A new term has entered the city's ever-fluid vocabulary, 'post-80s generation', which supposedly describes youth driven to rash and radical extremes by frustration over diminishing opportunities for upward mobility.
The public discussion about them - spurred by the radical edge of some recent protests - has revived popular interest in Hong Kong University sociology professor Lui Tai-lok's 2007 booklet Four Generations of Hong Kong People, a personal observation on the characteristics and circumstances surrounding four main age groups of Hongkongers.
Lui's first generation is those people born in the 1920s or 1930s, many of whom escaped to Hong Kong from the mainland during the Sino-Japanese war. Generally quiet and hard-working, they were able to survive in hard times. They created the liberal-minded environment in which the second generation was free to develop. That second generation comprises the post-war baby boomers born between 1946 and 1966, who gave the city its current shape.
Those born between 1967 and 1975 belong to Lui's third generation of Hongkongers, while his fourth generation was born between 1976 and 2000 - or 'post-80s', for short.
The post-80s live in an age of material abundance and economic affluence, Lui notes. But their life's paths are severely constrained by their overprotective and supervisory second-generation parents, who are determined to prepare them for the competitive world at an early stage.
'In fact, they do not have options. They can choose [for example] which musical instrument to learn, but they cannot just choose to listen to music and not play any instrument,' he wrote. 'Individuality is a luxury.'