Submitted Hong Kong articles

While cross-dressing performance in Chinese opera has been extensively studied in various disciplines, the existing scholarship has a stronger emphasis on male actors playing female roles in Peking opera. This ethnography sheds light on women’s cross-dressing in Cantonese opera (yueju) in contemporary Hong Kong. Women playing the leading male role (the wenwusheng) is a century-old performance practice. Female wenwusheng being pursued by female fans is a noteworthy and yet understudied phenomenon. Based on my 2012–2016 ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses on the performative aspect of female wenwusheng’s androgynous embodiments onstage and off. I examine fandom within this mostly homosocial space by studying the interplay between female wenwusheng’s public, onstage performances and their informal, offstage engagement with fans. I suggest that, by manipulating the gender ambiguity and ambivalence that extends from their onstage to offstage personas, female wenwusheng provoke homoerotic emotional intimacy that ties them and their fans together. Neither passing as men onstage nor appropriating male actors’ masculinity is the female wenwusheng’s goal. Their performance and offstage mingling provide an affective emerging space that accommodates the fluidities of gendered identities and sexualities. Female wenwusheng’s embodied androgyny also enriches Cantonese opera, as a seemingly heterosexist traditional art form, with queer sensibility.

This study focuses on the Hong Kong Lennon Walls and the communications posted there. We assert that the physical placement of COVID-19 related images on the Lennon Walls of Hong Kong and the replication of symbols and iconography from the Umbrella Movement and the Anti-ELAB Movement situated COVID-19 discourse not only physically within but also symbolically within the contentious politics of Hong Kong. We conclude that the messages and images posted on Lennon Walls between January and April 2020 have used COVID-19 to extend public expression of sentiment on the debates around the Hong Kong government and to further mobilize a sense of Hong Kong identity against China. The findings contribute to the understandings of how the cultural politics surrounding the pandemic became a collective action frame in the mobilization of a localized Hong Kong political identity against the Hong Kong and Chinese governments.

Grounded in the heterogenous linguistic and cultural landscape of Hong Kong, this article proposes a translational approach to the practice of world cinema, focusing on director Wong Kar-wai, via World Literature and the poetry of Leung Ping-kwan. Wong is a lyrical cinematic stylist, while Leung had a strong scholarly interest in cinema and produced many collaborations with visual artists. Both are highly attuned to the distinctiveness of daily life in Hong Kong despite its infusion of international influences. Moving beyond a model which sees translation as a secondary process carrying a work beyond its local context, I use Sakai Naoki’s concept of the “heterolingual address” to trace how translation becomes foundational to these artists’ engagement with the multilayered space and uneven temporality of Hong Kong.

Although the literature on political consumerism is prolific, political consumerism as a form of domestic political resistance is under-explored. The nascent ‘Yellow Economy’ in Hong Kong – in which citizens have boycotted pro-government (‘blue’) business and buycotted pro-democracy (‘yellow’) businesses – is an economic front of the pro-democracy movement that emerged in 2019. With rising political threats following the imposition of the national security law, street protests and other forms of contention politics have been stifled. The Yellow Economy, however, has become a new protest repertoire that has helped to sustain the movement. Drawing upon 26 semi-structured interviews with the Yellow Economy’s supporters from May to July 2020, as well as secondary data including newspaper articles, this article finds that a shared collective identity among pro-democracy citizens primarily gives rise to consumer activism in Hong Kong. Even though the initiative could not yield intended outcomes, i.e., resource mobilization and political opportunity expansion, pro-democracy citizens have continued engaging in political consumerism to express their solidarity. Furthermore, consumer activism and pro-democracy citizens’ identity are mutually reinforcing.

This paper proposes a tripartite model describing the lexical categories across different registers and levels of formality in the Cantonese language in contemporary Hong Kong: (i) native Cantonese words, (ii) Sino-Cantonese words, and (iii) Anglo-Cantonese words. Examples of authentic Cantonese use were used to illustrate the histories and etymology of key lexical categories and sub-categories as found in the city’s linguistic landscape. As a sensitising device, the proposed classificatory model highlights the role of lexical borrowings in the constitution of contemporary Cantonese lexis, whilst decentring a primarily Mandarin-based approach to research and practice. Given the authenticity and omnipresence of Cantonese use across spoken and written modalities in contemporary Hong Kong, this paper argues that there is much scope for disambiguating and systematising the place of Cantonese lexis in the local Chinese language curriculum. In this regard, the case of Chinese language provision for ethnolinguistic minority learners with Chinese-as-an-Additional-Language (CAL) needs in post-handover Hong Kong is put forth to call attention to the utility of this descriptive model in mitigating against the learning and pedagogical issues associated with the disconnect between the curriculum and authentic language use, as well as linguistic disintegration.

This paper draws on ethnographic data to investigate consumer flow in two retail sites and the urban territories that exist through them. The nature of urbanization is an integral and evolving factor in the everyday life of city-dwellers; however, the local forms of global–urban space remains opaque. This paper employs a flow and territory approach to analyse global retail culture in two local settings: a shopping mall and a flea market. While each retail site is defined by transnational connection, their respective locations in the global are products of very different urban territories. As such, the capability to make connections and territorialize global flows of retail goods becomes integral to understand the form of the urban constituting each retail site. Where the shopping mall can delineate the global to just the ‘world’s best’, the flea market is overwhelmed by the global flows of consumer excess. The analysis contributes a territorial approach to the study of cultural globalization, showing how globalization is demarcated by boundaries that are both local and global, real and virtual, making such global flows a resource or a threat to structuring one’s social world.

Previous studies of electoral authoritarianism identified that manipulations demobilize opposition supporters. Yet, less is known about whether radicals are more prone to abstention than moderates in manipulated elections. To answer this question, we disentangle two mechanisms of demobilization effect—the efficacy mechanism and the electoral supply mechanism—that have different expectations on the turnout rate of radicals and moderates. Our research leverages the disqualification controversy in Hong Kong in 2016, after which radical candidates who advocate self-determination or independence were filtered out from the electoral market. Using both aggregate-level and individual-level data, our analysis shows that a substantive demobilization effect exists. Crucially, we find that radicals and moderates are demobilized to a similar extent, and the decreases in perceived electoral fairness and importance of voting are similar between the two factions. These findings suggest that the efficacy mechanism is a more plausible explanation of the demobilization effect. Overall, this study extends our understanding of voting behavior and political attitude of opposition supporters in face of autocratization.

There has been a rise in archival activism, including the birth of social movement archives, leveraging marginalised communities’ voices, and challenging mainstream discourses. Through a case study of the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive (UMVA) in Hong Kong, this paper explores the risks faced by and the strategies of the archivists when preserving social movement objects amidst rapid autocratisation. Based on semi-structured interviews and documents analysis, this paper argues that autocratisation significantly restrains political opportunities for archival activism. When Hong Kong was relatively liberal before 2020, the UMVA encountered problems common in community archives in liberal democracies, such as sustainability crises and loss of public attention. Even so, archivists could still manage the risk by facilitating public communication and group solidarity. Nonetheless, the rapid autocratisation of Hong Kong since 2020 has created extreme political risks for archivists and the collection. Archivists could only migrate the archives overseas, resulting in public inaccessibility of the collection. While most extant literature on archival activism focuses on democratic or post-transitional context, this project offers an authoritarian-political perspective that tests the limits of the notion in the global wave of democratic backsliding.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, more than 230,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers arrived in Hong Kong and were detained in former military barracks, industrial buildings, and on remote islands. Although many of the refugee camps were in dense urban areas, the Vietnamese were segregated from Hong Kong's dazzling city life, and their presence was not known to many Hong Kong people. There is no plaque, sign, or demarcation of these structures. This paper retrieves the history of the Vietnamese refugee camps and considers them as an integral part of Hong Kong's urbanscape. In this effort, this research focuses on two case studies: Jubilee Camp in Sham Shui Po and San Yick Camp in Tuen Mun. We argue that the Crown land rule—the government as the owner of almost all land in Hong Kong—defined the Vietnamese refugee camps and their legacy in Hong Kong.

Extending critical luxury studies to a non-Western context, this article, using Burberry and other Western brands as examples, theorises how the temporal-spatial luxury subjectivity of homosexual Hong Kong male consumers is constituted through the intersections of British colonial history, nostalgia, the media, their personal and professional background, gender, social class, and emotional experiences. Using a consumer-focused anthropological perspective, we analyse how subjective, context-specific, and interwoven experiences of time and space co-constitute one’s perception of luxury and recurring luxury consumption practices alongside the forces of social structure and individual preferences. Dissecting consumers’ habitual and intimate relations to their wardrobes in the Hong Kong context, this article challenges and refines existing Eurocentric concepts of luxury, and helps clarify how (far) abstract macro-structural forces are consistently materialised into the normative outlook of luxury and micro-individual consumption practices.

This paper examines the public routines through which migrant domestic workers inhabit a global city such as Hong Kong. Using ‘public outings’ as a conceptual entry point to understanding migrants’ mobile geographies of dwelling, it seeks to present such migrants as ordinary urban actors who inhabit, share and shape the city landscape every day just like many others. Whilst disciplined by their employers in all sorts of ways, domestic workers nonetheless use the public and quasi-public spaces within their neighbourhoods – spaces integral to their work routines – as sites for forging a precarious autonomy. Drawing on a short ethnography – using participant diaries, interviews, and participant observation – of live-in migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, the paper describes how migrants use a range of neighbourhood spaces to create an improvised infrastructure of care that helps creates a sense of domesticity and home.

This research challenges the growing theoretical Global North–South divide and refines an ‘ex-centric’ theorisation of creative labour in the context of the increasingly monopolising but competitive capitalism in Asia. While it argues that job insecurity is not just a universal, objective condition, but varying, subjective experiences of anxiety and dissatisfaction for creative workers, we adopt a pluralist epistemological approach and identify the nuanced intersections among key global, local, and sectoral trends – increased use of digital technology, an Indigenous and outdated work ethic, and a devaluation of creativity both in industry and society – that co-configure Hong Kong creative workers’ divergent perceptions of and responses to job insecurities. Rather than merely focusing on job tenure insecurity and employment insecurity, we classify and highlight the conceptual distinctions among eight types of job insecurity for Hong Kong creative workers, some of which enable creative worker-actor’s response, resilience, and resistance to the exploitative creative labour process.

Previous research on fashion, clothing and accessorising practices typically stressed either the symbolic and identity-creating or practical and habitual functions of fashion, often neglecting its affective, emotive and mnemonic aspects. Drawing on affective theory and the agency of things, we theorise how the affects, feelings and emotions attached to active and inactive fashion objects evoke and are evoked by the consumer’s ongoing reminiscence, reconciliation, and renewal of memories. Remapping the intricate relationship among consumers, memory, affect, and fashion objects, this article employs wardrobe study interviews to reconceptualise the clothing consumption, storage and disposal practices of male fashion consumers in Hong Kong and their trans-temporal self-memory-object relationships. Interviewing 21 gay male participants while physically going through their wardrobes together reveals the mnemonic abilities of clothes and accessories to bring up the past, their functioning as emotive devices, and the process of how affective, unpatterned feelings and sensations are reminisced, reconciled and renewed through fashion. These unique theoretical and methodological approaches make it possible to delve deeper into consumers’ intimate material and sensual relationships with clothing and accessory items, which are often used to make sense of incongruent memories and future fantasies, also enabling their ongoing mediation of unresolved affective experiences and curation of a linear cultural script of personal development.

This article examines the 2019 Hong Kong protests from the perspective of urban space and the city's historical founding as a colonial entrepôt. Specifically, it explores how the protests destabilized both the urban fabric of the city and the political and economic agreements that have defined the city's governance since handover. The analysis of the protests, and of the history leading up to them, is informed by writings on democracy and space by Chantal Mouffe and Doreen Massey, and considers the work of activists, researchers, and journalists whose voices have often been out of step with the movement and with international media narratives that have defined it. The article provides historical and theoretical insight into the role of both collaboration and conflict in the formation of the city's political identity and points to possibilities for engaging with the still‐open question of the meanings and practices of democracy in Hong Kong.

In this article, the author advances understandings of the coloniality of British citizenship through the close examination of the status of the people of Hong Kong in Britain’s immigration and nationality legislation. This is a case that has been overlooked in most social scientific analysis of Britain’s citizenship–migration nexus. The article responds to Gurminder Bhambra’s call to recognise the connected sociologies and histories of citizenship, and the analysis is informed by the close reading of historical changes in legislation – from decolonisation and the making of the British nation-state to the post-Brexit construction of ‘Global Britain’ – and what these have meant for the people of Hong Kong. In dialogue with scholarship focused on the enduring colonial ties in present-day citizenship and migration regimes, the article offers an analysis inspired by Manuela Boatcă’s coloniality of citizenship and Ann Laura Stoler’s understanding of exception by design: imperial forms of governance producing differential rights within national populations that position some populations as ambiguous. Conceptualising the status of Hong Kongers in British legislation past and present as ambiguous by design, the author questions what the rhetoric of the Hong Kongers as ‘good migrants’ for ‘Global Britain’, the narrative at the heart of the promotion of the bespoke Hong Kong British Nationals (Overseas) (HK BN(O)) visa launched in early 2021, conceals from view. As the author argues, rather than a case apart in the context of increasingly restrictive immigration controls, the renewal of Britain’s obligations, commitments and responsibilities to the people of Hong Kong through this visa scheme provides further evidence of the enduring colonial entanglements in the formation of ‘Global Britain’ and its citizenship–migration nexus.

While existing studies assert that citizens actively use digital media to exert their political agency, the various roles and impacts of digital media should be further unpacked. Building on the notions of ‘digital democratic affordance’ and ‘cross-platform play’, this article uniquely theorises political consumerism as a multi-scalar mode of human–non-human interactions. The concept of multi-scalar cross-platform affordances is formulated to demonstrate how different digital platforms – large or small, corporate or amateur, global or local – co-constitute an environment in which citizens are progressively channelled to engage in multiple platforms, reinvent them in concert with one another and participate in political consumption across time and space. In the case of the Yellow Economic Circle, against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement, we examine such cross-platform dynamics and their multi-scalar enactment of everyday political consumption practices across four stages: deliberation, crowdsourcing, materialisation and habituation.

Over the past decade, Hong Kong’s art market has experienced unprecedented growth, emerging as the second largest in the world in 2020 in terms of contemporary art auctions. Factors such as the city’s free-market economy and well-developed infrastructure, as well as its unique position as a gateway to the large and growing Chinese art market, have led to major global art fairs and galleries establishing their presence in the city, in addition to the already present international auction houses. Moreover, the recent opening of M+, Hong Kong’s new museum of visual culture, as part of the West Kowloon Cultural District, is designed to further seal Hong Kong’s position and contribute to the continued growth of its art market. This paper explores the Hong Kong art ecosystem and its sustainability by focusing on leading art market institutions, anchor cultural organizations, and other key actors driving the development of the Hong Kong art system, on both the commercial and the nonprofit side; the effects of the expanding art market on the city’s art scene; the dynamics of the relationship between the Hong Kong art market and the broader Chinese art market; and the key emerging opportunities and challenges to Hong Kong’s future development as Asia’s premier art hub.

This article formulates a class critique that fosters productive tensions between global queering discourses and a Chinese homophobic order affecting Hong Kong and other ethnic Chinese societies. Vis-à-vis middle- and working-class Hong Kong gay men’s subjective constructions of homophobia, the findings demonstrate that class was configured through different geographical referents of everyday queer struggle, namely the West and China, with which my informants compared Hong Kong. This spatial manifestation of class was the result of an unequal cosmopolitan condition which enabled my middle-class informants to see, while excluding their working-class counterparts from seeing, Hong Kong as a gay-friendly city. Drawing on the geography of sexuality and the sociology of class and mobility, this article argues that Hong Kong is a significant site for understanding multidirectional flows of queer globalization.

As one of the most densely populated places in the world, Hong Kong fared relatively well in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a very low number of cases and fatalities per capita. This was mostly due to the Hong Kong government, healthcare workers, and the general public’s institutional and individual memory after they successfully overcame the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003. However, while Hong Kong was well accustomed to measures such as wearing masks and social distancing, the cooperation of the Hong Kong public to government restrictions was highly affected by its local political context, especially after widespread anti-government protests began mid-2019. This brought the public’s trust in government to an all-time low, creating a political ‘new normal’, which underpinned how COVID-19 policies would be proposed, accepted, and implemented, if at all. To understand how science advice was offered and how public health decisions were made, this research investigates the evolution of Hong Kong’s science advisory mechanisms for public health from before SARS, after SARS, and during COVID-19 in 2020, including the roles of key organisations and departments, the establishment of new centres and committees, and the creation of workgroups and expert advisory panels. This paper compares and analyses the reasons behind these differences in science advisory mechanisms between SARS and COVID-19. The findings from this research reinforce the unquestionable need for robust science advisory structures and knowledgeable scientific experts to solve health-related crises, though more research is required to understand the ways in which science advice influences both policy decisions and public acceptance of these policies.

The 2019 Anti-extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong has generated global support on both the narrative side and through material donations. This article compares global support networks organized by Taiwanese and overseas Hong Kongers. Drawing on interview data with 17 Taiwanese and 13 overseas Hong Kongers regarding the reasons, processes and meanings of donation to Hong Kong protesters, we found that even though both groups organized support networks in different ways and have different perceived risks and motivations, they both engage in pro-democracy activism and consider a shared/imagined political future (vis-a-vis China). By examining Hong Konger and Taiwanese support networks, this article applies a concept of connective activism that features a transnational democracy network that is based on shared beliefs, a gradual understanding of each other's experiences, and an imagined political future.