This article examines the news framing of the 2017 Hong Kong Chief Executive election using a big data analysis approach. Analyses of intermedia framing of over 370,000 articles and comments are conducted including news published in over 30 Chinese press media, four prominent Chinese online press media, and posts published on three candidates’ Facebook pages within the election period. The study contributes to the literature by examining the rarely discussed role of intermedia news framing, especially the relationship between legacy print media, online alternative news media, and audience comments on candidates’ social network sites. The data analysis provides evidence that audiences’ comments on candidates’ Facebook pages influenced legacy news coverage and online alternative news coverage. However, this study suggests that legacy news media and comments on Facebook do not necessarily have a reciprocal relationship. The implication of the findings and limitations are discussed.

Folk economics has become increasingly influential in today’s era, where laypeople can
(inter)actively deconstruct official discourse and form their truth in social media. This
article examines the formation and popularization of folk economics by investigating the
localized China collapse theory known as zhibao in one of the most influential online
forums in Hong Kong. By analyzing the popularization of zhibao as citizen curation – the
subjective and non-professional collection, assessment, and criticism of information by
participants in online discussions for the benefit of the group – this article questions the
dichotomy between folk economics and mainstream economics, arguing that laypeople
may selectively appropriate conventional economics into their discourse. Furthermore,
by investigating the citizen curation of zhibao diachronically, this article suggests that
online discussion participants’ attention to the credibility of the news sources may be
negatively related to the credibility of the discourse they are curating.

During the recent wave of pro-democracy movement across the world, new media technologies play a vital role in mobilizing participants. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the role of social media in empowering grassroots movements, but the rise of alternative media was somehow ignored. This study examines the impacts of social media and alternative media on social movement participation. The data came from a survey of 769 students from eight public universities in Hong Kong at the height of the Umbrella Movement. The findings revealed that acquisition of political information from social media and alternative media is associated with social movement participation through different mechanisms. Specifically, social media serve as an echo chamber where people are motivated to participate by perceiving a homogeneous opinion climate and forming a pro-protest attitude. In contrast, alternative media serve as an attitude intensifier to facilitate social movement participation.

Purpose
This paper explores how the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSARG) securitizes internal security, cultural identity and welfare system through refugee policy instruments. It also aims to explore the roles of members of the Legislative Council (Legco) and Chinese newspapers in the securitization process

Design/methodology/approach
The author analyzed 6 landmark verdicts, 342 related documents of the Legco, 2,386 news coverages and 408 editorials/ column articles from 6 selected Chinese newspapers from 2005 to mid-2019. While documents of the Legco were collected from the Legco archives, news reports, editorials and column articles were gathered on Wisenews with the keywords, namely, refugees, asylum seekers, torture claims and non-refoulement claims.

Findings
The author argues that the advanced comprehensive security approach helps to comprehend the securitization process in Hong Kong. The HKSARG, Legco members of the pro-government camp and pro-government Chinese newspapers perform as securitizing actors who regard refugees as an existential threat to the referent objects, i.e. internal security, cultural identity and welfare system.

Research limitations/implications
There are two significant limitations, namely, the coverage of newspapers and the absence of poll data. This paper merely selected six Chinese newspapers, which do not cover English newspapers and some other Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong. It may neglect some important data. Additionally, owing to the absence of longitudinal poll data, the author chose not to examine the related materials.

Originality/value
This paper intends to be the first study to provide a longitudinal examination of the transformations of current refugee policies in Hong Kong.

This essay explores the queer literary modernism of Hong Kong and Singapore since the 1990s to
make several interventions. While the two cities have been studied as exemplars of postcolonial
state formation in which finance capitalism contributes to the rise of modernity, their queer
modernism in the literary and cultural spheres has largely escaped comparative studies. To
address this blind spot, I examine two literary texts of gay male urbanism, namely Bryan Yip’s
2003 Hong Kong queer novel, Suddenly Single and Johann S. Lee’s 1992 coming-of-age queer
Singaporean novel, Peculiar Chris, as cases of “queer vernacularism.” Specifically, Yip and Lee’s
queer vernacular modernism—especially their references to Hong Kong and Singaporean popular
culture, urban space, and soundscapes of modernity—altogether exceeds the familiar boundary
of queer transnationalism and actualizes other modes of minor transnational desire. This essay
concludes with a brief analysis of Yonfan’s 1995 Hong Kong film Bugis Street, which visualizes the
bygone past of Singapore’s 1950–1970s sexual utopia and transgender imaginary.

Despite being designed to go unnoticed, censorship apparatus would occasionally manifest itself under various circumstances. In this study, we formulate four layers of censorship exposure where individual users can come across censorship. We investigate how different layers of censorship exposure influence users’ opinion expressions. Results show that people tend to stay silent when the censorship in the global environment is intensive, whereas they tend to “rebel” against censorship by voicing their opinions, when they experience censorship themselves or witness censorship occurring to their friends or reference persons. We also find community acts as a critical buffer against the influences of censorship. Outspoken crowd could shield individuals from the fear of punishment and outspoken friends could mitigate individuals’ anger against censorship. In either case, individuals can be liberated from their overconcern with censorship and be empowered to act for themselves.

This article examines the experiential and analytical routes of the researchers-authors’ webproject
titled ‘Making Home: Tai Hang’, which investigates Hong Kong home culture by accessing
informants’ domestic world through different layers of interpretation via hypermedia presentation.
The web-project’s [http://taihang.scm.cityu.edu.hk/#en] multilayered navigation structure—playful
yet scholarly introduction, ‘tourlike’ yet distant ‘virtual’ field experiences, participants’ situated yet
performative accounts of home lives, and the researchers-authors’ inductive categorizations—
communicate multi-dimensional ethnographic accounts of home culture in Hong Kong. Employing
media in isolation and in interaction (i.e. graphic illustrations, panorama photography, interaction
of images and audio vignettes of participants’ narration and researcher-participant dialogues, and
multiple micro-narratives on objects) via website’s hypermedia nature, we argue that hypermedia
representation affords engaged and critical readings of ethnographic knowledge as situated and
multivocal, interpretive and constructed.

Hong Kong has one of the least affordable housing markets in the world, but little is
known about its housing advertisements, which constitute important discourses that
shape the cultural ideal of homeownership. In many ways, Hong Kong’s property market
represents that of other ‘global cities’, which are important nodes of global culture and
capital flows. How do private property developers market housing in this context,
where the nature of housing has developed from accommodation to investment/speculation?
What can housing advertisements tell us about the nature of housing consumption,
the role of the state and housing developers in a global city like Hong Kong? Using
both content and textual analyses, this article presents findings from a longitudinal study
of Hong Kong’s private housing newspaper advertisements between 1961 and 2011 and
examines how and why representations of the ideal home have changed. Unlike the
existing literature on housing advertisements which are mostly ideological critiques or
socio-historical accounts of housing advertisements in consumer capitalism, our analysis
utilises insights from Baudrillard’s political economy of the sign and Lipovetsky’s concept
of hypermodernity. Our contextual and longitudinal analysis contributes to the existing literature by integrating temporality with the three modalities of housing consumption,
that is, as living space, investment and financial speculation. We argue that from the late
1970s onwards, Hong Kong government policy actively promotes homeownership and a
housing hierarchy discourse, as housing advertisements changed from emphasising functionalities
and everyday living in 1961–1981, to privatised quality living in 1991–2001,
and abstract living and ‘hyperindividualistic’ political subjectivity in 2011. By demonstrating
the increased abstraction of living, the promotion of the hyperreal, and private
housing as objects of financial speculation as evidenced in the construction of ideal
homes, we illuminate key features of and inequalities associated with housing advertisements
in a global city in neoliberal, late capitalism.

Building on insights from critical luxury studies, this paper examines how developers produce ‘luxury’ in Hong
Kong’s high-priced housing by using textual analysis on a sample of newspaper advertisements for private
housing from 1961 to 2011. Findings show how advertisers and developers actively injected new elements
of luxury to maximise profits. We argue that Hong Kong’s property oligarchy has successfully created luxury
housing in previously unremarkable locations by producing various exclusivist aspirations, thus promoting
excess and reinforcing housing and socio-spatial inequalities. Our discussion deepens understanding of Hong
Kong’s housing hierarchy by looking beyond location-based exclusivity and contributes to critical luxury
studies by underscoring the strategies of property conglomerates in the production of luxury housing.

Using Evans Chan’s documentary Raise the Umbrellas (2016) as a springboard, this essay examines the role gender identity and sexual orientation plays in Hong Kong’s rich history of protest culture.