Submitted Hong Kong articles

In 1889 a patrol of Qing soldiers entered Hong Kong territory and arrested two villagers from the village of Sham Shui Po. The Hong Kong government launched an investigation. After correspondence and negotiations between the governments of Hong Kong and the Qing Empire, the two villagers were eventually returned alive. This paper will rely on the dispatches in the CO129 series in the Hong Kong government records and discuss the course of events, including the investigations by the Hong Kong police, the interactions between the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir William Des Voeux, the British officials in Canton and Peking and the Qing Governor of the Two- Kwang, Zhang Zhi Dong.

Through this incident, this paper intends to examine the Kowloon frontier in the context of Hong Kong-China relations, from day-to-day cross- border activities to the two governments’ attitudes towards the border. The latter also includes the sensitivity of both governments to the consequences that border issues could bring, their attitudes towards each other, the ideas on modern legal systems and the policies on extraditing fugitives.

This article traces how the ‘wet’ market was integrated into the infrastructure of public housing estates in Hong Kong through modularization from 1969 to 1975. This includes how spatial modularization concepts extended into administration and management, incorporating responsibilities and categories of goods that ultimately reflected colonial ideas of health, food hygiene and social and spatial order. In doing so, this article theorizes how the modular market embodied the ways colonial government departments, architects and managers navigated notions of the materiality of ‘wetness’ in the market through its design in response to management and customer needs, but nevertheless how consumers found ways to re-narrate such spaces through maintaining ‘wet’ cultural exchanges and practices. Using government documents and photographs, this article combines a design historical approach to materiality with empirical evidence to expand on histories and practices of the ‘wet market’, bringing the everyday discourses of modernity in Hong Kong to the fore.

This article explores connection or disjuncture between everyday life and global culture. Efforts to
de-essentialise or pluralise urban globalisation have focused on local negotiations of discourse or
the macro effects of the world city, here rhythmanalysis is used to bridge these approaches. The
analysis develops on the tension between the theoretically-based multiplicity and reflexivity of
late-modernity, and the structured reality that has been documented. The global city is stratified
through spatial and dispositional-embodied qualities that dramatically truncate the possibility of
encountering unfamiliarity through everyday life. These stratifications lean on each other and
replicate as ‘small worlds’ of co-constitutive, comfortable spaces. To explore this, Lefebvre’s
rhythmanalysis is used to explicate participant accounts of going to a nightlife district in Hong
Kong for the first time. For some, the district is present in daily life, contributing to a fluent
connection and orthodox visitation. Meanwhile, subjects who visit under less seamless conditions
reflexively feel out of place and corporally distinct. This article contributes to understanding the
micro-politics of late-modernity, the very real, yet transparent, spatial and embodied barriers
which truncate individual flourishing in late-modern societies.

At the margins of a male-dominated film industry and working at the border between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), female directors struggle to make a living in an often tense cross-border business environment. Moreover, the demands of globalization exacerbate the competition local filmmakers face in their efforts to exploit the expanding motion picture market on the Chinese mainland. Nevertheless, Hong Kong female filmmakers still manage to tell stories about women from the margins of society who navigate the uncertainties of life in the nebulous border regions of Chinese society. Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011) and Flora Lau’s Bends (2013) make use of the border between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China to explore stories about women marginalized by their reliance on men, as well as Hong Kong’s increasing economic dependence on mainland China.

Tin Shui Wai new town in Hong Kong, known as the “city of sadness,” has been narrated by the “Tin Shui Wai Myth” that attributes its urban problems to the planning failures after the colonial government rescued the developers, including a Chinese red capital, from a market slump in the early 1980s. This myth creates misunderstandings, which confuse recent debates about new town development and regional integration with China. To debunk this myth, this article, based on archival research, analyzes the scalar politics of new town planning and explains why the government decided to purchase the land and develop it in a partnership with the developers. It sheds new light on how the regional dynamics in South China after the economic reforms prompted China and Britain to react to the new town proposal at interconnected and contested spatial scales, before the diplomatic negotiations about this British colony’s future officially started.

Purpose

This study aims to explore how urban governance of Hong Kong is impacted by the formulation and implementation of the new constitutional order of “one country, two systems” that distinguishes between the British colonial government and the current government under Chinese sovereignty.

Design/methodology/approach

While the literature recognises the society of Hong Kong has been heavily relying on land and property activities, few attempts notice the uniqueness of Hong Kong’s sequential constitutional orders and its relations to those activities. This study presents a geographical enquiry and an archival study to illustrate the spatiality of the new constitutional order and its implications on land injustice. Drawing from the works of legal geography and urban studies, this study extends and clarifies Anne Haila’s conception of Hong Kong as “property state” to “property jurisdiction”.

Findings

Though common law and leasehold land system were perpetuated from the colonial period, the new constitutional order changed their practices and the underlying logic and ideology. The urban governance order of this property jurisdiction is intended for prosperity and stability of the society, and for the economic benefit and territorial integrity claim of the Chinese sovereignty.

Originality/value

This study enriches the literature of Hong Kong studies in three major areas, namely, the relationship with China, urban governance and land injustice. It offers a conceptual discussion, which contributes to comparative territorial autonomies studies. It also contributes to legal geography by providing insights beyond the western liberal democracy model.

Over the last 2 decades, youth-led protests have increased. However, whereas youth mobilization has been widely examined, why some youth participate while others remain on the sidelines has not been adequately explored and remains not well understood. In 2019, protests against an extradition bill amendment led to unprecedented mass demonstrations, riots, and electoral turnout in Hong Kong. Young people were among the largest and most engaged participant groups during the movement. Yet even though protest action became a part of daily life on campuses, some students who sympathized with the movement did not become active supporters. This analysis examined reasons for non-participation using survey and interview data from undergraduate students. In particular, this study analyzed possible causes for the non-conversion of sympathizers into participants and the erosion of protest participants. Differences among students were explored based on their origin. The findings showed that non-participation was not merely a result of the ineffective mobilization of otherwise highly sympathetic individuals. Instead, perceived (in)effectiveness, identity conflicts, and barriers played an important role in individuals' decisions not to participate in protest action. The findings further our understanding of non-participation and are discussed with respect to students' networked participation, the processual nature and individual agency in non-participation, and the implications for culturally diverse societies.

This article examines Hongkongers' decentralized tactics of resistance in response to the government's suppression of political freedom and misuse of crowd-control chemical weapons, especially tear gas. Through the lens of reproductive justice (RJ), this article illustrates the coalition potential between RJ activists and pro-democracy Hongkongers who enact strategies such as citizen science, community medical care, and cross-generational marches to cultivate a safer environment for all. Amplifying the everyday tactics that Hongkongers deploy at the grassroots level, this article also argues that despite the political outcome and measurable success of any grassroots tactics, it is important for researchers to document and analyze these acts as a way of bearing witness. Although they are contingent on specific historical moments and sociopolitical contexts, these tactics can also help inform future grassroots coalitions and activism.

In this autoethnography, I reflect on my experience navigating the tension among different groups of local and diasporic Hongkongers as we experienced three key events: the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, the US presidential election, and the rise of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiments in the US. Through concepts from feminist and queer theories, such as differential belonging, disidentification, and transformative justice, I highlight moments of transnational coalition and barriers that render cross-national and cross-cultural solidarities difficult.

Much academic research has examined the transformation of Hong Kong people’s national and local identification after 1997. This article further develops the literature by focusing on the notion of cultural othering and adopting the perspective of eventful sociology. It contends that, up to year 2020, an important aspect of Hong Kong people’s identity change was the increasing tendency, especially among the younger generation, to see Hong Kong and Chinese identities as separable from—or even contrasting with—each other. This cultural othering was an ongoing trend augmented by both routinized and unpredicted political events. Analysis of longitudinal and individual-level survey data shows that Legislative Council elections and major social protests strengthened this tendency of othering. This article adds to the understanding of the post-handover development of Hong Kong people’s political identities. Theoretically, the article illustrates the role of political events in the process of cultural othering and identity evolution.

Made and released during protests, riots, and other social crises in Hong Kong, The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967) is a pivotal work that transitions between the conventions of the 1950s social-realist melodrama and the crime film that would flourish in the 1970s and 1980s and is a key cultural piece in Hong Kong’s changing structures of feeling during this volatile period. Lung Kong utilizes the crime film to challenge the dominant values of law and order and investigate how the system of colonial capitalist power in Hong Kong impacted social experience. This essay examines and contextualizes the industrial, historical, and sociopolitical context into which The Story of a Discharged Prisoner emerged to demonstrate how the film is a critical site for negotiating the reshaping of values in the emerging industrial city.

Both pro-establishment Christians, who support ‘obeying the authority’ (Romans 13), and pro-democracy Christians, who participated in the 2014–20 protests, want what is best for Hong Kong and truest to their Christian faith, but they understand those aims differently. The former believe social stability is a way to create space for Christian faith to flourish, while the latter judge that we need to break the current unjust system for Christian faith to begin flourishing. After conducting interviews with lay Christians, we found that both sides can struggle to communicate their vision for faithful Christian political theology. One reason, which we explore here, is that the key theo-political concepts at issue—namely, protest, democracy, and rights—derive from the historical context of post-Christendom societies rooted in the Western Enlightenment tradition. Hong Kong is adjacent to that tradition, but not at home in it. Using the method of ‘narrative portraiture,’ we endeavor to explore their respective theologies. This method uses the participants’ own stories, so that we, as researchers, are not speaking for Hong Kong Christians, but instead illuminating their own ideas. Presenting these lived theologies can remind us, as church leaders, that our congregations are a source of God's revelation to us, even when they may lack the terms to communicate effectively, which is why we should not forget to listen to the “average Jane.”

This review covers 46 research studies from 2007 to 2019, which examine the inflow of asylum seekers and refugees in Hong Kong after the Vietnamese refugee influx in the early 2000s. By analysing existing research studies, the authors summarise three themes, namely refugee law, asylum policies,1 and lived experiences of refugees and asylum seekers, on refugee and asylum studies in contemporary Hong Kong. While further research is needed, scholars can examine the potential possibilities of the legal reform of statutory insufficiencies, the development trajectory of asylum policy instruments with a more appropriate framework, and the protection mechanism of refugees’ and asylum seekers’ children.

The Christian Church needs to be aware of how potential conversions to Christianity might affect individuals holistically. This case study illustrates two elderly Chinese citizens from Hong Kong who converted to evangelical Christianity from folk Taoism. Their conversion experience not only affected their spiritual lives, but also their social and familial lives. As a result, Christian churches in the majority world can consider providing contextualised versions of discipleship, fellowship, and prayer support to new Christian converts. Thus, there is no one way of conversion, and the evangelical Christian church in the majority world needs to be in a supporting position for converts from various backgrounds.

This article traces the Chinese accommodation of foreigners in the lower section of the Pearl River delta during the Opium War to the region’s social ecology in late imperial times. With a long tradition of living with foreign sojourners and their vessels, Chinese people in the delta congregated on an unprecedented scale at the outer anchorages within the present-day Hong Kong region in 1839–1841 to trade with Euro-American merchants and the British expedition. As mobile and violent provisioners and opium dealers, they flourished in the littoral borderland between the Qing and British empires. Their cross-shore ventures constituted an intensification of their prewar activities and an economic adaptive strategy in the competitive society of mid-Qing Guangdong. Centering on the socioeconomic lives of ordinary Chinese people, this article problematizes the usage of “Hanjian” and “collaboration” as nationalist and statist labels to summarize Chinese assistance to foreigners in times of external war in modern China.

Stephen Chow is one of the most commercially and critically successful comedians in Hong Kong’s film history, but his popularity and legacy in other East Asian countries remains understudied. As the South Korean media nowadays still often mention him in their comedy discourse, this article seeks to shed light on Stephen Chow’s stardom, or more precisely, memories of his stardom in South Korea, which endured through the 1990s until the early 2000s. It analyses the YouTube channel B-rated Review, a highly active and popular Korean vidding community for Stephen Chow, on which amateur videos that remix and review his twentieth-century movies are published and discussed. Through the lens of participatory culture and participatory memory, this study examines the discursive strategies employed by the vid creator and commenters to collab- oratively define, translate, and interpret Chow’s sense of humor in the South Korean context. It discusses how they borrow the Korean neologism byeongmat as a foil to argue for the sociocultural relevance of Stephen Chow, and how they use his comedies as a device to evoke nostalgia for their lived experiences. This research, arguing that vidding is a participatory process of not only cultural production but also cultural memory making, demonstrates the active role of user-generated activities in (re)localizing international stardom across time. It seeks to contribute to the belatedly expanding body of literature on Stephen Chow from an intercultural, digital, and audience-centered perspective.

Lo Ting, a mythical half-human and half-fish figure, has been appropriated by local cultural workers since 1997. Based on the 1998 exhibition ‘Hong Kong Reincarnated: New Lo Ting Archaeological Find’ and the film Three Husbands (Fruit Chan, 2018), this article examines the creative agencies of Lo Ting from the perspective of ‘borderscaping’. The study affirms borderscaping as active signifying, discursive and affective practices that involve dynamic processes of adaptation, contestation or resistance in the subject-making of Hong Kong people. Set in two different contexts, post-1997 and post-2014, both productions have arguably sought a new form of becoming or belonging, and envisaged the Hong Kong/China border as something that can (or cannot) be crossed, interpreted and reinvented rather than passively inhabited. By offering new (geo)political-cultural imaginations, they have sought a new spatiality of politics, shifting from the rigid territorial spatialities of the nation-state to representing, negotiating and contesting the ‘where’ of the border.

Although studying music at school can be an enriching and enjoyable experience, it is an unpopular choice for many Hong Kong senior secondary students. The purpose of this study was to examine the rationale behind the low enrolment of music as a Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) subject. A questionnaire was conducted among senior secondary school students (N = 121) studying music at the HKDSE level, collecting information about their learning experiences and their perceptions of the curriculum. The results provided evidence supporting the difficulties and struggles faced by the students, including degrees of familiarity with, and confidence about, subject matters of different musical cultures, which subjects were prioritised when it came to studying, and the amount of prior specialist knowledge needed as part of the decision-making process. Tensions were revealed between the driving forces behind curriculum change and the readiness of students to cope with these changes, along with perceptions of music as an elitist subject with low utilitarian value. Socio-cultural interventions, such as making music education more accessible for all, while simultaneously ensuring that stakeholders’ voices are heard as part of the decolonisation process, remain fundamental challenges facing the curriculum.

This article adopts an ethnographic perspective to present the mental health situation of arrivals from Hong Kong (HK) to the UK on the British National (Overseas) – BN(O) – visa. In the months after the 2019–2020 HK protests, Western and Chinese media announced the onset of a mental health crisis. I discuss the construction of this crisis in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and disaster mental health, which translate the role of trauma from the clinical sphere into a marker of a moral economy. I also argue that the UK and the People's Republic of China classify populations according to ontological structures of distress for political gain. In this way, they participate in ‘damage-centred’ research, which regards BN(O) visa holders in the UK as victims without agency and subject to global players. By taking an anthropological stance on the debates surrounding this nascent immigrant group, I assert that PTSD is always political and that mental health integrates itself into larger goals Hongkongers have regarding their future educational, housing and employment prospects in the UK.

Emotions are essential for mobilization. In the face of violent repression, individual participants evaluate their relational positions in the interaction order within relation to other participants and compare their contributions. This evaluation leads to the arousal of emotions that help sustain mobilization. Using Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement as a case and based on thirty-two in-depth interviews of participants, this article proposes two emotional mechanisms of sustained mobilization. Through the guilt mechanism, interviewees believed that some others were making more contributions, and felt sorry for failing to do more. Interviewees mobilized by the mechanism of moral pleasure and solidarity, on the other hand, argued that participants contributed equally. They took part in the movement out of the desire to fulfill their moral obligations, and they felt good to be part of the movement. The key factor distinguishing the mechanisms was how participants evaluated their positions and contributions compared to other participants.