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.

This paper elaborates upon a cultural logic of overseas Chinese nationalism. Around the early twentieth century, some bourgeois members of overseas Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Seas mobilised Confucianism as an ethno‐symbol. The latter helped the overseas Chinese bourgeoisie to counter the quest for greater secularisation and to confront the surge of anti‐imperialist movements. The implication of this research is threefold. First, this research seeks to recentre the role of overseas Chinese in China's modern transformation. Second, this study calls for decentring the May Fourth agendas in the understanding of overseas Chinese nationalism. Third, the project tries to situate overseas Chinese nationalism in an extraterritorial space, including the Confucian zone created in the dialogical connections between Confucian intellectual elites (such as Zheng Xiaoxu and Chen Huanzhang) and overseas Chinese bourgeois networks that converged in Hong Kong and spread transnationally.

Creative class workers are highly mobile, yet the struggles, disruptions and
inequalities that emerge in their new, trans-local, experiential geographies are
usually erased in the upbeat, Florida-inflected narrative on creative work and
creative class mobility. This article aims to break open discussions of creative
class mobility with the insertion of affect. It argues for the inclusion of
personal, affective experiences to complicate the fluidity, the ease, the resolve
that are usually assumed in the imaginary of being mobile. Furthermore, the
article builds on the increasing volume of scholarship on affective labour –
conceptualized as the affective dimensions of labour – but via a different
route. I argue that any examination of affective labour may expand from the
affect in labour, to how labour affects; from affective labour to labour affects.
This inquiry brings to mobility studies the resonances between moving
(geographically) and being moved (affectively), supplementing cultural
studies’ critique of creative work with precarity of a different category, that of
the affective. The empirical section presents the affective accounts of three
re-located creative workers. They show us that mobility is never as frictionless
as it sounds, and doing what people love may well come at the cost of losing
those whom they love. I tease out three themes for further connections with
affect: ethos and values, gender, and technology.

Right-wing groups have generally been considered gender-conservative or, in some instances, sexist. Given this background, it is a puzzle why young people, particularly women with relatively liberal gender attitudes, support these groups. This article tries to answer this question by comparing men’s and women’s justifications for participation in nativist and antimigration political groups. It develops the concept of gender irrelevance, defined as the processes and strategies through which members of these groups render male dominance and gender segregation trivial within their organizations; the sexist behaviors of some group members tolerable; and concerns about gender inequalities unimportant, secondary, and ultimately irrelevant in their decisions to support these groups. The article further illustrates the strategies of gender irrelevance, which include the misrepresentation, naturalization, individualization, and universalization of gender inequality and biases; the construction and deployment of the twin discourses of female privilege and male disadvantage; the tendency to compartmentalize gender biases; the argument of compromising gender; and criticism against an allegedly exaggerated, inconsistent, and double-standard feminism. The research concerns Hong Kong’s young and educated supporters of nativist and antimigration political groups. They are political minorities in relation to the omnipresent Chinese state but majorities at home in relation to mainland Chinese immigrants whom they construct as the other. We believe that the concept of gender irrelevance is applicable to other contexts and not merely to these young people in Hong Kong. It has the potential to help us understand the global rise of the Right.

By 2036, about 31% of Hong Kong’s population will be 65 or above. This situation triggers the need for an Age-Friendly City framework (AFC) to promote healthy ageing. In this paper, we present a study on how conscious and collaborative interventions affect the public’s perception of various AFC domains and the implications for health-related well-being over time in Hong Kong’s Islands District. As part of a territory-wide project, the study used a repeated cross-sectional design to gather data among older persons in 2016 and 2018. Findings showed significant improvements in five of the AFC domains after the interventions. Although health-related well-being was lower in 2018 than in 2016, perceived improvements in AFC domains, including community support and health services, social participation, respect and social inclusion as well as the overall AFC index were positively associated with health-related well-being. Thus, even in the face of declining health, the enhanced forms of certain AFC domains might improve the health-related well-being of older persons. The findings are discussed within the broader theoretical debate on ecological ageing. Implications for community-led social care are drawn.

The importance of individuals’ social environment as an explanation for the ‘happiness-income paradox’, but also accounting for the negative relationship between income inequality and subjective well-being in macro-comparative perspective is now widely recognized. At the same time, however, debates are still ongoing about the specific role local communities play in moderating the relationship between personal income and subjective well-being. This article adds to this literature by examining cross-level interactions between individual- and district-level determinants of self-rated happiness using multilevel mixed regression techniques. Our findings suggest that living in wealthier districts in Hong Kong is a ‘positive’ for individuals on lower personal incomes, whereas the effect on those with higher incomes is more in line with arguments underlining the role of local communities as a ‘negative’. While the overall effect of district-level poverty on self-reported happiness in Hong Kong is benign, this is not the case for individuals on low incomes who are most negatively affected if they live in districts featuring higher levels of deprivation. Governments across contemporary Asian global cities should recognize the important role of citizens’ social environment and tackle existing structural barriers to greater self-reported happiness accordingly.

The promotion and development of sustainable volunteerism is crucial for quality social services. Previous studies on the relationship between social trust and volunteering is mixed and inclusive. This article aims to investigate the effects of the particularized trust, generalized trust, trust differential (i.e., difference in levels between particularized and generalized trust) and radius of trust (i.e., difference in levels between in-group trust and out-group trust), on volunteering. By interviewing 1,170 Hong Kong Chinese in a territory-wide randomized household survey, this article reveals that generalized trust facilitates volunteering, whereas particularized trust exhibits an inverse effect. The radius of trust could not facilitate voluntary participation. This article distinguishes between the reverse contributions of generalized and particularized trust among Hong Kong Chinese, thereby providing a clear and precise explanation for social trust-volunteering relationships. Future research should focus on the conceptualization and operationalization of radius of trust and cross-cultural comparative studies on the effects of particularized and generalized trust using longitudinal data.

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.

This study examines processes of class construction within a transnational community of professionals and managers who are emigrants, returnees, and non-migrants. Building on Bourdieu’s class analysis and literature on transnational migration, the article examines how class statuses are supported by moral claims based on varying transnational mobility strategies. The authors draw their results from qualitative interviews with 45 Hong Kong respondents in Hong Kong and Canada. They find that despite Hong Kong emigrants’ loss of economic capital due to de-professionalization, their cultural and symbolic claims frame an alternative set of norms about their life successes. Returnees claim to have the best of both worlds having amassed economic capital, while making social distinctions from stayers in terms of their globalized cosmopolitan imaginaries. Stayers appear envious of emigrants’ and returnees’ flexibility and seek to accumulate economic capital for future retirement migration or to send their children abroad. Respondents’ moralizing discourses reveal a social field defining within-class distinctions apart from hyper-concerns of upward mobility through material gains. Nuanced class distinctions articulate values around freedom of space, time, and expression not readily accessible to residents remaining in Hong Kong.

This study deployed a systematic method to develop and validate a measurement for the identity of Hong Kong people, reflecting the emerging localistic attitude in the city. Drawing on a two-dimensional identity model, a combination of cultural and civic domains, an operationalization for Hong Kong identity was derived to differentiate between ‘HongKongese’ and others with stronger Mainland-Chinese oriented identity. Cultural attribute, such as language and choice of technology products, is found to be of paramount importance in identity confirmation. Anti-authoritarianism and proactive political participation are the two major discriminatory features in the civic domain. Social distance from Mainland Chinese is positively associated with these key components of the scale, supporting the scale’s construct validity and confirming the nativist tendency of certain groups
of Hong Kong localists.