【by Lucas Wong, June 2025】
Donald Trump’s return to office has signaled a “declaration of war” on higher education, as he demands unwavering obedience from academics through threats of funding cuts. Historically, exerting control over education has served as a powerful political strategy: who controls knowledge, controls power, and vice versa. A similar narrative has unfolded in Hong Kong, where pro-Beijing politicians blame the education system for radicalizing youth and fueling anti-government sentiments. This has significantly intensified the precarity faced by scholars and public intellectuals. Under intensifying political pressures, how can they safeguard academic freedom, continue producing community-based research, while negotiating political red lines, public scrutiny, scholarly rigor, and community needs? Additionally, what roles should public intellectuals play in fostering social justice education in today’s post-truth environment?
This article explores the concept of public intellectualism in exile, both in its physical and metaphorical forms. Although there is no universally accepted definition of public intellectuals, the term generally refers to scholars, journalists, artists, writers, and other professionals who engage with the public. Public intellectuals are often characterized by their tendency to “speak with” the public (Chomsky and Borofsky 2001), while “public intellectualism” refers to this tendency or way that can be practiced by anyone. Recognizing the diversity of these figures, this article, however, focuses specifically on scholars who not only produce academic work but also actively disseminate knowledge to the public and involve the public in their research practices—whom I refer to as “public scholars” in the context of Hong Kong. This article does not attempt to survey all public scholars across disciplines, from the humanities to the sciences. Rather, it concentrates on those whose work engages directly with political issues, given the increasingly fraught political climate in Hong Kong. To illustrate the theoretical discussion, the final section briefly discusses political scientist Simon Shen (沈旭暉). This example is not intended to suggest that Shen is the only or most exemplary public scholar. On the contrary, it is important to acknowledge the wide range of public scholars with diverse academic, cultural, and gender backgrounds.
1. Rethinking Exile
Due to its intensifying political environment, Hong Kong has witnessed a proliferation of public intellectualism engaging directly with political issues. But this intellectualism also intersects with exile experiences. When Edward Said introduced his famous notion of “intellectuals in exile,” he emphasized exile not only literally but also metaphorically. Reflecting on his identity as a Palestinian-American living away from his birthplace, Said writes, “my characterizations of the intellectual as exile and marginal, as amateur, and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power” (Said 1996: xvi). He further argues that exile is a “model for the intellectual”—“always to move away from the centralizing authorities towards the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable” (Said 1996: 63).[1] Being not at home—maintaining a stance of perpetual critical detachment regardless of their physical location—remains particularly relevant to what I am going to explain.
Hong Kong’s history of public intellectualism is closely tied to exile. A place that once served as a destination for exiled intellectuals has now become a point of departure. During periods of political turmoil, particularly during WWII and the Chinese Civil War, Hong Kong welcomed many Chinese intellectuals, including writer Eileen Chang (張愛玲), historian Ch’ien Mu (錢穆), and philosopher Tang Chun-I (唐君毅). Notably, the founding of New Asia College (now part of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) is directly related to the exile of Confucian scholars. On the other hand, contemporary landscapes of knowledge and public culture have become even more complex. Neoliberalism and bureaucratic governance in universities have transformed academics into a “cheap army of reserve labor,” shrinking spaces for critical commentary (Giroux 2010).
Responding to this shrinking space, some intellectuals have shifted their efforts to digital platforms, creating public scholarship through social media channels like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. However, the Internet is far from being a neutral or free space. Emerging research in platform studies highlights how rules of platform governance mirror, and even reinforce, existing ideological frameworks and constraints from the physical world (Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy 2022). For public intellectuals operating in politically contested environments such as Hong Kong, critical questions arise: how do intellectuals navigate the tensions between knowledge dissemination, social engagement, and platformization in the digital age? I suggest the concept of the “educator-activist-entertainer complex” as a framework to understand Hong Kong’s exile and public intellectualism. These labels might be self-claimed or externally attributed, positively or negatively correlated, supplementing or conflicting with each other. Individuals discussed later in this article may not fully embrace all three identities or even reject some. Nonetheless, examining this complex provides a comprehensive lens to understand public intellectualism in Hong Kong, particularly illuminating the precarity faced by these intellectuals.
2. The Educator-Activist-Entertainer Complex
The “educator-activist-entertainer complex” describes intersecting instead of separate or contradictory modalities of engagement that perform strategically in the platformized era. Knowledge production and dissemination in the digital public sphere are no longer confined to scholarly authority or activist commitment alone. Instead, they are increasingly mediated by performativity, affect, and algorithmic visibility.
First, as educators, intellectuals communicate with the public through critical knowledge, reflexivity, and political imagination. However, in the age of the attention economy, knowledge dissemination must be reconfigured as a relational and affective practice that is responsive to the desires, anxieties, and lived experiences of online publics. In other words, intellectuals must understand what the public cares about most. In the case of Hong Kong, these educational initiatives must respond to broader pro-/anti-China sentiments, for example, by contextualizing democracy education within the city’s unique cultural and political landscape. The educator’s role therefore requires dual accountability: scholarly rigor and public resonance.
Besides what the public intellectuals want and are able to teach, and what the citizens want to learn, platform algorithms also play a role here. Studies indicate that topics aligned with contemporary social movements gain greater online visibility, while platforms like YouTube may impose strict content restrictions on certain issues, such as COVID-19 (Duffy and Meisner 2023). Nonetheless, how significantly algorithmic factors shape the content produced by public intellectuals, particularly within Hong Kong’s politically sensitive context, remains an underexplored area.
Second, as activists, public intellectuals translate scholarly critique into civic intervention. Activist scholarship has a long-standing tradition, notably advanced by feminist and, more recently, Indigenous scholars. Challenging traditional notions of objectivity, activist scholarship emphasizes deep personal engagement and responsibility towards the researched communities. Julia Sudbury and Margo Okazawa-Rey (2009: 3) define activist scholarship as “the production of knowledge and pedagogical practices through active engagements with, and in the service of, progressive social movements,” ultimately fostering “emancipatory knowledge(s).” However, unlike the recent rise of scholar-activism in Western contexts, the term “activism” poses significant risks to scholars in authoritarian regions. Typically, studies on how public intellectuals “speak truth to power” emphasize their speeches and deeds—visible expressions of intellectual exile. However, in Hong Kong, we have to be more careful to identify the subtler ways of activism. Rather than adopting Western definitions directly, researchers must (re-)define activism in this context. In this regard, activism does not necessarily imply an antagonism to the government. Instead, it involves a commitment to “emancipatory knowledges,” revealing a subtle yet essential connection between social movements and public intellectualism.
Third, as entertainers, public intellectuals are compelled to perform within the logic of platform capitalism, where visibility is contingent upon affective labor, personal branding, and algorithmic boundaries. The entertainer role highlights how public intellectuals communicate their messages. Despite delivering academic and theoretical insights, public intellectuals rarely adopt traditional lecture formats and an “one-to-many” communication method online. Instead, to sustain audience engagement and visibility, they combine educational content and activist motivations with entertaining styles. This approach leads intellectuals to craft online personas distinct from their academic personas. A notable global example is Slavoj Žižek, whose digital persona has been described as a “joker or court jester” (Bar-El 2023: 156). While his criticism is insightful, they are often in the form of jokes in sarcastic language or even with sexual implications. Hence, he “has become a viral hot commodity through his image as a fool or as a self-sacrificing intellectual” (Bar-El 2023: 15), illustrating a tension where public recognition inversely affects academic credibility. In short, entertainment here is not reducible to frivolity or distraction; rather, it is a mode of engagement that mobilizes humor, storytelling, aesthetics, and persona as pedagogical and political tools.
Through entertainment, public intellectuals can remain visible to audiences while strategically obscuring their political intentions from state authorities. This seemingly depoliticalized ambiguity is particularly popular among intellectuals in exile. Indeed, “depoliticization” has a long history in colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong. While “staying away from politics” is a common belief among Hongkongers, it has not equated to political indifference. Instead, it has functioned as an alternative mode of engaging politics and social issues through entertainment and cultural production.
The educator-activist-entertainer complex thus captures the tensions among these three roles, challenging the binary between seriousness and spectacle, between critique and charisma, and between intellectual gravitas and popular appeal. The next section will briefly discuss a public intellectual who went into “exile”—physically and/or metaphorically—to showcase how the educator-activist-entertainer complex works.
3. Exile in/outside Hong Kong
Simon Shen (沈旭暉) is an International Relations scholar. Formerly teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he relocated to Taiwan and is currently an Associate Professor at the National Sun Yat-sen University. This marks a literal departure from his place of intellectual and political engagement.
After the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protest, Shen was reported to be possibly related to the 2020 Legislative Council election campaign of “35+,” aimed at securing a democratic majority in the council. This campaign was seen as subversive by the Hong Kong government under the National Security Law, leading to the arrest of 47 activists. Staying in Taiwan, in March 2020, Shen launched his YouTube channel with Jacky Fung (馮智政), “Simon Global (堅離地球・沈旭暉・馮智政).” In his introductory video, he situates his work within the contemporary movements, saying:
We are here to respond to something happening now. […] In recent years, many events we once thought unimaginable have occurred around the world: the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the social movements in Hong Kong. […] Public demand for knowledge about current affairs and international relations has significantly increased, yet the influence of the internet has led to a more polarized worldview. (simonglobal 2020a)[2]
Living in a world bombarded by fake news and brainwashing materials, he claims, “we have to respond to the new era—convey positive messages in new ways.” The centering on “positive messages” and “new ways” avoids explicit political confrontation while subtly addressing politically sensitive topics. Being physically away from the home country does not mean being free from political surveillance and censorship. This deliberate ambiguity illustrates the tightrope public intellectuals in exile must walk: speaking critically without crossing the state’s red lines.
Covering international relations, diaspora experiences, political economy, and cultural commentary, the channel exemplifies the adaptive strategies of public intellectuals in exile—where intellectual work must maintain resonance and reach in a shifting media and political terrain. This broad thematic spectrum signals a deliberate shift away from overtly activist content, suggesting a strategic dilution to preserve both public visibility and political safety. The inclusion of lighter content, such as discussions on films and the cultural industry, also reflects how public intellectuals may tactically use entertainment to diffuse tension, broaden their appeal, and obscure sensitive critiques behind a veil of neutrality.
Shen’s YouTube channel is not without tension. In a video discussing YouTube’s algorithms (simonglobal 2020b), Shen stated that he wanted to create educational content with theoretical depth that has long-lasting impacts, but in reality, his most popular videos are usually commentary on breaking news. This platform-driven demand for immediacy and sensationalism reveals the algorithmic constraints imposed on public intellectuals, further entrenching a sense of exile not only from one’s homeland but also from one’s ideal intellectual practice. Hence, we may rethink Said’s discussions of critical distance from one’s homeland by reconsidering the digital platforms that render these critical voices visible, shaped by as much as shaping the homeland and the exile intellectuals.
Shen’s case, therefore, illustrates multiple dimensions of exile. First, his physical relocation to Taiwan constitutes literal exile from the Hong Kong academic and political environment. Second, his continued critical engagement with Hong Kong’s sociopolitical developments positions him as an intellectual in metaphorical exile, striving to maintain influence from the margins. Third, his negotiation with platform algorithms and audience expectations signals a form of professional exile, where the norms of academic labor are displaced by visibility metrics. Together, these layers of exile underscore the evolving conditions under which public intellectuals must operate.
In short, public intellectuals in exile experience a “triple precarity”: academic precarity, political precarity, and digital labor precarity. The tensions between academic and public personas may harm their academic career. Meanwhile, balancing public visibility against state surveillance presents notable risks. Online visibility can indeed expose intellectuals to increased scrutiny, data tracking, and government or corporate monitoring (Uldam 2018).
The writing of this article reminds me of a recent BBC News Chinese video which illustrates social caution around sensitive political issues like Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law. When asked directly about their stance, interviewees avoided responses, fleeing or covering their faces. Such reactions indicate not political indifference, but self-censorship driven by a shared social sentiment of fear.
Historically, public intellectuals like Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno elevated the image of the intellectual in exile as one of sacrifice and principled detachment, whether in prison or in geographic exile. Today, Hong Kong public intellectuals may not always face such overt repression, but their platformed engagement reveals new forms of algorithmic vulnerability, border-crossing surveillance, and audiences or markets’ rapidly changing demands. Exile, in this context, is not solely about physical displacement. It seems that many public intellectuals in exile today have to speak with strategic ambiguity, to find resonance beyond visibility metrics, and to create meaning in precarious and contingent spaces. What emerges is a form of intellectual-activism that is attuned to the local context of Hong Kong and is shaped by the platform politics. For public intellectuals in exile, going public is a continual negotiation between visibility and vulnerability, between the desire to intervene and the need to endure.
AUTHOR
Lucas Wong is a PhD student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he is interested in the cultural politics of East Asia, with a particular focus on the intersection of media and education. His doctoral research examines public scholarship and scholar activism in the age of platformization, with recent work theorizing how academics accumulate digital cultural capital. He has previously written on youth political participation, documentary filmmaking, and transitional justice, focusing on Hong Kong and Taiwan. His research has been published in international journals such as Social Sciences, Asian Cinema, and the Journal of Screenwriting.
NOTES
[1] Theodor Adorno’s intellectual career exemplifies Said’s concept vividly. Exiled from Nazi Germany, Adorno was an outspoken critic of fascism. However, even after settling in the U.S., he continued embodying metaphorical exile through his critical stance toward American culture, stating that, “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (Jenemann 2007: xxv).
[2] Translation mine.
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