State of Hong Kong Studies—A Workshop

1A. The History and Politics of Hong Kong History

Friday, 9 June 2023, 09:15–10:15 PDT

In this presentation, I will examine some of the main trends and developments in Hong Kong history over the past three decades or so. I will show how the emphasis on Hong Kong as an encounter between East and West—a theme that persisted from the earliest accounts all the way through the 1990s—has evolved into one on Hong Kong as a place with fluid geopolitical, economic, and cultural borders. I will then look at recent official attempts to create a “fact-based” narrative of Hong Kong history that disregards competing narratives, omits or glosses over key aspects of the colonial period, and focuses on the nation rather than the special administrative region. The combination of the 2019 protests, the Coronavirus pandemic, and the enactment of the National Security Law in June 2020 created a perfect storm for clamping down on important aspects of Hong Kong history. Yet I will show how this also provided a favourable environment for promoting Hong Kong history in ways that challenge or at least question this new official narrative.

John M. CARROLL is Principal Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on the history of Hong Kong, the British Empire, museums, and tourism. He is the director of HKU’s new MA programme in Hong Kong History and the chair of the Society for Hong Kong Studies. Carroll has published three books on the history of Hong Kong, most recently The Hong Kong-China Nexus, and is currently writing on the history of Hong Kong tourism.

1B. Political Development in Hong Kong: From Colonial State-Building to Postcolonial Regime Breakdown

Friday, 9 June 2023, 13:45–14:45 PDT

In this presentation, I will analyze the political development in Hong Kong from the 1970s to 2020s, focusing on the complex causal logics linking the state-building effort of the colonial state in the 1970s to the eventual termination of the “One Country, Two Systems” experiment by Beijing.

Ray Yep and Tai-Lok Lui’s (2010) original study offers cogent evidence that the purpose of the colonial state-building initiative in the 1970s was to “build a model city” so as to maintain internal stability and strengthen Britain’s future bargaining power with China over the 1997 issue. The outcome was a quantum leap in the infrastructural power of the state, social development, and political liberalization. The profound societal changes were monumental for shaping the civic identity of Hong Kong people and the civil society in the postcolonial era. The immediate consequence of prolonged political stability, however, led to the undermobilization of the democratic movement during the crucial moment of Sino-British negotiation. When the Basic Law was being drafted, the objective conditions were highly favorable for the business elites to form a leading political coalition through reaching out to conservative sectors of the middle class. Instead, the business elites accepted Beijing’s cooptation, forgoing the alternative route of protecting their interests through negotiating for full democracy and securing their position of strength in elections.

The political alignment of post-colonial Hong Kong was the outcome of a political engineering project launched by the party-state to choreograph elite coalition formation while containing the power of the opposition parties. The outcome is a negative dynamic of disequilibrium, in which the social power basis of the ruling elites became increasingly exclusive, while the opposition parties were increasingly divided by internal frame disputes. The Anti-ELAB movement signified regime breakdown, as social insurgency was accompanied by elite rupture, electoral breakthrough, and the temporary coalescence of political opposition, prompting the party-state to terminate the OCTS experiment.

Eliza W.Y. LEE is an honorary professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, The University of Hong Kong, where she was a professor from 2012 to 2022. Her current research interests focus on civil society, state-society relations, and political regime characteristics in Hong Kong. She has published extensively on various topics related to Hong Kong politics and public administration. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Contemporary China, Governance, Policy and Politics, International Public Management Journal, Journal of Social Policy, Public Administration Review, Journal of Civil Society, Voluntas, and Asian Survey. She is the lead author of Public Policymaking in Hong Kong: Civic Engagement and State-Society Relations in a Semi-Democracy (London: Routledge, 2013) and the editor of Gender and Change in Hong Kong: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Chinese Patriarchy (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003). She currently serves on the editorial board of Voluntas and International Review of Administrative Sciences, and has previously served on the editorial board of Public Administration Review. She is currently a member of the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel, Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, China. She was head of the department from 2013 to 2016, and the director of Centre for Civil Society and Governance of her university from 2010 to 2018.

1C. Hong Kong Society under Autocratization

Saturday, 10 June 2023, 10:00–11:00 PDT

In the past decade, Hong Kong has gone through a period of spectacular social mobilization, followed by rapid de-mobilization due to state suppression. I will address two sets of issues that would tie the phenomenon to broader issues in the study of Hong Kong society. First, I will examine the socio-economic and socio-cultural bases of political discontent in the 2010s. Through reviewing existing research about economic inequality in Hong Kong society and value change of Hong Kong people, I argue that economic grievances and political values were articulated into a holistic critique of social and political injustice that fueled contentious politics. Second, I will examine Hong Kong society’s response to the abrupt and radical tightening of social and political control since 2020. Through a discussion of the most recent publications as well as ongoing research about Hong Kong society on issues ranging from societal self-censorship to migration, I highlight adaptation and resilience as the emerging themes in the political sociology of Hong Kong. I will end with a discussion of how societal grievances and values may evolve given the ongoing process of adaptation.

Francis L. F. LEE is Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the lead author of Media, Social Mobilization and Mass Protests in Post-colonial Hong Kong (Routledge, 2011), Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989–2019 (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). He is the founding Co-Chair of the Society for Hong Kong Studies. He is also currently Chief Editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication and an Elected Fellow of the International Communication Association.

1D. Hong Kong (Cultural) Studies: Institutionalization and Its Discontents

Saturday, 10 June 2023, 14:00–15:00 PDT

In this presentation, I will offer a very brief but critical introduction to the development of Hong Kong studies from a cultural perspective. Despite its international fame, Hong Kong has long been considered a “cultural desert,” and the study of its culture was therefore marginalized in the academy until the 1997 issue brought it to the attention of academic research during the late-transitional period. Notwithstanding this, there were different kinds of researches at the periphery of the academy, which are scattered in different units without a strong theoretical thrust as a field. In light of these efforts, the institutionalization of Hong Kong cultural studies since the 1990s—including but not limited to academic programs, conferences, journals, and book series—and its discontents are discussed. It is against this backdrop that this chapter explores Hong Kong cultural studies in relation to its possible development as a field. Meanwhile, when the “one country, two systems” framework prescribes that the Special Administrative Region would continue to play a special role between China and the world after reversion to its motherland, Hong Kong has witnessed paradigm shifts in recent years, through which issues related to the city and its culture have to be reconsidered. Given emerging formations of global modernity with Chinese characteristics, Hong Kong and its culture has to be (re-)imagined in a new “one world, two systems” world order. I will also endeavor to offer preliminary thoughts on how to theorize Hong Kong cultural studies in this special context.

Stephen Yiu-Wai CHU is Professor and Director of Hong Kong Studies Programme, The University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on postcolonialism, globalization and Hong Kong culture. He has published more than 30 books, including Hong Kong Popular Culture in the 1980s: A Decade of Splendor (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming), Main Melody Films in the 2010s: Hong Kong Directors in Mainland China (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Found in Transition: Hong Kong Studies in the Age of China (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), Hong Kong Cantopop: A Concise History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), Hong Kong Culture and Society in the New Millennium: Hong Kong as Method (ed.) (Singapore: Springer, 2017) and Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). In recognition of his contribution to the promotion of Hong Kong culture and Cantopop, South China Morning Post presented him the Spirit of Hong Kong Award (Culture) in 2019.

1E. The Political Economy of Hong Kong Development

Sunday, 11 June 2023, 09:00–10:00 PDT

In this presentation, I will outline the transformation of Hong Kong’s economy from a colonial entrepôt to an export-oriented manufacturing hub and then a global financial center. I will focus on the literature that discusses Hong Kong’s changing economic role in the context of the transformation of the global capitalist economy and China’s link to it from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing on the post-sovereignty-handover period. I will also cover the changing inter-sectoral and inter-corporate balance of power, employment structure, pattern of income distribution, and the myth vs. reality of laissez faire economic policy amidst successive economic restructurings. I will end with a discussion about plausible future trajectories of the Hong Kong economy under intensifying US–China rivalry and decoupling.

Ho-fung HUNG is the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy in the Department of Sociology and the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Protest with Chinese Characteristics (Columbia University Press, 2011), The China Boom: Why China Will not Rule the World (Columbia University Press, 2015), City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Clash of Empires: From “Chimerica” to the “New Cold War” (Cambridge University Press, 2022). His academic publications have been translated into at least 10 different languages. His analysis of Chinese and Hong Kong politics and economy have been cited and featured in major media outlets around the world, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, CNN, Financial times, BBC, The Guardian, South China Morning Post, among others.