Submitted Hong Kong articles

The impact of state restriction and surveillance on social media engagement has been widely investigated in communication studies. However, these studies tend not to capture the moment when these restrictions are implemented and citizens experience a high level of uncertainty. Addressing the implementation of a national security law (NSL) in Hong Kong, we used two-wave panel data to understand political engagement on Facebook before and shortly after the law was enacted. We find a serial mediation path in which pan-democratic and localist users (those who tend to oppose the government) showed greater fear of the law; this encouraged more active privacy management which was related to a higher level of engagement after the enactment of NSL, implying that these users responded strategically through restricting the visibility of their engagement. This mediation path is moderated by the level of political disagreement users encountered on Facebook. Implications of the findings are discussed.

This paper intends to investigate how the differentiation between traditional and alternative media is reinforced through the mutual attention among journalists, based on field theory. It further argues that a significant social movement can serve as a critical event which intensifies mutual monitoring among journalists. Focusing on the anti-extradition law amendment bill movement in Hong Kong, this study conducted interviews with 20 reporters from traditional and alternative media. The analysis revealed two mechanisms of mutual monitoring: (a) direct monitoring at protest sites and (b) monitoring published works. Such monitoring activities reinforce the differentiation between traditional and alternative media through encouraging boundary work exercised by traditional media journalists and providing cues for alternative media reporters to cover important perspectives which are missing in the mainstream coverage.

This article investigates the complex entanglement of neutrality and displacement in Hong Kong and Macau with a focus on the impact of and responses to an unprecedented influx of refugees during the Second World War. Displaced persons were of central importance in shaping the ambiguous experience of neutrality before Hong Kong's occupation by Japan in late 1941 and until the end of the war in Macau. Building on Elizabeth Sinn's conceptualization of Hong Kong as an ‘in-between place’, this article considers these two foreign-ruled territories as ‘in-between places’ where multi-layered transborder flows developed in an ‘in-between time’ of neutrality. Highlighting similarities and connections between Hong Kong and Macau, it argues that neutrality was shaped by the movement of refugees and that refugees often experienced neutrality differently depending on perceptions of race, class, and nationality. The presence of diverse communities of refugees shaped multiple dimensions of urban life, with colonial concerns for spatial order and social control co-existing with humanitarian co-operation. The discourses and practices around refugees are an important precedent to understanding post-war refugeedom in these territories.

This article outlines the evolution of Hong Kong consciousness from the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 to the Handover to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 and to the pro-democracy movement of 2019-2020. Whereas Hong Kongers were worried about the disappearance of their culture, way of life, and economic competitiveness in the prelude to the Handover, they confronted a spectrum of opportunism, ethno-nationalism, and recolonization as Hong Kong was gradually assimilated by the PRC. While official narratives tend to portray the governance of Hong Kong as being attacked by a minority of protesters during this period, this article shows that it was rather the maturation of Hong Kong consciousness that was being demonstrated in the process. Protest art, slogans, films, and music functioned as purposive expressions of Hong Kongers’ desire for more political rights, including universal suffrage, freedom of speech, and the rule of law. Meanwhile, the collective will of Hong Kong people was time and again reflected in elections for the Legislative and District Councils. However, the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020 has drastically altered the legal and legislative infrastructure in the city. This article explains how the cultural logic of expiration, first experienced by Hong Kongers in the 1980s and 1990s, has evolved over the twenty-five years since the Handover. Written for a broad audience, this article offers a succinct introduction to Hong Kong for students and non-specialists and advances a fact-based counternarrative for scholars of modern China.

Teachers’ beliefs influence educational goals, teaching practices, and learning outcomes, and are thus of great importance for civics research. This comparative study used semi-structured interviews with 17 teachers in Hong Kong and Germany conducted in 2020 to examine teachers’ beliefs about digital citizenship and education in digital societies. The teachers acknowledged the positive influences of digitalization on information gathering and participation opportunities. They also highlighted the threat of manipulation and interference by antidemocratic actors but rarely reflected on the influences of digitalization on the citizenship concept. Teacher education should facilitate discourses about digital citizenship that go beyond traditional competence models.

The political development in Hong Kong after 1997 displays certain similarities to that in Taiwan. This article uses the term "Taiwanisation of Hong Kong politics" to generalise this trend. A closer look at Hong Kong and Taiwan politics reveals that the essence of this "convergence" is the emergence of "exogenic infighting" that comprises two dimensions, political antagonism and ethno-nationalism. Indeed, "exogenic infighting" politics could be explicated largely by China's triadic leverage. By "localising" this leverage, the centrifugal forces in Hong Kong's constitutional design of autonomy activate two mechanisms, namely intensifying polarisation and mutual shaping, which eventually shape the political trajectories of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, the world's financial hub, is now confronting the pandemic's wrath after remaining relatively unscathed for nearly two years following the advent of the fifth wave of COVID-19 in January 2022. Hong Kong has strictly adhered to mainland China's policy of "Dynamic zero-COVID" as a strategy aimed at containing any outbreaks as soon as they begin. As the highly transmissible variant, Omicron, hits the city and puts the healthcare systems to the test, the strategy that worked so well is beginning to collapse with a 60-fold increase in daily infections since February 1. The ongoing wave is presenting unique complexities, as the population's low vaccination rate among the elderlies and the city's highly dense urban structure are severe causal factors, as they can facilitate rapid transmissions and spread like a wildfire. In Hong Kong, there are about 750 elderly care homes in operation, which provide housing for more than 75,000 elderly people. In such a scenario, elderly care homes may be the weakest link because they are not resilient to these variables, and the elderly and children are especially vulnerable in terms of getting infected and fatalities, as demonstrated in other countries such as the United States and Canada. Given the government's struggles to maintain the zero-COVID policy, it can be asserted that a more "place-based" or territorially responsive strategy to pandemic preparedness is needed at this time.

During China's one-child policy era (1979–2015), birth tourism in Hong Kong (HK) became a way for Chinese parents who wanted more children to avoid the regulations. From 2003 to 2012, about 200,000 babies were born in HK to mainland Chinese parents. This paper explores how the one-child policy, migration regulations, and welfare provision jointly influence family practices of mainland parents who gave birth in HK. Data are drawn from ethnographic research conducted with 45 mothers staying in HK on temporary visas to look after their HK-born children. Research findings show these parents need to negotiate with the following contradictory circumstances: a one-child policy that disregarded cultural preference for sons; migration regimes that separated parent from child and thus challenged the cultural ideal of an intact family; and welfare policies that stigmatized the parents as irresponsible in a context where families are widely regarded as care providers.

The paper investigates the puzzling phenomenon of why Hong Kong citizens have much lower support for increasing spending on social assistance when all other welfare programs have been favored by local residents. With a random sampling survey, we find that citizens’ support towards raising the requirement of immigration is negatively correlated with their support for social assistance (the CSSA scheme). This study highlights that the perception of “who benefits” will influence citizens’ support for welfare spending. The Hong Kong story enriches the debate about the impact of citizens’ attitudes towards immigration on welfare spending against a backdrop of deglobalization and anti-immigration.

Platforms play an increasingly important role in organizing our economic and political systems globally. Drawing on the varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach and the notion of regulatory entrepreneurship, this article introduces the concept of guerilla capitalism to describe an emerging politically led and economic operative logic of platforms: their profitability relies on the active exploitation of legal gray zones and their ability to harness their network power to openly contest and reshape legislation politically. Through a comparative study of Uber’s operation in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, this article demonstrates that, despite the fact that Uber’s guerilla growth strategy remained strong, its political playbooks resulted in diverse dynamics within different regulatory regimes. The article further explains why its playbook was relatively more effective in the democratic context because the firm could successfully mobilize the fictitious voice of the citizens to legitimize its business. Through these three case studies, this article contributes to the existing literature on platform studies by introducing novel uses of political economy. It also enriches the VoC and platform economy literature by studying the behaviors of platforms in East Asian contexts which exist under separate and specific political regimes.

This article explores the tension between missionary hopes for mass conversion through Christian education and the reality of operating mission schools in one colonial context: Hong Kong. Riding on the wave of British imperial expansion, George Smith, the first bishop of the diocese of Victoria, had a vision for mission schooling in colonial Hong Kong. In 1851, Smith established St Paul's College as an Anglo-Chinese missionary institution to educate, equip and send out Chinese young people who would subsequently participate in mission work before evangelizing the whole of China. However, Smith's vision failed to take institutional form as the college encountered operational difficulties and graduates opted for more lucrative employment instead of church work. Moreover, the colonial government moved from a laissez-faire to a more hands-on approach in supervising schools. The bishops of Victoria were compelled to reshape their schools towards more sustainable institutional forms while making compromises regarding their vision for Christian education.

On New Year’s Eve 1959, Ferry to Hong Kong was screened at the Lee Theatre and the Astor in Hong Kong. Produced by Rank as its first CinemaScope feature, the big-budget movie tells the real-life tale of Steven Ragan (he was also known as Michael Patrick O’Brien), a stateless drifter who was stuck for ten months on the ferry sailing between Hong Kong and Macau from September 18, 1952, to July 30, 1953. The British film was Rank’s major Anglo-American joint venture of the year. Positioned within Cold War contexts, Ferry to Hong Kong could be seen as a British cultural-diplomatic response through cinematic soft power to reestablish national assurance on Asian Cold War fronts, following the 1956 Suez Canal debacle that witnessed the death of Britain’s imperial might at the hands of the Eisenhower administration. Unlike such vaunted Hollywood pictures as Soldier of Fortune (1955), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), and The World of Suzie Wong (1960), which imagined the incursions of American white knights into Hong Kong (as a stand-in for China), Ferry to Hong Kong conveyed imperial nostalgia and loss. The film turns the antihero into a paragon of British gallantry who saves the passengers and refugees from the hands of Chinese (Communist) pirates. The sinking ferryboat is the traumatic device used to recall British naval war stories and retell romantic and narcissistic tales of British valor and international influence. More than an adventure of a vagabond, Ferry to Hong Kong was an espionage thriller in uneasy disguise. The film preceded Gilbert’s three James Bond films, all of which affirmed the power of the individual in cracking transboundary networks of espionage and political intrigue.

Keywords
Anglo-American coproduction, Cold War tourism, Hong Kong cinema, orientalism, Orson Welles

This article examines the commercial diplomacy between Britain and the People’s Republic of China during the 1970s and early 1980s, especially in relation to the British colony of Hong Kong. Recent historiography has focused on the negotiations over the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty, agreed in 1984, and tends to argue that Hong Kong’s status as a colony was a hindrance to British attempts at improving relations with China during the 1970s and 1980s. Using two related case studies of British attempts to sell railway equipment to Hong Kong and China, this article addresses this debate before and in the immediate aftermath of China’s opening up in the late 1970s. It argues that whilst Hong Kong was a subsidised market for British-made rolling stock, its value as a ‘shop window’ for facilitating Sino-British trade was limited. Hong Kong was not a hindrance to British railway manufacturers exporting to China; but neither was it much of a help.

United front work has long been an important tool through which the Chinese Communist Party exercises political influence in Hong Kong. While existing works have revealed the history, actors, and impact of united front work in this semiautonomous city, few studies have focused on its changing structure and objectives in the post-handover period. Using publicly available reports and an original event dataset, we show that united front work has involved a steady organizational proliferation of social organizations coupled with their increasingly frequent interaction with the mainland authorities and the Hong Kong government. We argue that united front work has become more decentralized and multilayered in its structure and that its objective has been shifting from elite co-optation to proactive countermobilization against pro-democracy threats. Our findings indicate that state power in post-handover Hong Kong does not solely belong to governmental institutions; it is increasingly exercised through an extensive network comprising multiple state and social actors.

Inglehart’s theory of postmaterialism outlines the influence of intergenerational value change on social change. While the sense of security during a formative period is an essential context for postmaterialist values to be bred among the younger generation in democratic states, social protests and political instability are common in some hybrid regimes. Yet how social protests in a hybrid regime interfere in the building of postmaterialism and its association with other value has been underresearched. Based on the data collected from the seventh wave of the World Value Survey in Hong Kong in 2018 (N = 1,031), this paper investigates the role of a critical event—the Umbrella Movement in 2014—in moderating the relationship between a postmaterialist orientation and perceived quality of elections in Hong Kong. It reveals that the negative relationship between a postmaterialist orientation and perceived quality of Hong Kong’s election was stronger among the people who supported and participated in the Umbrella Movement. Moreover, the moderation effect of the Umbrella Movement was stronger among young people. This paper underscores the context of socialisation in influencing both a postmaterialist orientation and intergenerational change occurring during a critical event, which sheds light on the relationship between value change and authoritarian resilience.

Reviewing the extant literature on China's public sphere from the perspective of 20th-century history and social science, this introductory essay argues for the continued relevance of studying the publications and public practices associated with knowledge communities. By steering away from normative definitions and by envisaging publicness as a process, a connection can be explored between social discourses and political practices in China. Discursive communities, based on shared identity or sociability, may appear marginal, but at key moments they can play a unique role in modifying the dynamics of political events.

This paper surveys the process of discursive contestation by intellectual agents in Hong Kong that fostered a counter-public sphere in China's offshore. In the post-war era, Chinese exiled intellectuals leveraged the colony's geopolitical ambiguity and created a displaced community of loyalists/dissenters that supported independent publishing venues and engaged in the cultural front. By the 1970s, homegrown and left-wing intellectuals had constructed a hybrid identity to articulate their physical proximity to, yet social distance from, the Chinese nation-state, as well as to appropriate their sense of belonging to the city-state, through confronting social injustice. In examining periodicals and interviewing public intellectuals, I propose that this counter-public sphere was defined first by its alternative voice, which contested various official discourses, second by its multifaceted inclusiveness, which accommodated diverse worldviews and subjectivities, and third by its critical platform, which nurtured social activism in undemocratic Chinese societies. I differentiate the permissive conditions that loosened constraints on intellectual agencies from the productive conditions that account for their penetration and diffusion. Habermas's idealized public sphere framework is revisited by bringing in ideational contestation, social configuration and cultural identity.

The extant social movement literature tends to regard the youth as radical actors and senior citizens as conservative actors. However, the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong exhibited strong solidarity among protesters across generations, despite the radicalization of protest actions over an extended period. These phenomena contradict Hong Kong's traditional political culture, which favors peaceful and orderly protests and the worldwide trend where radicalization often leads to internal division in movements. By analyzing the data collected from onsite protest surveys in December 2019 and January 2020 (N = 1,784), this paper presents the mediating role of guilt in shifting senior citizens from opposing radical actions to supporting them and feeling solidarity with militant protesters. We find that the relationship between age and feelings of guilt is stronger among respondents who experience state repression. The findings shed light on the affective and relational dimensions of protest participation, showing how the traumatic conditions under which different social actors are welded together by shared emotional upheavals facilitate ingroup identification and affective solidarity.

Much contemporary social mobilization is digitally enabled. Digital media may provide the communication platforms on which supporters deliberate movement goals, share information, discuss tactics, and generate discourses in response to ongoing happenings. Yet digital media’s capability to serve these functions should depend on platform-specific affordances and movement dynamics. Based on such premises, this article examines how the online forum LIHKG became the central communication platform in the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong. Empirically, digital media and content analysis data help establish the forum’s prominence during the first few months of the movement, while analyses of protest onsite survey data show how the use of LIHKG systematically related to several movement-related attitudes among the protesters. The article highlights the affordances and movement dynamics that allow the forum to play the role. It contributes to understanding the factors that shape the role and impact of digital media platforms in social mobilization.

Does life satisfaction (LS) predict people’s likelihood of participating in politics? Although the relationship between LS and political participation (PP) has been widely debated, its correlation and causality remain inconclusive. We contribute to the literature by exploring the moderation effect of post-materialist value orientation. By conceptualizing the conventionality of PP as a continuous spectrum, we suggest a new typology beyond the dichotomous understanding. Seventh-wave data from the World Values Survey in Hong Kong indicate that individuals who are more dissatisfied with their lives are more likely to engage in radicalized actions such as strikes and boycotts. This negative relationship is particularly strong among people with a post-materialist orientation, yet LS is not related to electoral participation and normalized actions, including peaceful demonstrations commonly regarded as ‘unconventional’ in previous studies. Furthermore, the results of propensity score matching reinforce the causal claim that LS predicts radicalized action negatively.