Submitted Hong Kong articles

This article explores an understudied aspect in Asia's Cold War history: how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used Hong Kong as a Cold War pivot to produce and disseminate left-wing literature for overseas Chinese living in Southeast Asia. It argues that the CCP's expanding cultural influence can be attributed to the Party's commercial acumen. Operating within a permissive colonial regulatory regime, the CCP expanded its control of local and regional markets for left-wing printed materials. The content of CCP literature was inevitably propagandistic – that is, shaped by the changing demands of the Chinese government's foreign policy and by a need to attract foreign remittances and accommodate socialist transformation at home. Hong Kong's emergence as a pivot in propaganda wars that were global in scope created tensions between the United States and Britain, and led governments in Southeast Asia to strengthen state controls on imported communist media. As such, this article makes an original contribution to Hong Kong colonial history and deepens our understanding of transnational dynamics within Southeast Asia.

This article examines how the Hong Kong government promoted and preserved Chinese culture through postage stamps and coins. It shows that colonial officials attempted to utilise these tangible forms of Chinese culture to win popular support from the 1960s on. This was an era when the British and colonial governments hoped to hold onto Hong Kong before discussing the colony’s future with Chinese leaders. Colonial officials thus attempted to secure public trust and improve the government’s image. This article analyses cultural policies of this era. It reveals how colonial administrators featured traditional Chinese culture in postage stamps and coins to showcase their ‘imagination and sensibility to what appeals to Hong Kong people’, a phrase used by Secretary for Chinese Affairs John Crichton McDouall in the 1960s. While previous studies have shown how colonial authorities utilised objects to reinforce imperial superiority and construct a sense of the Other, this article argues that political calculations made Hong Kong officials appear to respect how local people actually understood their culture. By cooperating with the Crown Agents and the Royal Mint, colonial administrators incorporated Chinese symbols in these everyday objects to demonstrate their care for the people’s culture.

This article scrutinizes the negotiations with, and discursive refashioning of, Hong Kong identity during and after the Umbrella Movement (2014–16). I argue that these discursive experimentations borne out of the Umbrella Movement bring to light Hong Kong's uniquely cultural formulations of democratic self-determination that exceed the traditional analytic framework of Hong Kong cultural studies. The article analyses literary works as a hitherto neglected facet of the ‘Umbrella culture’ that, as a whole, acts as a discursive laboratory for multiple reflexive theorizations of Hong Kong identity and democratic subjectivity to be devised and debated. Cases studied here include the protesters’ on-site cultural expressions and two major Hong Kong literary authors: Dung Kai-cheung and Wong Bik-wan. This article examines social-movements artworks and literary works in terms of their performative and ethnographic dimensions, arguing that they are important intellectual and cultural-political processes to produce new knowledge about collective identity. This article first demonstrates how the Umbrella artworks repurpose the performative and the ethnographic strategies in Saisai's canonical novel, My City (1975), often cited as the ur-text of Hong Kong identity, to proclaim themselves as ‘we the Hong Kong people’. After reading Dung's and Wong's Umbrella-related works, I then show in this article that the performative and the ethnographic can open up spaces to reconfigure collective identity beyond its existent discourses. Putting theories of performativity into dialogue with critical ethnography, I consider the politics of negotiating and debating cultural identity in literature and protest arts as integral to postcolonial democratic action.

This essay argues that the queer figure of the child that crops up curiously in (post–)Umbrella Movement Hong Kong is a defining political signifier for characterizing the city's youthful protesters and imagining alternative futures for Hong Kong. In many mainland Chinese media outlets, the youthfulness of the Hong Kong demonstrators is often emphasized to critique their fixation on the Western ideology of democracy. For the young resisters and their sympathizers, childishness connotes a different script of identity: it entails a narrative of temporal suspension in the face of assimilation into a Chinese homogeneity. By, for example, comparing the political star Joshua Wong to Peter Pan, who refuses to grow up, or by assigning uniform-wearing grade-school students the role of “the keepers of the Umbrella Movement,” prodemocratic cultural narratives keep alive the possibility of a political alterity that resists the neoliberal, temporal mandates of Hong Kong's government and mainland China. Theorizing that possibility in the context of temporal, queer, children's, and postcolonial studies, this essay contends that the future of resistance in Hong Kong will follow a lateral horizon, a sideways course that will put minor dissenters into new and nonheteropatriarchal relations with the existing order of the city.

This essay argues that the queer figure of the child that crops up curiously in (post–)Umbrella Movement Hong Kong is a defining political signifier for characterizing the city's youthful protesters and imagining alternative futures for Hong Kong. In many mainland Chinese media outlets, the youthfulness of the Hong Kong demonstrators is often emphasized to critique their fixation on the Western ideology of democracy. For the young resisters and their sympathizers, childishness connotes a different script of identity: it entails a narrative of temporal suspension in the face of assimilation into a Chinese homogeneity. By, for example, comparing the political star Joshua Wong to Peter Pan, who refuses to grow up, or by assigning uniform-wearing grade-school students the role of “the keepers of the Umbrella Movement,” prodemocratic cultural narratives keep alive the possibility of a political alterity that resists the neoliberal, temporal mandates of Hong Kong's government and mainland China. Theorizing that possibility in the context of temporal, queer, children's, and postcolonial studies, this essay contends that the future of resistance in Hong Kong will follow a lateral horizon, a sideways course that will put minor dissenters into new and nonheteropatriarchal relations with the existing order of the city.

This paper focuses on Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s discourse of motherly love during the 2019 mass protests, examining it in relation to the politicization of Confucianism taking place in China today. This politicization results from a new cult of personality centered on President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan which reinforces patriarchal authoritarianism and familial nationalism through an explicit emphasis on Confucianism and traditional values. Through this process, authoritarian power has been reconfigured and legitimized as Confucian duty, with the result that political leaders are made to appear firm but benevolent parents while the protestors are cast in the role of children requiring discipline. Lam’s discourse of motherly love is further complicated by the fact that she is the first woman to assume such a leadership role in modern Chinese history, which further illuminates Hong Kong’s struggle against both patriarchal authoritarianism and the gendered legacy of coloniality.

In gender and sexuality studies, heterosexual sex has often been portrayed in terms of inequality and injustice; however, there has been scant discussion of what social conditions may cultivate a democratic and egalitarian culture that sustains sexual autonomy. Developed from Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, I propose the erotic capabilities approach to assess and promote entitlement to erotic choices and erotic freedoms in everyday practice. I argue that erotic capabilities should consist of the following: (1) freedom from sexual coercion and deprivation; (2) democratized sexual knowledge; (3) sexual health options; (4) inclusive space for diversified erotic expressions; (5) erotic affiliation and negotiation; and (6) diversified erotic aspirations, fulfilments and experimentations. Drawing on a 29-month ethnography of a sex party club in Hong Kong, I demonstrate how the erotic capabilities approach can be used in a meso-level analysis to evaluate a sexual space or community which, while situated in the overarching patriarchal ideology, may or may not offer a reflexive space for its participants to define their erotic selves. As this study formulates sexuality as a vehicle of empowerment that can and should be cultivated and actualized, it illuminates the possibility to imagine and create agentic and pleasurable opportunities for people in different social locations under the patriarchy we still live in.

The British colony of Hong Kong was one of the last ports that Jewish refugees transited through before their arrival in Shanghai. By using recently declassified materials this paper argues that Hong Kong played a more complicated role an ambiguous refuge: one that provided shelter, but whose colonial administration was responsible for the internment and expulsion of Jewish refugees. This paper broadens its inquiry by analyzing local and historiographical factors that contributed to Hong Kong being overlooked. Adopting a Global Holocaust framework and following refugees’ paths of escape reveals Hong Kong as more than just a transit port.

Focusing on performance that functions outside explicitly theatrical frames, art installations staged in Hong Kong between June and October 2020 progress a broader view of Hong Kong’s complex development as global financial center, creative hub, and meeting point between “East” and “West.” Artists Mark Chung, Nadim Abbas, and Christopher Ho interrogate Hong Kong at a historically definitive moment, allowing audiences to study what constitutes “home” beyond what conventional academic analyses, traditional publishing outlets, and social media allow.

This article develops a feminist reading of the biographical action series featuring Ip Man, the Wing Chun grand master lionized for mentoring Bruce Lee, as a set of culturally inflected practices in order to probe the sociohistorical structure that embeds and overdetermines these productions and allows for new, subversive potentialities. Building upon situated engagement, my analysis traces how the hypermasculine violent yanggang aesthetic tradition takes on new life by reclaiming women's voices in the Ip Man film franchise. I also identify the ways in which this filmic remaking of Ip's life story builds an alternative embodiment that unsettles musculature as the ground of colonialist/nationalist dominance and lays the basis for a new horizon of justice encapsulated by the flexible and elastic “Be Water” sensibility. As human beings are facing the common threat posed by prevailing toxic masculinity, these lessons, I argue, are crucial for us to find a path through the turbulence and build a more peaceful world.

This article offers a longer perspective on the origins and effectiveness of reforms of colonial governance in Hong Kong. It shows that the colonial state shifted from increasingly ineffective indirect rule to using a covert bureaucratic opinion poll, Town Talk, to assess public opinion. The article argues that this bureaucratic device increased the organizational capacity of the colonial state and, in so doing, enabled a constructed form of ‘public opinion’ to influence policy formulation in a state-controlled manner without democratization. This mechanism was used as an imperfect substitute for representative democracy. These reforms enhanced a ‘non-political’ sense of citizenship among the Hong Kong Chinese but failed to bridge a communication gap between an unelected government and the people over whom it ruled.

From the lens of two Macanese publics, this study rethinks cosmopolitanism as a diverse identity and pursuit that can vary from one individual to another. It complicates what we know about polyglot Asian publics often profiled as ‘cosmopolitan’ for their foreign education, middle-class status, social commitment, and internationalist visions. I argue that, while these subjects shared a common background, they diverged according to shifting global contexts, generational differences, and personal experience. On a par with imagining themselves as part of a global community, cosmopolitan publics navigated between personal worlds and communal networks, as well as between a narrower nationalist and/or urban context and a broader global framework. My first subject, Macao-born Lourenço Pereira Marques, saw Hong Kong as a liberal ground to disseminate Darwinism across southern China's Lusophone public sphere during the 1880s, whereas Hong Kong-born José Pedro Braga worked to preach an internationalist vision of racial equality through a wider Anglophone public sphere and an emerging transnational associational culture in the early twentieth century. This study also aims to further our understanding regarding Hong Kong as a vibrant port city and explore the diversity of cosmopolitan publics in the context of transitioning internal and external worlds.

This paper discusses the space-clearing flânerie of post-1997 Hong Kong literature and culture as it appears in Dung Kai-cheung’s novel Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City and Hong Kong indie band My Little Airport’s music. Drawing from postcolonial theory, it rethinks flânerie in post-1997 Hong Kong as an act of worlding. Comparing the lexical flânerie in Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas and the sonic flânerie in My Little Airport’s songs as two ways of worlding Hong Kong, it continues the inquiries of the formation of a post-handover Hong Kong subjectivity in the field of Hong Kong studies. This paper demonstrates how the flâneurs and flâneuses of contemporary Hong Kong, in their continuous strolling as an attempt to clear themselves a space in the post-handover city, open the possibilities of belonging in pluralistic ways with a new Hong Kong subjectivity that is both local and cosmopolitan.

This paper analyses how British political actors approached the negotiations over the future of Hong Kong. It does so by drawing on declassified documents from the Prime Ministerial archives of Margaret Thatcher and Foreign and Commonwealth Office files, amongst other sources. This paper begins in 1979, when the British first proposed to extend their administration over Hong Kong beyond the 1997 expiry date of the lease which covered the majority of Hong Kong, and ends in 1982, when Thatcher met with China’s leaders, Zhao Ziyang and Deng Xiaoping. During this period, the British saw the Hong Kong issue as primarily an economic one and regarded their proposal of continued British administration as a selfless one. The position Thatcher took on the issues of sovereignty and the validity of the treaties caused offence which increased Chinese suspicions of Britain’s proposals and delayed the start of formal negotiations.

The current political crisis in Hong Kong is characterized by a level of social unrest that the city has not seen since the riots of 1966–67. After that earlier round of turmoil, the British colonial regime secured legitimacy through socioeconomic improvement in Hong Kong. “Prosperity and Stability” became the hallmark of Hong Kong’s success, which extended into the period of political uncertainty in the 1980s. Transcending the hand-over of Hong Kong to China in 1997, this catchphrase was adopted as the slogan of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government in its bid for legitimacy through socioeconomic appeals. Against this perennial state rhetoric, grassroots protesters began to demand “Democracy and Freedom” around June Fourth. These public demands have escalated since the Umbrella Movement in an environment of socioeco-nomic regression. Examining these two pairs of keywords—prosperity/stability and democracy/freedom—this article underscores the contention in the legitimacy of governance in Hong Kong since the closing decades of British rule. This analysis indicates that it would be unproductive for the governing authorities or the protesters to deny the earnestness of either the political or socioeconomic assertions in the ongoing contention of legitimacy to govern Hong Kong.

Now considered a quintessential Hong Kong household food product, Vitasoy won the approval of local consumers only in the post–World War II period as its producer capitalized on the discourse of modern nutritional science, leveraged tech-nological breakthroughs, and positioned the soy beverage to respond to a growing clientele experiencing economic growth and lifestyle transformation. In the emerging market and socio-cultural conditions of postwar Hong Kong, Vitasoy’s producer created a local beverage that articulated for the city a modernity that originated in a Chinese national discourse but then blos-somed into a celebration of the lifestyle that economic progress enabled.

This study combines content analysis and critical discourse analysis to examine how the media representation of politicians is shaped by their gender, political identities, political leanings of the press, and journalism genres, with a sample of 946 news articles during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Results show that women legislators in Hong Kong are more visible in softer journalism than hard news. Under authoritarianism, women politicians with liberal, prodemocracy agendas are particularly vulnerable to what Gaye Tuchman terms the “symbolic annihilation” by the media. Although celebrity journalism tends to portray more women politicians over men regardless of their political leanings, it often stresses women’s gender over their profession. This study brings in an intersectional, cultural studies approach to research on gender and news.

In contrast to the infrastructural properties of Western media platforms aiming at market power expansion, the digital platform model in China is designed and developed with a techno-nationalist media agenda. In the case of Hong Kong, we look into how exactly the platformisation process restructures and interacts with its surrounding cultural, economic, political and social activities. This article contributes to the Creative Labour Studies by analysing the intricate linkages between the city’s unique socio-historical, technological and political trajectories and the lived dynamics of television work. Through in-depth interviews with Hong Kong TV workers, we reinstitute the techno-political to the analytical lens of Creative Labour Studies. We posit that the ebb and flow of Hong Kong’s TV industry and its creative labour process are not just guided by economic considerations under global media platformisation, but also uniquely entangled with its historical legacies, socio-technical contexts, and political and ideological framework. Our empirics show how the conflicting strategies directed by both the platformised business models and an unprecedented techno-nationalist media agenda generate ambiguity and inconsistency in daily TV operations. The elevated self-censorship and loss of editorial autonomy alongside the rapid media platformisation reinforce a normative ‘moralist regime’ creating specific forms of precarity and dissatisfaction among Hong Kong TV workers, undermining the development of the creative industry and a creative career. But the changing techno-political conditions also alter TV workers’ perceived nature, functionality and value of creative work, enacting a self-governed ‘ethical regime’ in their professional practices, and open up new creative opportunities.

I attend to the trope of Humble Wage Earners (daa gung zai 打工仔) in the Hui brothers’ comedies and their remake Fantasia (Gwai maa kong soeng kuk 鬼馬狂想曲, 2004) and argue that they preserve a cultural memory of Hong Kong during transitional periods. The trope and its everyman heroism are keys to decoding the social critique in the remake, which can be seen as an archive constructed through pastiche of canonical elements from the originals. The article first contextualizes the Hui brothers’ comedies in the postwar East Asian comedy film and media tradition (1950s–1970s) and considers them as Hong Kong salaryman comedies, which epitomize the trait of everyman heroism as a core element of Hongkonger’s identity. I demonstrate this point through a reading of Fantasia by focusing on how memory is represented and how the trope is remade. The close reading examines the film’s pastiche of the classic elements, influences, and anecdotes of the Hui brothers’ comedies, hence illustrating a remake’s capacity to archive cultural memory, rewrite cultural history, and reexamine identity in a new light.

Keywords cultural memory | cultural history | pastiche | film remake | humble wage earners | the Hui brothers’ comedies | nostalgia cinema | Hong Kong Cantonese comedy film

How have high-density, high-rise planned communities become the predominant housing choice of Hong Kong residents and a vital feature of the city’s vertical urbanism? This article reconstructs the history of a gigantic housing estate called Mei Foo Sun Chuen, which was completed in Hong Kong between 1968 and 1978 by an American joint venture led by Mobil Oil Corporation. The estate was redeveloped from a former oil depot into a vast housing estate of 99 residential towers for 80,000 tenants. By the time of its completion, the estate was the largest privately financed residential development in the world, and it was heralded as the first high-rise planned community in Hong Kong. In studying Mei Foo Sun Chuen, this article discusses how a mega-scale residential development established a new dimension of Hong Kong’s new middle-class housing market. It argues that Mei Foo Sun Chuen’s new idea of a planned community, its modern flat design, and its comprehensive housing management met the requirements of a nascent middle class, which demanded a comfortable lifestyle that Hong Kong’s traditional housing market could not provide at the time. Since the completion of Mei Foo Sun Chuen, its popular housing model has proliferated throughout Hong Kong.