This article examines the Hong Kong refugee policy and its relationship to local people’s attitudes towards asylum-seekers and refugees, since the launch in 2014 of a new mechanism to assess their claims. Based on an analysis of debates between 2015 and 2018 in the Hong Kong Legislative Council, government statements and documents, media reports, two surveys on local people’s attitudes and an NGO interview, I argue that the government has sought to criminalize asylum-seekers by forcing them to breach Hong Kong’s immigration law. The article suggests that a pragmatic, inclusive approach would help the government to promote ethnic harmony in the territory.

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.

Private ownership of publicly-accessible space is a phenomenon that is increasingly being adopted in new urban developments in many cities around the world. The purpose and role of these spaces, especially in Hong Kong, has been widely criticised for failing to effectively engage with the public realm of the city, a fact which, in addition to being a cause for concern for the Hong Kong government, has raised questions about the benefits of the programme.
Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this study examines 28 public open spaces in private development (POSPD) in the financial district of Hong Kong with the aim of both evaluating the spatial characteristics as well as understanding their potential contribution to the multilevel structure of this dense urban area.
The research further establishes a new evaluation index as an alternative theoretical framework to assess other critical aspects which may affect their capacity to encourage social activities.
The results of the study suggest that, although a large percentage of the POSPDs analysed are not providing positive impact to the district, they hold significant potential which, with new strategies in place, could greatly enrich the pedestrian and social experience in Hong Kong’s dynamic and complex urban environment.

This study uses a governmentality approach to examine poverty and welfare media discourse as a complex aggregate of a wide variety of knowledge and political rationalities aimed at governing citizens. A discourse analysis of newspaper articles about poverty from 1994 to 2013 was conducted. Five discursive strategies and four oppositional claims were found in the 20-year sample period. The findings illustrate the relationship between neoliberalism and governmental strategies in poverty discourse.

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.

This chapter provides a reflexive account of my research experience as a Chinese male ethnographer with male and female Nepali drug users in Hong Kong within various drug settings. Specifically, the chapter describes how I use various strategies to create multiple gender identities to approach male informants at drug rehabilitation centres and female informants on the streets, and how this flexible gendered performance has helped me to obtain a better understanding of the informants who are also practising multiple gender identities throughout their drug career. The chapter draws a contrast with previous drug studies done by male researchers who have often highlighted the importance of performing a hegemonic masculine identity in their fieldwork. Their approach is similar to transparent reflexivity, which overlooks the complexity and uncertainty of the research process. This chapter highlights the intersectional approach to reflexivity and emphasizes the correlation between the generation of knowledge and the performances of the researcher and researched in a particular social space.

Making and sharing food plays an essential role in foreign domestic
helpers’ work and leisure life. However, this has seldom been
addressed in the voluminous migrant domestic helper literature.
In Hong Kong, overseas helpers are employed in over three hundred
thousand households. This article explores their food experiences
in both their leisure and work spaces. It first examines the
“contact zones” in which these workers share food with co-ethnics.
It then considers the kitchen space in which foreign domestic
workers serve their employers. It shows how these domestic
helpers make use of their culinary skills to secure better human
relationships and gain extra bargaining power through the provision
of tasty ethnic dishes. Despite the immense power imbalance
between the employer and the domestic helper, such food contact
has shed light on the everyday resilience embedded in kitchen
politics in Hong Kong.

This article assesses how contemporary forms of regional assimilation by centralizing states affect the political behavior of threatened social groups within peripheral polities. Recent mainlandization, “the blurring of the physical, social, cultural and psychological border between Mainland China and Hong Kong,” has constrained the region’s autonomy. Here, we consider the political consequences of Chinese mainlandization. How does mainlandization affect the likelihood of political participation in Hong Kong? Drawing and expanding upon theories of social identity, we argue that mainlandization increases the political involvement among those who make the choice to identify as Hong Konger because this is the group under threat by China’s recent actions. Hong Kongers politically mobilize as a response to mainlandization to combat Chinese threat and to improve the status of their identity group, of which their own sense of selves is also tied to. Using an original survey experiment, we find support for our theory. Hong Kongers are influenced by mainlandization to attend contentious protests, recruit others to attend such rallies, and sign pro-democratic petitions. We conclude by noting implications for China’s increasing attempt to assimilate this electoral autocracy and discuss how our research informs Hong Kong political activism in 2019 and 2020.

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.

Recent migration studies have adopted the lens of mobility to examine the stratifying effects of border policies, but few investigate the differential mobility of migrant families and children. This paper aims to contribute to the migration literature by considering the interplay between border policies, family configurations, and differential mobility. We apply the lens of differential mobility to the experiences of Chinese cross-border pupils – young child migrants with Hong Kong permanent residency who reside in Shenzhen, China, and cross the border to attend school. We begin by describing shifts in Hong Kong’s border and immigration policies since 1997, which have created a typology of families differentiated by mixed status, citizenship rights, and mobility. We then turn to four case studies of students with unequal border-crossing experiences to elucidate how border control constrains or promotes family mobility and perpetuates inequalities.