WHAT MAKES THE LOCAL? A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF THE REJUVENATION OF HONG KONG IDENTITY

This paper ascertains what makes the local and why the local is important, in the context of change in Hong Kong due to the political transition to PRC sovereignty.In doing so, I hope to pose a modest polemical challenge to cultural studies' tendency to overlook seemingly simplistic empirical information. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 has led to a contraction of the political sphere, as the convergence of political structures curbed the development of local identities. The label or category ‘Hong Kong people’ was then appropriated with a specific meaning for the local to resist encroachment of the national. It was true that the high intensity of dominant national discourses during the political transition created a favourable atmosphere for re-nationalization. However, as soon as the political transition was over, Hong Kongers re-adhered to their own label in their struggle for cultural autonomy.Their strong cultural affect toward various national icons during the transition quickly diminished. This multiyear discourse study (1996–1998), which utilizes social scientific methods in conjunction with cultural theories, illustrates important political and methodological impulses necessary for the formulation of a socio-political approach to cultural studies within the Hong Kong context.     

Life and death in Hong Kong in an age of cosmopolitanism

Recent events in Hong Kong direct attention to a disturbing trend – the neglect of (selected) life. The society is increasingly discarding its policies and practices concerning immigrant workers, foreign pregnant women and impoverished men and women, whom it deems unworthy of protection or assistance. In this article, I argue for a radical cosmopolitanism that would entail a commitment not only to preventing the taking of life and building a non‐killing society but also to the elimination of the structural conditions that disallow life to the point of death. Drawing on recent bio‐political debates in Hong Kong, I consider the sovereign right over life and death within the neoliberal state. I argue that the state predicates neoliberal sovereignty on a systemic indifference to life; it calculates its bio‐political decisions according to a bio‐arithmetic of economic productivity and social responsibility; and it allows those whom it deems unworthy ‘to die’. As a potential counter discourse, I outline the coordinates and discuss the implications of a commitment to a radical cosmopolitanism.     

Anti-hierarchical activism in Hong Kong: the post-80s youth

In 2009, a political youth movement known as the Post-80s emerged in Hong Kong to protest against the construction of a high-speed railway. While local academics and government officials framed the motivations of these youth protesters using economic rationales, I argue here that the Post-80s are better understood as conveying their dissatisfaction towards existing political structures in the city. This profile sets out Post-80s criticisms of the entrenched hierarchical dynamics in Hong Kong political culture that has shaped interactions between the government, political parties and the wider population, and discusses how the Post-80s have responded to the representational imbalances imposed by these hierarchical practices in the local political sphere by advocating for a way of doing politics where individual voices (as opposed to the collective) are emphasized, and where horizontal structures are used. I conclude by exploring the repercussions of this critique on recent political discourses and protests observed in Hong Kong.     

A cultural economy perspective on service sector migration in the global city: the case of Hong Kong

This article argues that in order to fully understand the geography of labour migration to global cities, it is necessary to consider economic forces in conjunction with mediating socio-cultural influences. Support for this argument is based on an examination of the pattern of migration to Hong Kong, a city which plays a significant role in the world economy.
Reported here are the results of an analysis of recently released 1996 by-census data, and the authors' interviews with foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. These findings have shown that highly skilled immigrant workers were drawn largely from developed countries, the main sources of inward investment in this city, while less skilled immigrants were drawn from less developed neighbouring labour markets.
While the geographical pattern of immigration followed broadly that predicted from Hong Kong's position in the world economy, the results have revealed that cultural influences such as language and social networks are also important in shaping the economic roles of migrant workers.     

The changing responsibilities of the state and family toward elders in Hong Kong

With a predominantly Chinese population and a cultural tradition of respecting the old, Hong Kong has long relied on the family to support its elderly members. Economic success has, however, not spared Hong Kong from encountering the same problems as other industrial societies, such as the loosening of its traditional values. This article examines the changing responsibilities of the state and the family in Hong Kong in supporting the old, and in particular, the effectiveness of the "care in community" policy, which the Hong Kong Government has adopted since the mid-1970s. The examination concludes that the responsibility must now be shared between the state and the family.     

Model Hong Kong malls and their development in mainland China: consumer iconicity and the trans/national capitalist class

Relational geographies of capital and consumption between Hong Kong and mainland China have been forming through tourism engagement in Hong Kong and the development of model Hong Kong malls in China. This analysis of urban restructuring for the consumer economy identifies how landmark Hong Kong malls are reproduced in major cities of China by networks of Hong Kong property firms and mainland elites. Adapting Leslie Sklair's formulation of architectural iconicity in the culture‐ideology of consumerism, this economic relationship, which restructures urban space, constructs iconic built forms and develops Chinese consumerism, marks hegemonic opportunities of a national capitalist class, suggesting how Chinese state capitalism and its Hong Kong networks limit and incrementally engage transnational capital while instantiating Hong Kong‐style consumer iconicity. New malls in mixed‐use developments in China often occupy sites of historical markets and thus affirm Sklair's prediction that iconic architecture increasingly proclaims consumer space while claiming historic forms of public space.     

Planning and development control through lease conditions

The Hong Kong government has pledged to deal with the imbalance between supply and demand of housing. Given the innate constraints of limited land resources in Hong Kong and the extensive and expedient control enforced through lease conditions, the Hong Kong government can alleviate the long-recognized problem of housing shortage by modifying specific development conditions. Therefore, the supply of housing units can be changed at a faster pace to satisfy the requirement of private dwellings. Other factors affecting the property market in Hong Kong include land supply, economic issues, population growth, and income growth. Many studies, for example, Hui et al. (Monograph, Department of Building and Real Estate, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Hong Kong Government (Study of Housing Demand, Hong Kong Government Printer, Hong Kong and Study of Housing Demand Model, Hong Kong Government Printer, Hong Kong), have investigated in detail the impacts of these factors on the property market. However, little or nothing is known about the planning and development control through lease conditions. Therefore, this study particularly attempts to examine how the Hong Kong government exerts its influence in the local private residential market through changing the development conditions. These conditions will be studied separately and distinctively in order to capture their unitary effects upon the local private residential real estate market. Section 1 looks at Hong Kong's tenure system, followed by the deliberation of how planning and development control is done through lease conditions (in Section 2). 3 and 4 set out the analytical framework and report on the findings of how lease conditions affect property supply. The concluding section gives out recommendations.     

Between a subject and an object: representation of China in Kuo Pao-kun’s Singapore and Denny Yung’s Hong Kong

Late Pao-kun Kuo in Singapore and contemporary Denny Yung in Hong Kong have made particular ontological and epistemological choices in their experimental theater in the context of the de-colonization and rise of China. We gather, between the two sites, a possible dichotomy in the representation of China: China as a collective subject to accommodate the changing world and China as an individualized object that emerges in each narrator’s chosen perspective. Kuo intends to prompt the audience to reconnect with something greater than their individuality. For Kuo, the crisis is the loss of cultural subjectivity and the privileging of transcendence over individualized meanings of life. For Yung, cultural subjectivity is no longer a question after the return of Hong Kong to China. Yung painstakingly generates the legitimacy and capacity of individual Hong Kong people to have faith in their own ways of transcending any version of the entirety of China.     

Post-handover identity: contested cultural bonding between China and Hong Kong

This study examines the formation of Hong Kong identity and its cultural articulation in Chinese identity in the post-handover years. Surveys of Hong Kong identity conducted between 1996 and 2016 demonstrate a set of interlinked yet contradictory findings: (i) the coexistence of both cultural pride in and resistance to cultural icons that represent the Chinese state; (ii) weakening correlations between China and Hong Kong regarding cultural affiliation; and (iii) the growing significance of cultural resistance to China by people who love Hong Kong. The survey results indicate the prevalence of an ambivalent identity in post-handover Hong Kong with regard to the coexistence of opposing attitudes toward Chinese identity. These results provide evidence of the complex cultural bonding between China and Hong Kong in the development of the China–Hong Kong relationship since the handover in 1997.     

Indonesian Chinese in Hong Kong: re-migration,re-establishment of livelihood and belonging

This paper describes the re-migration and adjustment of Indonesian Chinese to living in Hong Kong and their cultural belonging to Hong Kong, China, and Indonesia. Known in China as guiqiao or ‘Returned Overseas Chinese’, these were Chinese who re-migrated from Indonesia to mainland China in the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, many were allowed to migrate to Hong Kong. Although arriving with very little money, many have succeeded in establishing a fairly good life in Hong Kong, although there are also many who survive on low incomes. This paper discusses the experiences of the Indonesian Chinese in relation to local and transnational belonging, the perception of homelands, and the re-establishment of a Southeast Asian lifestyle in Hong Kong.     

Unlocking the racialized and gendered educational experiences of South Asian females in Hong Kong: the case study of Pakistani girls

Educating South Asians with different language and cultural backgrounds and integrating them into mainstream society have been a challenge for the educational system of Hong Kong. This study documents the educational experiences of a group of Pakistani girls in the contexts of home, community, and school in Hong Kong. Using ethnographic methods, data collection is based on interviews evoking their life stories. These stories recount how Pakistani girls attempt to negotiate with traditional customs, religion and mainstream stereotypes and to construct racialized and gendered schooling experiences. This study highlights the importance of mainstream engagement in regard to critical learning about cultural and linguistic diversity. It is claimed that minorities have an active role as agents in social transformation and change in achieving racial and gender equality, in this case for the most disadvantaged minority females, within the asymmetrical power relationships between local Chinese and South Asian minorities in Hong Kong.     

Business as usual: the UK national daily press and the Occupy Central movement

This essay reviews the coverage of the Occupy Central movement in the UK national daily press from the first notice of the growing movement in July 2013 to the time of writing in January 2015. This is a relatively small subset of the total mentions of Hong Kong in the UK press, which cover a wide range of cultural, leisure, sport, and business stories. Hong Kong is very far from invisible to the UK press in “normal” times but, given that the UK is the former colonial power in Hong Kong, and that the terms under which the territory was returned to China were formalized in an inter-state agreement between the UK and China (the Joint Declaration, ratified in 1985), it is reasonable to assume that developments in the constitutional situation would attract very considerable attention on the part of the UK government. Studies of foreign news suggest that nationally specific factors tend to influence news salience so we would concomitantly expect that the UK newspaper press would devote substantial amounts of space to reporting and discussing the issues raised by these developments.     

影响高密度城市的城市更新因素——以香港为例

香港高密度城市发展模式闻名于世。这种模式的形成或是由于城市新的发展需要，或是由于城市更新，后者是目前香港政府为提高公众居住条件和建成环境质量所使用的主要手段。本文聚焦城市更新，旨在突出当前香港城市改造实践中的不足，并从文献中筛选出影响城市设计的主要考虑因素，阐析它们如何能够从各方面支持本地社区发展。笔者通过问卷调查及后期资料分析，搜集和评估了香港专业设计人士与市民的意见，提炼出提升城市更新项目可持续性的关键设计因素。但愿本文的结论能为香港的开发商、城市设计者以及政府官员在日后的可持续城市更新项目中带来启示。     

Body,dress and cultural exclusion: Experiences of Pakistani women in ‘global’ Hong Kong

Underneath a veneer of racial harmony and acceptance, racial discrimination is widespread at many different levels of life in Hong Kong, the so-called ‘global city’. For decades, some minority communities have lived with subtle but institutionalized and cultural discrimination permeating their existence. In recent years, social exclusion has been one of the important themes in policy debates in Hong Kong. It is increasingly recognized that there is a close relation between ‘ethnicity’ and ‘social exclusion’. According to our research on the life situation of the South Asian minority in Hong Kong, experiences of exclusion are common. This paper focuses on investigating dress as a form of cultural exclusion among Pakistani women in Hong Kong and how mainstream society constrains the bodies of its members through dress.     

Colonial State Entrapped – The Problem of Unregistered Schools in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s

Utilizing sources from newspapers, published official documents, and declassified governmental files from archives in Hong Kong and England, this article explores the problem of unregistered schools in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s. After the war the Hong Kong colonial government played a limited role in education provision, and private institutions became the chief providers of schooling facilities. To prevent private schools from operating in a manner detrimental to the political stability of the territories, and to ensure pupils' health and safety, the ruling authorities imposed strict regulations. This approach increased the cost of running private schools, caused a substantial portion of education demand to remain unfulfilled, and consequently led to the emergence of unregistered schools. These unlawful institutions placed the government under tremendous pressure, both because some were tied to questionable political factions and because the founding of these institutions provoked objections from operators of legal private schools. Since the colonial state continued to assume a limited role in education provision, strong action brought against unlawful institutions would have further increased the number of unschooled children and undermined the popularity of the government. These pressures made the presence of black market schools a very difficult problem to resolve.     

AN ALTERNATIVE METACRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES FROM A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

This paper examines some of the current metacritical perspectives to postcolonial cultural studies, and discusses an alternative cultural contextualist perspective through the case of Hong Kong cultural studies. I first demarcate between contextualist and non-contextualist metacritical perspectives as well as between political-economic and cultural-contextualist ones. Then I identify major metacritiques that are currently made against postcolonial studies, and by showing how they may be applicable to Hong Kong cultural studies, I suggest ways to re-interpret these metacritiques from a cultural sociological perspective. I shall highlight important structural characteristics of Hong Kong cultural studies, and analyse them in terms of a cultural sociology of the postcolonial intellectual field. Ultimately, I argue that the problems associated with this postcolonial intellectual field appear to originate from the hierarchical global cultural context.     

Influence of Intrinsic Culture: Use of Public Space by Filipina Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong

In line with the process of globalisation, large numbers of foreign labour migrants, who live and work across national boundaries, have created unique, cultural landscapes on foreign soil through their use of public space. Some scholars see this use of public space by foreign labour migrants in the main as a response to external challenges, the result of political economy, gender struggle, body politics, and cultural resistance. However, little effort has been made by scholars to examine the influence of the particular intrinsic cultures in which the aforementioned migrants were born and raised, cultures that they endeavour to sustain in alien environments, e.g. their religious beliefs, family ties, languages, and modes of social contact. In this article, the writer examines the use of public space by Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong and argues that foreign labour migrants’ intrinsic cultures could be among the driving forces that shape the cultural landscapes of countries or regions in which they undertake overseas employment. The aforementioned religious beliefs, family ties, languages, and modes of social contact are major elements of these forces. The writer trusts that this article will demonstrate a new approach to the study of foreign labour migration‐related cultural issues and landscapes.     

INTERFACING FEMINISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN HONG KONG: A CASE OF EVERYDAY LIFE POLITICS

Cultural studies, as a cultural and political re-articulation of common sense, knowledge and community practices, aims at opening up new cultural space for criticisms, reflections and action. Originating from the women' movement and later flourishing in the academy as well, feminism espouses similar aims to cultural studies. Both cultural studies and feminist/gender studies have a strong sense of intervening into everyday life politics. This paper is an attempt to discuss how feminism and cultural studies interface with each other, largely based on examples of gender-related everyday life politics taken from the feminist movement in Hong Kong. It will examine issues concerning the conflict of consumption and female subjectivities, the reconceptualization of home and housewives, and the representation of everyday life for women and history writing. It is argued that by blurring, negotiating or deconstructing the boundary or division between positions, identities and domains–such as subject and object, housewives and workers, private and public, personal and political, consumption and production–the re-articulation of knowledge about ‘victim’, ‘exploitation’, ‘home’ and ‘history’ in the feminist movement will not only provide the movement with new impetus and insight to reconsider its strategies in fighting for more cultural, social and economic space for women and other marginal groups at large in Hong Kong, but will also ‘metabolize’ the newly developed discipline of cultural studies in Hong Kong by providing a platform to strengthen the dynamic arm of cultural studies education and research. Based on her feminist and teaching experiences in Hong Kong, the author has highlighted activism and pedagogy as the two important dimensions of feminism and cultural studies in this paper.     

KUNG FU: NEGOTIATING NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY

‘Kung fu’, as a cultural imaginary consecrated in Hong Kong cinema since the 1970s, was constituted in a flux of nationalism. This paper argues that the kung fu imaginary found in Hong Kong kung fu cinema is imbued with an underlying self-dismantling operation that denies its own effectiveness in modern life, and betrays an ‘originary’ moment of heterogeneity, an origin of itself as already ‘impurely Chinese’. Having been British-colonized, westernized, capitalist-polluted and culturally hybrid, Hong Kong's relation with ‘Chineseness’ is at best an ambivalent one. This ambivalence embodies a critical significance of Hong Kong as a defusing hybrid other within a dominant centralizing Chinese ideology, which is itself showing signs of falling apart through complex changes imposed by global capital. Hong Kong's kung fu imaginary, which operates in a self-negating mode, is instructive when read as a tactic of intervention at the historical turn from colonial modernity to the city's reluctant return to the fatherland. The kung fu imaginary enacts a continuous unveiling of its own incoherence, and registers Hong Kong's anxious process of self-invention. If Hong Kong's colonial history makes the city a troublesome supplement, then the ‘Hong Kong cultural imaginary’ will always be latently subversive, taking to task delusive forms of ‘unitary national imagination’.