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Following the 2019 political crisis and the passage of the 2020 National Security Law, Hong Kong’s philosophical landscape has undergone a profound structural transformation. Historically shaped by Eurocentric frameworks, local academia long suffered from an epistemic vacuum unanchored from local subjectivities. Recently, however, this baseline has been aggressively reconfigured in tandem with mainland China’s post-2016 academic restructuring, which explicitly tasked philosophy and the social sciences with serving national governance and state soft power. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony and Pierre Bourdieu’s field analysis, this paper conceptualizes the emergence of post-2020 state-backed initiatives – such as the Hong Kong Philosophy Research Institute and the Yangming Academy – as a novel modality of 'Intellectual Collaborative Colonialism'. Rather than relying solely on crude censorship, the Chinese party-state and affiliated 'central cultural enterprises' have established an 'embedded' apparatus that offers new hierarchies of funding, prestige, and institutional legitimacy suited to Hong Kong's distinct institutional environment. This project appropriates and hijacks the language of 'decolonisation' to displace Eurocentric hegemony, replacing it with a centralized, state-mandated orthodoxy aligned with national priorities. By tracing how this 'Red Intellectual Field' tames philosophical inquiry and depoliticises local agency, this paper demonstrates how decolonial discourse can be weaponised as a rhetorical shield for state hegemony. Ultimately, it highlights how modern authoritarian regimes engineer intellectual legitimacy, posing a critical warning for the future of autonomous thought and genuine decolonial subjectivity in Hong Kong and beyond.

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