The global trend for immigrants to return home has unique relevance for Hong Kong. This work of cross-cultural psychology explores many personal stories of return migration. The author captures in ...dozens of interviews the anxieties, anticipations, hardships and flexible world perspectives of migrants and their families as well as friends and co-workers. The book examines cultural identity shifts and population flows during a critical juncture in Hong Kong history between the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 and the early years of Hong Kong’s new status as a special administrative region after 1997. Nearly a million residents of Hong Kong migrated to North America, Europe and Australia in the 1990s. These interviews and analyses help illustrate individual choices and identity profiles during this period of unusual cultural flexibility and behavioral adjustment.
In 2014, the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan grabbed international attention as citizen protesters demanded the Taiwan government withdraw its free-trade agreement with China. In that same year, in Hong ...Kong, the Umbrella Movement sustained 79 days of demonstrations, protests that demanded genuine universal suffrage in electing Hong Kong's chief executive. It too, became an international incident before it collapsed. Both of these student-led movements featured large-scale and intense participation and had deep and far- reaching consequences. But how did two massive and disruptive protests take place in culturally conservative societies? And how did the two "occupy"-style protests against Chinese influences on local politics arrive at such strikingly divergent results? Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven aims to make sense of the origins, processes, and outcomes of these eventful protests in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ming-sho Ho compares the dynamics of the two movements, from the existing networks of activists that preceded protest, to the perceived threats that ignited the movements, to the government strategies with which they contended, and to the nature of their coordination. Moreover, he contextualizes these protests in a period of global prominence for student, occupy, and anti- globalization protests and situates them within social movement studies.
Born out of place Constable, Nicole
2014., 20140404, 2014, 2014-03-14
eBook
Hong Kong is a meeting place for migrant domestic workers, traders, refugees, asylum seekers, tourists, businessmen, and local residents. In Born Out of Place, Nicole Constable looks at the ...experiences of Indonesian and Filipina women in this Asian world city. Giving voice to the stories of these migrant mothers, their South Asian, African, Chinese, and Western expatriate partners, and their Hong Kong–born babies, Constable raises a serious question: Do we regard migrants as people, or just as temporary workers? This accessible ethnography provides insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship and points to the consequences, creative responses, melodramas, and tragedies of labor and migration policies.
Undercurrents Leung, Helen Hok-Sze
Undercurrents,
c2008, 2009, 2014, 2008
eBook
Undercurrents engages the critical rubric of queer to examine Hong Kong's screen and media culture during the transitional and immediate postcolonial period. Helen Hok-Sze Leung draws on theoretical ...insights from a range of disciplines to reveal parallels between the crisis and uncertainty of the territory's postcolonial transition and the queer aspects of its cultural productions. She explores Hong Kong cultural productions � cinema, fiction, popular music, and subcultural projects � and argues that while there is no overt consolidation of gay and lesbian identities in Hong Kong culture, undercurrents of diverse and complex expressions of gender and sexual variance are widely in evidence. Undercurrents uncovers a queer media culture that has been largely overlooked by critics in the West and demonstrates the cultural vitality of Hong Kong amidst political transition.
Legal mobilization is the process by which individuals invoke their legal rights and use litigation to defend or develop these rights against the government. In recent years, increasing attention has ...been paid to this phenomenon as it occurs under authoritarian regimes. It is often suggested that, in such situations, legal mobilization is caused by the strategic interests of the ruling elites. Using the case study of post-colonial Hong Kong, where legal mobilization has by no means unfolded as political authorities would wish, Waikeung Tam casts doubt on this contention. To do so, he examines in depth why and how legal mobilization arises under authoritarianism. Tam analyses quantitative data of changes in the Hong Kong judiciary agendas over the last three decades and uses detailed interviews with activists, politicians, cause lawyers, judges and government officials to reveal the complex underlying socio-political forces at play.
In the years since it was established on 1 July 1997, Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal has developed a distinctive body of new law and doctrine with the help of eminent foreign common law judges. ...Under the leadership of Chief Justice Andrew Li, it has also remained independent under Chinese sovereignty and become a model for other Asian final courts working to maintain the rule of law, judicial independence and professionalism in challenging political environments. In this book, leading practitioners, jurists and academics examine the Court's history, operation and jurisprudence, and provide a comparative analysis with European courts and China's other autonomous final court in Macau. It also makes use of extensive empirical data compiled from the jurisprudence to illuminate the Court's decision-making processes and identify the relative impacts of the foreign and local judges.
Since 2003, Hong Kong has witnessed a series of large-scale protests which have constituted the core of a reinvigorated pro-democracy movement. What drove tens of thousands of citizens to the street ...on a yearly basis to protest? What were the social and organizational bases of the protest movement? How did media and public discourses affect the protests’ formation and mobilization? How did the protesters understand their own actions and the political environment? This book tackles such questions by using a wide range of methods, including population and protest onsite surveys, media content analysis, and in-depth interviews with activists, politicians, and protest participants. It provides an account of the "self-mobilization processes" behind the historic July 1, 2003 protest, and how the protest kick-started new political dynamics and discursive contestations in the public arena which not only turned a single protest into a series of collective actions constituting a movement, but also continually shaped the movement’s characteristics and influence. The book is highly pertinent to readers interested in political development in Hong Kong, and as a case study on "the power of critical events," the book also has broad implications on the study of both media politics and social movements in general.
1. Introduction: From a Critical Event to Ritualistic Protests 2. Public Opinion on the Eve of Explosion 3. Organization, Communication, and Mobilization 4. The Reshaping of Public Discourse 5. Constructing the Call for Democracy 6. Contextual Changes and Strategic Responses 7. Development of the Movement Organization 8. The Social Bases of Continual Protests 9. Making Sense of Participation 10. The June 4 Connection
Francis L. F. Lee is Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Joseph M. Chan is Professor of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He also served as the Changjiang Chair Professor of Journalism at Fudan University, Shanghai.
The authors also co-edited Media and Politics in Post-handover Hong Kong (also published by Routledge, 2008).
This book offers an in-depth sociological study on Hong Kong lesbian and transgender lesbian subjectivities and their materialization within multiple spaces. Based on thirty life history interviews, ...the author attempts to map the complex relations between lesbian subjectivities and spatialities as they emerge, develop, interact and negotiate with each other in their everyday lives. Drawing upon theories on cultural studies, feminism, postcolonialism, urban sociology and queer theory, this book positions Hong Kong as a late capitalist city and neoliberal economy, to bring the notion of sexuality and spaces together in a theoretical exercise in order to focus on the forces that determine the conditions and possibilities for the materialization of lesbian and transgender lesbian desires and identities. Tang investigates social relations within certain spaces and make linkages between a living room, a busy street, a classroom, a church congregation, a workplace and a queer film festival. Hong Kong women with lesbian desires and transgender lesbians can be understood as exclusionary to some spaces but participatory in the constant development of new sites where their needs and intimate desires are met. Tang concludes that a preliminary analysis of spaces in Hong Kong can be rooted in a physical sense but also proposes conditional spatiality as a theoretical concept to understand the emergence and disappearance of spaces.
