Hong Kong’s Changing Role in Connecting the Mainland With the World

Abstract

Many discussions on Hong Kong’s social movements rightfully focus on the internal and external political factors that are influential in shaping the recent political events. This paper examines selective important political deve-lopments related to the subject matter and does not pretend to be comprehensive on the subject matter. While contextualizing Hong Kong’s recent unrest in political events, we are simultaneously also interested to de-privilege political factors as the sole explanation for the social movements and highlight a functional and highly utilitarian reason for the social turmoil, which is that of high housing prices and social disenfranchisement. It was the twin impacts of political changes as well as housing grievances (along with other bread and butter issues) that became a volatile cocktail in concocting the social unrest and public expressions of discontent. The central and local HK governments cannot homogenize a single uniform response to the challenges of globalization, in terms of both clamoring for democratization and economic egalitarianism. This paper therefore argues that there is a differential effectiveness of China’s/HK’s responses to economic globalization’s inequities and addressing the pro-democrat demands.