, which means that in a generation they will form a large voting bloc. In that piece, Samuel Heilman argues that as Orthodox Jews gain political influence, they will clash with “American values” (by which he seems to mean liberal-secular values).