Hong Kongers Research Articles

From Chinese to Global Humanism: Articulations and Decolonial Critiques of New Confucian Philosophy in Cold War Taiwan and Hong Kong

In scholarly discussions of Cold War humanism, writings by New Confucian philosophers who exiled themselves from China after 1949 have been largely overlooked due to assumptions about their anti-Communist position. This essay proposes to re-examine New Confucian writings on humanism in Taiwan and Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1970s as a way to better understand the complexity of these two places in relation to humanistic genres of decolonization: while the New Confucian conception of Chinese humanism intervenes in the hegemony of Western humanism, it also represses other humanistic imaginations that do not derive from Han cultural nationalism. The first part of the essay closely analyses the connection between the French debates on humanism and several philosophical works of Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909–1995) in Taiwan and Tang Chun-I 唐君毅 (1909–1978) in Hong Kong. Following a brief overview of their exilic context, it looks into Mou’s rejection of Sartre’s existentialist humanism in defence of Chinese subjective freedom, as well as Tang’s conception and ideological development of the “Chinese humanistic spirit” in opposition to “anti-humanism” (different from Althusser). The second part turns to repressed humanisms – the positive reception of existentialist humanism among liberal and nativist intellectuals in Taiwan and the search for Hong Kongers’ cultural identity between anti-humanism and Chinese humanism in Hong Kong, which complicates colonial and anti-colonial humanisms under European imperialism. Via a comparison with Sartre, Fanon, and the conception of a new/decolonial humanism, the essay concludes that a different shift from Chinese to global humanism is necessary for finding new approaches to decolonization in Taiwan and Hong Kong from the Cold War era to the present moment.

Sowing Hate, Cultivating Loyalists: Mobilizing Repressive Nationalist Diasporas for Transnational Repression by the People’s Republic of China Regime

Pundits, advocates, and scholars have increasingly focused on the strategies of transnational repression employed by autocratic states to deter opposition and control the voices of emigrants abroad. Typically, transnational repression is understood as various forms of state-directed tactics executed by institutional actors who are deployed, trained, and organized by the state. Yet, the tactic of inciting hatred and division among emigrants to undermine dissidents—part of a nationalist strategy that mobilizes non-state actors for repression—has not been thoroughly explored. This article reveals a unique form of diaspora actorhood: the repressive nationalist diasporas, which consist of culturally driven migrants who support their authoritarian homelands and exert significant influence in various aspects of transnational migrants’ civic life, including student groups, ethnic associations, and grassroots organizations. Through these networks, diaspora migrants provide autocrats with the means to extend their repressive reach internationally. This paper examines the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a case study, demonstrating how the state leverages nationalist sentiments to alienate dissidents and fuel enmity among its loyalists overseas. The consequences are extensive, involving surveillance, harassment, and assaults on dissidents such as Hong Kongers, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese, and mainland Chinese—aiming to silence those who criticize the PRC regime. Ethnographic research, interviews, and publicly available data are used to reveal, describe, and analyze the role and global reach of the repressive nationalist diaspora in the transnational repression mechanism as part of modern autocratic statecraft.

Emergent Well-Being: A Qualitative Study on Cultural Identity and Belonging of Emigrated Hong Kongers Post-2019

This study examined the cultural identity and well-being of emigrated Hong Kongers amid sociopolitical changes post-2019. Utilizing constructivist grounded theory and art-based research, it involved four Hong Kongers who recently emigrated to the United Kingdom. A custom method called object-interview-object explored narratives through participants’ personal objects, complemented by the researcher’s self-reflexive papermaking. Findings revealed a dynamic interplay between memory, belonging, and well-being, highlighting the heterogeneity of cultural identity and the prevalence of ambivalence and non-belonging. The study proposes “Emergent Well-being” as a theory that centers emigrants’ perspectives in understanding their well-being within a collective and systemic context. It also underscores the necessity for art therapists to engage in approaches that respect the evolving identities of emigrants for effective and ethical support.

Hong Kongers and their languages: bordering, scale and identity

Abstract In this paper, we examine discourses about border and scale in the context of Hong Kong’s relationship with mainland China. We argue that, as the physical and political borders between Hong Kong and the mainland are eroding, other forms of bordering practices – such as linguistic borders – become more salient and contested. We draw on selected thematic analyses of a corpus of 70 articles from Hong Kong English media, as well as socio-historical analyses that have widely circulated since Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, in order to examine how the construction of “Cantonese” and “Mandarin” is managed against anxieties about Hong Kong’s potential loss of distinction and fears of becoming “just another Chinese city”. In this process, both borders and scales become key terrains of negotiation and function themselves as ideological resources in debates about Hong Kong’s identity and future, as certain distinctions take on reduced or pronounced meaning from particular scalar perspectives. Amid an ongoing reframing of what it means to be “Chinese”, examining language ideologies in Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of how national and linguistic categories achieve or reframe their social meanings.

At home in illegality: place-making practices in Hong Kong’s industrial buildings

Hong Kong offers a unique laboratory for housing studies given its notoriety for housing inequalities. This study utilized participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and photovoice to explore place-making practices in one type of illegalized housing, the residential use of industrial buildings. In contrast to studies of housing inequalities that have typically focused on marginalized communities, we found that the use of industrial buildings was adopted by educated, ‘local’ (i.e. ethnically Chinese) Hong Kongers who aspired towards socio-economic mobility. Place-making required spatial adaptations to sub-standard living environments and acclimation to routine, ongoing fears of detection from law enforcement. We argue that illegality is not necessarily an impediment to place-making, but may serve to mark the temporariness of residential spaces in industrial buildings, a temporariness that accommodates residents’ aspirational socio-economic trajectories more effectively than formal housing markets. In our study, the meaning of a place was not necessarily tied to rootedness or permanence, but rather a liminal temporality enforced by illegality.

Religious Minorities in the 2019 Hong Kong Protests

Based on a broader ethnographic study with Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh residents of Hong Kong, this article examines the role of minority religions, specifically Islam, in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. While the protests were dominated by the debates over the identities of Hong Kongers versus mainland Chinese, they also produced discussions over the positions and experiences of Hong Kong's “ethnic minorities,” many of whom are religious minorities. Often racialized and seen as outsiders by Han Hong Kongers, ethnoreligious minorities were reluctant to take sides out of worry for their livelihoods and fear of further marginalization. This sharply contrasts with the visibility of Christian communities in the protests. Christian leaders were publicly involved in prayer meetings and other forms of support for the protests, while the followers of minority religions either stayed away or organized prayer sessions in small, private settings. However, around October 2019, after a series of events described in this article, minorities either found themselves drawn into the protests or took the opportunity to participate to claim their Hong Konger identity. This held the potential to expand the political discourse and create a unified multicultural, multiracial identity of Hong Kongers. However, such aspirations were crushed against the walls of cultural-religious representation, and minorities felt that they remained misunderstood and unacknowledged as fellow citizens.

Chinese Religious Practice as Protest

This essay explores how and why protestors from the 2019 anti-ELAB (Extradition Law Amendment Bill) movement turned to popular Chinese religious practice for political dissent, and simultaneously tracks the negotiation of emerging sociocultural identities of Hong Kongers in the face of political upheaval. Attempting to pressure the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government into meeting their demands, protestors adopted a wide range of tactics that brought protest activities to previously unaffected residential districts. Although no less hectic than other months during the movement, August 2019 also produced indelible moments of nonviolent innovation that attracted international media coverage. One of the protest events from this fertile period, the Hong Kong–wide Night Assemblies for Freeing Spirits, Almsgiving, Prayers for Merit, and Removal of Evil 全港超幽佈施祈褔除惡晚會, was held on August 9, 2019, in the districts of Wong Tai Sin and Shatin and specifically centered religious practice as a creative and potent source of political expression. To better understand this intersection of religion, politics, and identity in Hong Kong, this article analyzes protestors’ ritual utterances and interview responses from the protest event's proceedings.

Examining the gray cube effect on naïve viewers’ appreciation of street-based art in Hong Kong and Poland

The present research investigates the appreciation of sanctioned street-based art among naïve viewers. It examines the role of viewing context in art appreciation, by experimentally testing a gray cube effect, which posits that street-based artworks are more likely to be identified as art (H1), liked more (H2), and understood more (H3) when viewed on the street. Identical procedures were carried out in Hong Kong (Experiment 1) and Lublin, Poland (Experiment 2), separately, sampling local artworks and local viewers. Experiment 1 tested 14 murals with 100 Hong Kongers; Experiment 2 tested 7 sculptures and 7 murals with 88 Poles. Participants were randomly assigned to either viewing street-based artworks on the street (gray cube) or viewing digital images of street-based artworks in a laboratory. The participants assessed each artwork in terms of art identification, liking, and understanding. These “twin” experiments yielded identical results, i.e., street-based artworks were liked more (H2) and understood more (H3) but not more likely to be identified as art (H1) on the street than in the laboratory. Overall, the present findings support the gray cube effect with ecologically valid data, and the effect seems robust across Western and Eastern cultural contexts and across genres of sculpture and mural.

Colonialism and Nationalism in Hong Kong: Towards True Decolonization

In June of 2019, millions of Hong Kongers took to the streets. What began as a protest against an extradition bill quickly evolved into a broader movement to safeguard Hong Kong’s autonomy from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Protesters pointed with increasing alarm to the fast disappearance of Hong Kong’s distinct legal system, political system, and civic culture as well as the erosion of the borders, both physical and abstract, that separated the territory from the mainland. The 1997 handover was designed to safeguard Hong Kong’s local autonomy after the end of British colonialism, these demonstrators claimed, and Beijing’s government was threatening that promise.

The transforming journey of Hong Kong Elites athletes and coaches migrating to the United Kingdom via the British National (Overseas) visa scheme

The deteriorating political climate and assault on civil society in Hong Kong resulted in a mass exodus. In response, the UK Government has provided a special immigration visa pathway for Hong Kongers since 2021, known as the British National (Overseas) visa. However, athletes and coaches are prohibited from continuing their careers in the UK under the BNO visa regulations. The research examines the practical concerns surrounding the departure and transition of Hong Kong elite athletes and coaches. Eight elite athletes and coaches were interviewed in a semi-structured format to explore their decision to emigrate to the UK and the use of this specific visa pathway. The study analyses the decision-making process during their transition and how it affects their sports careers. The researchers developed a model for the emigration decision-making process. Finally, the study proposes strategies to facilitate a smoother transition for Hong Kong athletes and coaches.

The Demographic Ceiling of Changes Driven by the Umbrella Movement

Abstract This article explains post-Umbrella Movement shifts in public opinion in Hong Kong by correlating demographic subgroups with changes in support for the status quo, utilizing Asian Barometer Survey data regarding support for the existing system of government and idealized models for the future. The aim is to determine whether public opinion shifts occurred evenly through population subgroups or were limited to participants and peers. The findings show that while Hong Kongers’ views underwent a seismic shift, the expansion of dissent was unevenly distributed across demographic cohorts, rather than representing demographically symmetric diffusion reflecting societal bridging and cross-demographic coalition building. This indicates that, while the social movement may have shifted aggregate public opinion away from the status quo, its precepts permeated differently across age, class, and especially gender lines, and that views on the status quo were also strongly linked to idealized models for their future, relative to China.

Coping with international politics: A case study of Hong Kong

AbstractThe way that leaders and citizens cope with stress is under-theorised in the study of International Relations (IR). This article anchors psychological studies on coping to the literature theorising emotions in IR to clarify two unaddressed questions: (1) how do political actors – individuals and collectives – cope with both sudden crises and long-term change?; and (2) in the context of international politics, whose coping matters, and under what conditions? Our coping framework demonstrates that intersubjective appraisal of urgency from everyday stressors triggers a process that elevates individual coping to the collective level. Circulation of coping responses, a key but neglected process of scaling up, binds individuals to affective communities. Our theoretical contribution is an innovative coping framework to explore how individual pursuit of well-being is transformed into collective agency. The methodological novelty is the triangulation of emotional representation with survey data and in-depth interviews to capture the circulation of coping responses. We illustrate our conceptual framework with the overlooked case of Hong Kong. Our findings suggest coping constitutes conditions of political possibilities, in that individual Hong Kongers’ efforts to sustain emotional well-being are aggregated to create momentum for a state-building project unexpected by the former British colonisers or the Chinese Communist Party.

Stories about Somewhere Else: Mobility and ‘Spatial Others’ in Hong Kong Cinema

ABSTRACT As a migrant city, Hong Kong has produced numerous diasporic films that portray physical mobility and fluid identity as the city’s cultural style. This cultural picture has changed since the 2000s with the rise of localism. As the debate about localism has grown heated, the concepts of mobility and fluidity have seemingly become obsolete. Many Hong Kongers have emigrated to other countries due to the changes in the contemporary political climate, which urges us to read these films in a new context. This article focuses on the works of Wong Kar-wai and Ann Hui, who have consistently made films about journeys and ‘spatial others’. By analysing Wong’s In the Mood for Love (2000) and The Grandmaster (2013), and Hui’s Song of the Exile (1990) and The Golden Era (2014), I illustrate how these films construct a local identity in relation to mobility and why they offer new insights into the debate about Hong Kong’s contemporary culture. Bringing these films into dialogue with the localist discourses, I argue that mobility should be reconsidered a crucial component in the construction of local culture and identity in modern-day Hong Kong.

Double Push and the Contingent Path: Migration and Remigration of South Asian Minorities in Post-2019 Hong Kong

Hong Kong (HK) is encountering a new wave of outmigration. Numerous recent surveys and news reports have been recording the escalating effects of migration. However, almost all of these are about HK’s majority group—the Chinese Hong Kongers. The city’s South Asian minorities are rarely mentioned or included in these records. This article examines South Asian minorities’ aspirations and frustration amid the continuous exodus of Hong Kongers, their views on the city’s recent migration waves due to its great social changes, and the conditions that could trigger these minorities’ (re)migration. By engaging with the literature on immigrant minorities' remigration and the expanding global South Asian diaspora, this research contributes to our understanding of the remigration of HK’s South Asian minorities—a subject heretofore glaringly understudied.

An “Unsettling” Journey? Hong Kong’s Exodus to Taiwan and Australia After the 2019 Protests

This article compares the considerations, expectations, and realizations of Hong Kongers migrating to Taiwan and Australia. Based on interviews with 22 Hong Konger migrants, we identified some key drivers for Hong Kongers who moved to Taiwan or Australia. The findings add insights into the spatial–temporal nexus of migration and extend the static push–pull model by including migrants’ changing perceptions about the sociopolitical conditions of different destinations. In addition to offering a more nuanced understanding of migrants’ perceptions of and adaptations to the sociopolitical environment of the host society, we highlight that, after moving to Taiwan or Australia, Hong Kong migrants experience a gap between what they imagined at the time of migrating and the reality (political, social, and/or cultural). The imagination of the sociopolitical community in the destination countries before they leave and the gap between pre- and post-migration experiences constitute the “unsettling” characteristic of the recent Hong Kong exodus after 2019.

Artificial intelligence in local government services: Public perceptions from Australia and Hong Kong

Despite the exponential growth in the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), our knowledge on the public perception of AI, especially in the context of local government services, is still limited. To bridge this gap, this study aims to provide empirical evidence and insights into public perceptions concerning the use of AI in local government services. Our methodological approach involves collecting data via an online survey from the residents of three major Australian cities—i.e., Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane—and Hong Kong (n = 850), and performing statistical analyses. We found that: (a) Ease of using AI is significantly and positively influenced by attitude towards AI; (b) Attitude towards AI significantly and positively influences perceived usefulness of AI in local government services; (c) AI is seen useful in resource management and to improve delivery of service, reduction of cost to provide urban-service, improvement of public safety, and monitoring the effectiveness of strategies to manage environmental crisis, and; (d) AI is more positively perceived by Australians in comparison to Hong Kongers, indicating the impact of contextual and cultural differences. The research findings inform local government authorities—e.g., urban policymakers, managers, and planners—on their AI policy, planning and implementation decisions.

Integration Based on Socio-economic Status? Everyday Interactions and Boundary (Un)making Between Mainland Skilled Professionals and Locals in Hong Kong

Scholars and the Hong Kong government are concerned about the social, economic, and cultural integration of new mainland Chinese immigrants (NMCIs) into local society. Research on NMCIs’ integration difficulties in Hong Kong has largely focused on one-way permit-holder migrants from China — who are less skilled and face discrimination and problems with integration based on differences in human capital — while overlooking other NMCI groups, such as mainland skilled professionals (MSPs) who may have different social integration experiences and receive different treatment from locals. Drawing on interviews with 48 MSPs and local Hong Kongers, this article investigates three questions: (1) What do interactions between MSPs and locals look like in the workplace and other social settings? (2) Are specific stereotypes of the other group changed or reproduced through boundary-making/unmaking processes, and if so, how? (3) What kind of integration are MSPs pursuing, do they face barriers to their integration? If so, how do they react to the barriers? The findings contribute to international migration literature by highlighting that, with the decreasing need for migrants to integrate into the host society, the high socio-economic status of skilled migrants does not weaken their boundaries with locals but instead reinforces them. Socio-economic status, along with language, political/ethnic identity, and cultural differences, thus divides highly skilled migrants from mainland Chinese workers and local Hong Kongers.

Ontological (In-) Security and the Dark Night of the Soul

This study reflects on how Christian political prisoners in Hong Kong utilize their Christian resources to articulate and live with the ontological insecurity caused by incarceration. Hong Kongers consider political prisoners to be sufferers for Hong Kong rather than criminals, an interpretation that corresponds to the Christian notion of redemptive suffering. The Christian political prisoners interviewed in this study see their days in prison as the dark night of the soul in which a generative sense-making has emerged. The days in the dark night are painful, but ironically, their spirituality in the dark night exposes the injustice of rule by law, disempowers the threat of demoralization, changes the game theory from prisoner’s dilemma to warden’s dilemma, and illustrates that imprisonment can be turned to an unexpected platform for personal growth. This sense-breaking, despite as yet being weak, gives birth to a social narrative characterized by suffering in solidarity in contrast to the official narrative,“from chaos to order, from order to prosperity.”

Industrial and cultural heritage of the Ma On Shan Iron Mine landscape and the making of industrious Hong Kong

Ma On Shan (MOS, literally ‘Saddle Hill’) is an extension of Shatin new town in Hong Kong. This area embeds the site of the now closed MOS Iron Mine and several related settlements at the Peak, Mid‐Level and Pier Districts. The history of the MOS Iron Mine landscape sheds important light on the city's post‐WWII development. The MOS is a typical historic urban landscape, a product of transnational urbanism, a joint‐venture of local and Japanese investments made possible by the Cold War, and the retreat of faith‐based organisations and poor refugees fleeing Chinese rule after 1949 practicing mutual support in a laissez‐faire colonial city. The Japanese trained miners, explosive operators, mechanics and construction workers of the MOS Iron Mine contributed to infrastructure developments of modern Hong Kong. The associated settlements also epitomise the industrious spirit of Hong Kongers in the face of international and regional political volatilities, absence of government support, material shortage and economic hardship. Embedded in the MOS Iron Mine landscape is not only valuable industrial heritage bequeathed by multi‐scalar transnational socio‐economic and political developments but also the cultural heritage of reciprocity and mutuality among community members in local economic development, knowledge with continuing relevance for city‐building today.

Myth of identity

Abstract This study delves into the stylization of a unique and dynamic Hong Kong identity through examining a series of Cantonese standup comedies performed by the Hong Kong comedian, Wong Tze-wah, from 1993 to 2003. It explains the ways that Wong’s standup comedies become the stylistic and semiotic resources which not merely iconically and symbolically represent the reality of Hong Kong society; rather, they index many modalities of Hong Kongers’ questioning of authenticity and the relationship between China and Hong Kong. It suggests that the comic performance, as a meaning-making process, helps to shape and reproduce the local ideologies of identity, and to challenge the power underlying the discourse of China-Hong Kong relations.