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.

This paper draws on theoretical discussions of world cities to analyze socio-spatial polarization and (re-)distribution of deprived groups in Hong Kong in the 2000s. Intensifying global economic restructuring processes have induced socio-economic polarization, thereby producing deprived groups although the spatial outcomes may depend on the city-specific context. When local policies do not counteract the polarization trend, a spatial manifestation of widening socio-economic gaps can be expected.
Intensified pro-growth policies adopted since Hong Kong’s return
to Chinese rule in 1997 and during its economic recession in the
early 2000s have worsened the impact of globalization-induced
socio-economic and spatial restructuring. Census data from 2001
and 2011 show increasingly differentiated socio-economic profiles
at the district level. The analysis offered in this study also points to
a decreased socially mixed society in 2011 when the deprived
groups lived in districts with less presence of the advantaged
population.

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.

An ecological and humane urbanism is required to combat resource degradation and socio-economic polarisation. UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda calls for a paradigm shift to ‘leave no one, no place and no ecology behind’ through sustainable development. However, this article argues that a ‘sustainability fix’, while necessary, is insufficient to counter the hegemonic growth-orientated culture and it is important to re-embed economic activities in ethical socio-ecological relationships for people and place well-being. These require critical scholarship to reproblematise issues and present prescriptive approaches for resolving them. Reproblematisation of Hong Kong’s alleged land scarcity problem reveals a property-dominant urban-biased political economy that sustains a high land price policy through suppressing development of massive rural land resources, resulting in ecological and socio-spatial disparities. Reimagining the development of rural Hong Kong based on the principles of nature conservation and place-making for conviviality and human flourishing could be a potential pathway towards a transformative urbanism.

This paper examines how a community in Hong Kong, led by a local charity, mobilised its bonding, bridging and linking social capital to transform a government-initiated regeneration project that had aimed at commodifying a residential heritage building cluster as a shopping facility to attract tourists into a community commons. The community succeeded in retaining the housing right of sitting tenants and the use right of the building cluster to experiment with re-embedding economic development within social relationships. The Blue House cluster is located in Wanchai, a rapidly gentrifying area east of the Central Business District in Hong Kong. Although continuing residents have experienced a kind of ‘in situ displacement’ as the surrounding built and socio-economic environments have continued to gentrify, the case nevertheless provides valuable insights into the merit of adapting heritage buildings as a base for those relationship-rich community members to practise recommoning, to (re)build with new residents a sustainable community.

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.

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 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.

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.

This article seeks a dialogue between masculinity studies and generational sexuality studies by comparing two generations of gay men in Hong Kong through in-depth interviews with 15 older gay men born before the 1950s and 25 young gay men born after 1990 using a life course approach. The article highlights the sociohistorical and political changes shaping male identity, practice, and culture in colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong, and identifies responsibility and respectability as two key dimensions in the construction of Chinese masculinity. It argues that the two generations under study accomplish gay masculinities against changing Chinese masculine ideals and hetero/homonormativities sensitive to different social relations and institutions, as well as engage in constant negotiation with the dominant heteronormative life course and need to manage stigma. Drawing on the narratives of the participants from the two generations, the article examines continuity and change in the idealized and practiced forms of masculinity embedded in different institutions, thereby providing a nuanced understanding of the transformations of Chinese generational masculinities under broad social–historical changes.