opening paragraph:Time-lapse video amplifies the speed of traffic, people, and their movement around the cityscape of Hong Kong. In a video, "The Best Is Yet to Come," dedicated to promoting Hong Kong as "Asia's World City," for example, writers used the magnification of speed to emulate the dynamics of capital's never-ending flow.1 Time-lapse brands Hong Kong and creates a visual metaphor for the elusiveness of "connectivity" that depicts Hong Kong culture as one of rapidity and instant gratification. Recently, speed has been foremost on the mind of Hong Kongers caught in the political quagmire surrounding what has been lambasted as "white elephant" projects devoted to more speedy connections to mainland China. Time-lapse forms the idealized mirror image of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, which, without station stops cuts traveling time to Guangzhou from two hours down to forty-eight minutes. The fantasy of uninhibited speed occludes the controversy of the co-location agreement that ceded Hong Kong territory to the mainland allowing for the practice of Chinese law on Hong Kong soil in direct counter-indication of Hong Kong's mini-constitution. "One train, two systems" directly challenges "One country, two [End Page 619] systems." Plagued by financial woes and construction setbacks, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau mega bridge connects Hong Kong to the Pearl River Delta and puts each city within an hour's commute of each other. Faster and more efficient connections between locations in southern China cemented a new geographical and economic proposition envisioned by officials as the Greater Bay Area. In the context of Hong Kong, faster connections also compress space by supposedly bringing "two systems" closer in a more harmonious temporal and political network.

This article examines how schools in Hong Kong attempt to craft South Asian migrant students into desirable citizens and how the youths understand themselves as members of Hong Kong and of a global community. The contestation has to do both with how South Asians are viewed in Hong Kong and with how post-colonial Hong Kong is related to China. The process of citizen-making of transnational youths, I argue, is best understood at the local–national–global intersection.

Government response to public opinion is essential to democratic theory and practice. However, previous research on the relationship between public opinion and government attention predominantly focuses on western societies. Little is known about such relationship in nonwestern or nondemocratic societies. Drawing upon time-series data of public opinion polls and government press releases, this study examines the dynamic relationships between public opinion and government attention in posthandover Hong Kong. The findings reveal that the responsiveness of the Hong Kong government to public opinion varies across issue domains and is constrained by the political power from the central government in Beijing.

This is a study of a group of Hong Kong social workers who have worked in mainland China for the past decade building a social work profession. In an unfamiliar environment full of uncertainties and obstacles, the interactions of these overseas professionals with local state and societal actors have effected change in the transmission of knowledge and techniques across borders, forging of local alliances to initiate change, adaptation of professional practices to local contexts, and contestation of encroachments on their professional autonomy, ethics, and standards. In their endeavours to introduce novel knowledge and practices into the mainland, these social workers have actively engaged with state agents and inspired indigenous societal actors, attempting to turn them into ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ and to create opportunities and platforms for state-in-society rather than state-versus-society scenarios.

Shaped by a host of antecedent factors, the Umbrella Movement in 2014 gave rise to a new political consciousness in Hong Kong’s civil society. The term “Umbrella Generation” has been widely used in the wake of the political struggle. This article takes the movement as a pivotal case study of the formation of a new political generation through the intersection of sociodemographic, political, and cultural changes. This entailed not only antistate opposition by citizens of that generation but also a process of generational change mediated by various contending forces. Considering both inter- and intragenerational dynamics, this article integrates the insights of generational theory with a cultural analysis of discourse and dramaturgy—the umbrella protests as street theater—as well as a political analysis of agency, conflict, and leadership shifts.

The Umbrella Movement, which took place in Hong Kong between 26 September and
15 December 2014, was indisputably a defining moment in the former colony. The authors
argue that the Umbrella Movement was not a single, contingent political incident. Rather it
represented a structural change in Hongkongers’ perceived relations with the Chinese government,
which was deeply connected with the change of specific cultural, economic and political factors
pertinent to Hong Kong society in the past three decades. In conclusion, the authors suggest that
Hongkongers’ cultural perception of the closing-in of the central government’s power is a key
determinant of the perception of Hong Kong–China relations.

This paper examines the implementation of ‘one country, two systems’ (1C2S) in the two former Western colonies, Hong Kong and Macao, as a policy innovation
in managing inter-governmental relations of a large, diverse country like China. 1C2S embodies internal tensions because the Hong Kong and Chinese
governments have multiple and often incompatible goals. After 20 years, these two special administrative regions (SARs) of China are gradually being absorbed.

Using Hong Kong and Shenzhen in a comparative case study, this article addresses two important questions about digital governance: what its development sequence is, and the governance role of social media in the Chinese context. A content analysis is performed of social media communication by four sets of comparable agencies in the two
cities, using the framework of e-government interconnectivity. Contrary to general expectations, our findings show that Shenzhen was more active than Hong Kong in the governmental use of social media. The results also suggest that, against the normative and sequential models, there is no strict sequence or particular order of development that must be followed in digital governance, thus rejecting the stage-by-stage “walk before you run” hypothesis. A government can “leapfrog” or “run before it walks” in its digital governance, bypassing earlier stages of development. Furthermore, the study shows that digital governance is an important tool of institutional adaptation and development to enhance a government’s ability to respond to a dynamic environment of raising citizen expectations. State-led digitalization complements and compensates for the traditional and formal citizen–government interaction mechanisms, making offline and online institutions interchangeable and substitutable, and therefore also more interrelated and indistinguishable.

Although the idea of freedom has been well studied as an ideal in political philosophy, relatively little scholarship has focused on the human experience of freedom. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2012 and 2013, I examine how freedom was achieved by people who practice freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong. I show that the freedom that these people pursue, either individually or collectively, is not a freedom without constraints but a freedom that must be attained through the exercise of deliberation, restraint, and self-discipline. While freegans seek liberation by withdrawing from the world and practicing self-cultivation (chushi asceticism), freecyclers do so by engaging with worldly affairs in order to create social changes (rushi asceticism). In both cases, by reimagining freedom as ethical practices rather than a right that comes naturally with birth, freegans and freecyclers in Hong Kong are able to experience moments of freedom despite inevitable structural constraints.