The Politics of Hope: Young People, Inequality and Social Citizenship in Hong Kong

Hope is a relationship of credibility

Hope is often treated as an inner resource. Young people are encouraged to set goals, remain positive, become resilient and invest in themselves. These qualities matter, but they do not explain why one person can pursue uncertainty while another must protect the present. The politics of hope begins at this point. It asks how resources, institutions and power make some futures credible and render others too costly to pursue.

Three community studies I conducted in Hong Kong identified a gap between ambition and credible opportunity. Material constraint affected education, work, relationships and recovery from setbacks. Supportive families and friends helped young people endure but did not connect them with institutions or opportunities. Young people could recognise inequality and care about a fairer future while remaining uncertain that their views would influence decisions (Kung, 2024a; 2024b; 2026). These community samples cannot describe an entire generation, but they illuminate a social-work question: what conditions allow hope to become practicable?

My central argument is that hope is a relationship of credibility between people and the social world. It involves a judgement that effort may lead somewhere, that failure can be survived and that institutions may respond. Hope is therefore neither simple optimism nor the opposite of despair. Anxiety, caution and hope can coexist. A young person may continue studying, supporting family members or imagining a fairer society while doubting that education, employment or public participation will deliver what they promise.

Freire (1994) distinguishes active hope from passive waiting: hope becomes meaningful through reflection and practice. Sen’s (1999) capability approach similarly directs attention from formal opportunity to the substantive freedom to act. Together, these perspectives shift the social-work question. The issue is not merely whether young people possess hope, but whether they possess the material, relational and civic conditions through which hopeful action can be sustained.

Inequality sets the price of trying

The cost of failure is not shared equally. A person with savings, secure housing and family support may repeat an examination, accept an internship, change courses or wait for a suitable job. Someone without that buffer may need the first decision to succeed. They may combine study with insecure work, postpone education, restrict social participation or choose immediate income over longer-term development. These are not necessarily signs of low aspiration. They can be rational responses to circumstances in which one unsuccessful attempt carries serious consequences.

This makes inequality temporal as well as financial. Hope requires time: time to learn, explore, build relationships and wait for uncertain returns. Yet time becomes scarce when paid work, caring responsibilities, debt or inadequate housing consume attention. The qualitative study showed how limited resources could narrow not only major decisions but daily ordinary participation including learning an interest, meeting friends, travelling across the city or imagining independent adulthood (Kung, 2024a). A future can contract through many small exclusions before any formal opportunity is refused.

The same reasoning applies to mental health. Kung’s study (2026) placed psychological pressure alongside academic, financial, housing and employment barriers. An individualistic interpretation would treat distress as another deficit to be corrected before a young person can progress. A structural interpretation also sees distress as friction. It consumes concentration, time and confidence while resources are being converted into qualifications, applications and sustained participation. This does not reduce mental health to economics or claim a simple causal chain. It insists that therapeutic support and material or institutional change cannot be separated.

Bourdieu’s (1986) account of capital helps explain this process. Economic capital provides a buffer; cultural capital supplies valued knowledge and credentials; social capital offers information, sponsorship and entry; symbolic capital concerns recognition and legitimacy. The later studies suggested that the central problem was not simply the amount of one’s resource, but whether different resources could be converted into an opportunity (Kung, 2024b; 2026). Emotional support may preserve wellbeing without opening an institutional door. Education may build skill without producing a credential that employers value. Money can reduce risk without automatically creating voice or belonging.

Inequality also accumulates across transitions. A delayed grant, unstable timetable, unrecognised qualification or inaccessible application process can each appear minor yet together interrupt a route. Policies organised around isolated programmes often overlook this sequence. From a politics of hope perspective, an opportunity is real only when a young person can reach it, remain in it and convert participation into a valued next step. Formal availability is not the same as substantive accessibility.

Appadurai (2004) describes aspiration as a cultural capacity whose distribution is unequal. People develop this capacity by practising how to navigate from present circumstances towards valued futures. Those with fewer resources have fewer opportunities to acquire such navigational knowledge. From this perspective, lowering a goal can be a protective strategy rather than evidence of personal deficiency. Social work should take such caution seriously as knowledge about the costs and credibility of available routes.

Social citizenship means having a consequential voice

Citizenship in this discussion does not refer narrowly to legal status or party politics. Social citizenship concerns whether membership in society carries substantive access to security, education, recognition and participation (Marshall, 1950). It asks whether young people are treated only as future workers and service recipients, or as present members of society whose interpretations and contributions matter.

Kung’s studies (2024b; 2026) revealed an important tension. Participants could express concern about inequality, responsibility towards others and interest in a better society, yet have less confidence in their ability to enter policy processes or be heard by institutions. Conceptually, this is not an absence of citizenship. It is a citizenship gap: public concern exists, but the channels through which concern acquire consequence are weak or inaccessible.

Recognition is central to this gap. Young people need more than encouragement to speak; they need reason to believe that their knowledge will be treated as legitimate. Institutional language, meeting formats, professional hierarchies and assumptions about age can determine whose account is considered credible. For those under 18, Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes the right to express views in matters affecting them and to have those views given due weight (United Nations, 1989). The second requirement is crucial. Expression without response is not meaningful participation.

Consultation can reproduce inequality even when everyone is invited. Participation matters when young people help define the question, receive accessible information, see what changed and remain involved. Otherwise, institutions may collect youth voices without sharing control. The politics of hope asks who can describe the problem, imagine the future and influence the route between them.

Future-making as navigation, openness and collective agency

Hope is better understood not as a set of personality types but as future-making with three interrelated dimensions. Navigation is the capacity to identify a valued destination, judge routes and revise them when circumstances change (Appadurai, 2004). It requires more than ambition: information, time, access and enough security to survive delays or failure. Inequality contracts this capacity by restricting practical knowledge and second chances.

Openness is the capacity to remain engaged with a future that cannot be guaranteed. It differs from confidence in which a person may act while anxious or doubtful. Yet it has material limits. Urging someone without savings, stable housing or support to accept uncertainty can romanticise risk. Caution may be an accurate reading of unequal consequences, not deficient motivation.

Collective possibility locates a worthwhile future beyond individual mobility—in mutual care, belonging, equality, cultural continuity and the wellbeing of future generations. It becomes political when people interpret barriers together and seek to alter institutional conditions rather than adapt privately (Kung, 2026). It need not reject personal advancement; it challenges the assumption that private advancement is the only legitimate measure of progress.

These dimensions can diverge. A young person may pursue qualifications while judging the opportunity structure unfair or remain committed to community wellbeing while avoiding consultation. A simple hopeful–hopeless scale therefore confuses survival, navigation and collective agency. It also hides how institutions govern aspiration. When resilience becomes a duty, doubt is recast as negativity and exhaustion as failed motivation, shifting responsibility for insecure futures onto individuals. Critical hope permits distrust of arrangements that have not earned confidence and joins care to collective action. For social work, the task is to connect private support with access, knowledge and consequential participation, enabling young people to influence the conditions shaping their futures.

What the politics of hope asks of social work

First, social work should treat material security as infrastructure for future-making. Assessment should consider not only immediate crisis, but the opportunities abandoned because of cost, time, housing, transport, digital exclusion or debt. Income support, accessible education and stable housing make experimentation less dangerous. Asset-building proposals such as a Child Development Account may provide an additional buffer, but cannot substitute for adequate income, public services and social protection.

Second, services should build opportunity-bearing relationships. Mentoring is insufficient if it offers advice without access. Partnerships with schools, employers, cultural organisations and community groups should create durable routes to learning, placements, recognised experience and decision-makers. Success should be measured by changes in access and continuity, not only by confidence, motivation or the number of contacts made.

Third, youth participation should redistribute some interpretive and decision-making power. Young people can help define needs, frame research questions, design services, review eligibility rules and evaluate outcomes. Participation requires accessible language, safeguarding, feedback, appropriate recognition of young people’s time and a clear account of what has changed. Social workers can act as brokers, but they should also challenge procedures that make participation ceremonial.

Fourth, organisations should evaluate the credibility of their own promises. If a programme promotes aspiration, it should show what opportunities followed, who was excluded or unable to continue, which institutional barriers were altered and whether young people gained influence. Measures of confidence or resilience may be useful but are insufficient. A programme can raise morale while leaving housing, debt, selection rules or labour-market exclusion untouched. Accountability runs in both directions: young people are asked to act, and institutions must show that such action can receive a response.

Finally, social work education should connect relational skills with structural analysis. Practitioners need counselling and group-work competence, but also community development, rights-based practice, policy analysis and participatory research. The profession’s global definition places social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversity at its centre (IFSW and IASSW, 2014). A politics of hope turns these commitments into practical questions: who bears the risk of trying, whose capacities are recognised, who can enter institutions and whose account of the future receives a response?

A credible future is public responsibility

The specific institutions differ across societies, but the underlying issue travels. Young people in many regions are promised mobility through education and effort while facing insecure work, unaffordable housing, unequal access and limited influence. Hong Kong’s circumstances are locally distinct, yet they illuminate a global social work concern: the widening distance between being urged to aspire and being given credible conditions in which aspiration can matter.

Hope becomes political when its possibility depends on collective arrangements. Social work should not persuade young people to trust institutions unconditionally. It should help institutions become more trustworthy: more responsive to material needs, more open to different forms of knowledge and more willing to share influence. A society that asks young people to believe in the future must offer them reasons for belief, and a meaningful part in creating it.

(Word count: 1,898)

References

Appadurai, A. (2004) ‘The capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition’, in Rao, V. and Walton, M. (eds) Culture and Public Action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 59–84.

Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The forms of capital’, in Richardson, J. G. (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 241–258.

Freire, P. (1994) Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by R. R. Barr. New York: Continuum.

International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) (2014) Global Definition of Social Work. Available at: https://www.ifsw.org/what-is-social-work/global-definition-of-social-work/ (Accessed: 15 July 2026).

Kung, S. (2024a) Youth Development Needs: A Qualitative Research Report [in Chinese; English title translated by the author]. Hong Kong: Alliance for Children Development Rights.

Kung, S. (2024b) Seeking Only to Escape Poverty, Not Upward Mobility? A Study of Young People’s Perceptions of Social Mobility [in Chinese; English title translated by the author]. Hong Kong: Alliance for Children Development Rights.

Kung, S. (2026) Between Hope and Barriers: A Study of Young People’s Social Mobility and Life Capitals [in Chinese; English title translated by the author]. Hong Kong: Alliance for Children Development Rights.

Marshall, T. H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

United Nations (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York: United Nations.