Anticipating The Return of Hong Kong: Women from Hong Kong and Macao Discuss the Implications

Chen Muhua (L4), Vice Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of the ACWF, Wang Zhaoguo (R3), Minister of United Front, Lu Ping (L3), Director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council, Huang Qizao (L2), Vice President and first member of the ACWF Secretariat, and Zhao Di (R2), Vice President and member of the ACWF Secretariat with Ms. Peggyp Lam, head of the Hona Kona and Macao Women's Visitina Group.     

Psychological Well-Being and Adolescents’ Internet Addiction: A School-Based Cross-Sectional Study in Hong Kong

This study examines the correlations of adolescents’ self-esteem, loneliness and depression with their internet use behaviors with a sample of 665 adolescents from seven secondary schools in Hong Kong. The results suggest that frequent online gaming is more strongly correlated to internet addiction and such correlation is higher than other predictors of internet addiction in online behaviors including social interactions or viewing of pornographic materials. Male adolescents tend to spend more time on online gaming than female counterparts. In terms of the effect of internet addiction on adolescents’ psychological well-being, self-esteem is negatively correlated with internet addiction, whereas depression and loneliness are positively correlated with internet addiction. Comparatively, depression had stronger correlation with internet addiction than loneliness or self-esteem. A standardized definition and assessment tool for identifying internet addiction appears to be an unmet need. Findings from this study provide insights for social workers and teachers on designing preventive programs for adolescents susceptible to internet addiction, as well as emotional disturbance arising from internet addiction.     

Postdivorce Coparenting and Children’s Well-Being in Hong Kong

This article reports a survey study on postdivorce coparenting and its relationships with children’s well-being in Hong Kong. Based on data from 142 resident parents and 84 children, the results revealed that interparental conflict and triangulation of children within parental conflict adversely affected children’s well-being, whereas interparental support fostered children’s well-being. Parental communication and interparental support coexisted simultaneously with parent conflicts. These conflicting effects make postdivorce coparenting a mixed blessing for children. Fortunately, residential parent–child intimacy and quality parenting by both parents protected children’s well-being from the effects of negative relational dynamics. Promoting postdivorce coparenting should always accompany effective interventions in conflict resolution, the renegotiation of growth-enhancing boundaries among family members, the support of parental functioning and individual recovery of both parents, and the facilitation of noncompetitive parental involvement of nonresident parents.     

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.     

Pluralistic ignorance in Sino–Hong Kong conflicts: the perception of mainland Chinese people living in Hong Kong

This study examined pluralistic ignorance in the context of conflicts between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese in Hong Kong. This focus differs from past studies, which have mainly explored in-group pluralistic ignorance regarding whether people could correctly perceive the opinions of others who belonged to the same social group as they did. The present study investigated whether people could correctly perceive the public opinion of a collective to which they did not belong. Using two representative samples of mainland Chinese students and local students from three universities in Hong Kong, this study found that mainland students overestimated the local public’s unfavorability regarding Chinese mainlanders and the Chinese government. This overestimation was found to be positively associated with their attention to media content about the Sino–Hong Kong relationship and the extent to which they perceived the pertinent media content to be biased toward Hong Kong but negatively associated with their interpersonal communications with Hong Kongers about issues regarding the Sino–Hong Kong relationship. The overestimation of the local public’s unfavorability of Chinese mainlanders and the Chinese government reduced the willingness of mainland students to stay in Hong Kong for further study, work, or domicile. Based on the findings of this study, further research on pluralistic ignorance is recommended in order to determine how migrants perceive the mainstream opinion in the society to which they migrate.     

Revisiting contingency theory in regenerative social-mediated crisis: An investigation of Maxim’s and Yoshinoya in Hong Kong’s polarized context

This research investigates how the social media-based crisis response of two organizations operating in a specific polarized context unfolds along a regenerative crisis lifecycle in line with the contingency theory of accommodation. By analyzing two crises that affected the Maxim’s and Yoshinoya groups during the Hong Kong social unrest in 2019, the paper commits to explicate how internal, socio-environmental, and external publics’ factors shape the communication patterns of the crisis. By focusing on Facebook posts and information available online, this study examines how the two selected organizations responded to specific crisis situations, and how publics reacted during the regenerative crisis lifecycle. Results show that Maxim’s took the advocative, while Yoshinoya engaged in the accommodative stance initially. Then, they both turned to an avoidance stance to deal with active online publics with opposing political stances. Contingent factors driving the organizations to adopt specific stances were relevant to internal members, organizational characteristics, social media environment, and external publics. Results provide insights about the complexities organizations face to respond to online publics in regenerative social-mediated crises. They also advance the contingency theory by refining the advocacy-accommodation stance continuum, re-defining contingent factors, and explicating the interactive effects of contingent factors on organizational response decision making in a polarized and social-mediated context.     

Hong Kong Parents’ Perceptions and Experiences of Involvement in Homework: A Family Capital and Resource Management Perspective

This qualitative study examines Hong Kong Chinese parents’ perceptions and experiences of involving in their primary school children’s homework process. It draws upon the theoretical frameworks of family capital theory and family resource management perspective to explicate the role of parents in enhancing children’s homework outcomes. Information was collected through individual and focus-group interviews with 52 parents who had at least one child attending primary school. Findings of this study provide a glimpse into the range of homework-involvement strategies used by Chinese parents, and reveal parental goals and cultural values embedded in the generation of family capital. Such understanding on parental involvement is helpful for schools and policy-makers in cultivating parents’ participation in home-based learning processes for children.     

Older Adults’ Gambling Motivation and Problem Gambling: A Comparative Study

Gambling participation rates among older adults (65+ years) have been increasing in recent years. Very few studies have compared older and younger gamblers on gambling motivation and problem gambling. This study compared 41 male and 63 female older gamblers (66-87 years; median 73) to 20 male and 85 female younger gamblers (17-34 years; median 20) in New Zealand on gambling involvement, gambling motives and number of gambling related problems in the previous 12 months. The questionnaire included the Gambling Motivation Scale (GMS) and the Revised South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS-R) of current problem gambling. There were between-group age differences but no significant gender or gender by age interaction effects. While older adults had significantly lower scores on all the measures, except they gambled more frequently, for both groups frequency of gambling, number of activities, largest amount spent in a single session and all motives were correlated with SOGS-R scores. Preferences for electronic gaming machines and bingo were related to SOGS-R scores for both age groups. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that after statistically controlling for age, gambling involvement and other motives, tension release uniquely predicted SOGS-R scores. For both age groups, increasing severity of problem gambling is more likely to be associated with releasing tension than with winning money or seeking sensation.     

Looking beyond ‘buildings of chrome and glass’: Hong Kong’s ‘uncanny postcoloniality’ in photographs of Tin Shui Wai

Hong Kong has a unique postcolonial identity. After being colonised by Britain for over a century and a half, it was ceremoniously handed over to China in 1997, without necessitating any bloody wars or even skirmishes. Hong Kong has continued to enjoy a privileged status within China due to the doctrines enshrined in the ‘one country two systems’ policy. She has benefited from becoming part of a nation with the fastest growing economy in the world, and the people of Hong Kong have for the most part acquiesced to the reduction in levels of political freedom. However, recent events like the Umbrella Movement spearheaded mainly by student protesters has brought to the fore the cracks in Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity and the city finds itself once again precariously poised in a moment of transition.

Theorising a connection between Hong Kong’s postcolonial predicament and the city state’s physical landscape, I analyse Hong Kong photographer Derrick Chang’s photos of Tin Shui Wai, a remote new town located on Hong Kong’s northwestern edge. Tin Shui Wai is a failed new town – it was developed to house workers who would serve the industries that were projected to develop there in the 1990s. However, these labour-intensive industries never materialised due to the meteoric rise of Guangdong’s manufacturing industry. Instead Tin Shui Wai has now come to be known as the ‘city of sadness’, notorious for its gruesome murders, high rate of domestic abuse and tragic suicides. Through an analysis of Chang’s photographs of Tin Shui Wai depicting isolation, stagnation and urban detritus, this article argues that the uncanny, spectral spaces of encounter raise questions and provide an alternative and more disquieting narrative of Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity.     

Parents’ Health and Adult Children’s Subsequent Working Status: A Perspective of Intergenerational Transfer and Time Allocation

This paper frames how parents’ health problems may affect a child’s subsequent working status. Parental health problems occurring in their prime working years undermine an adult child’s resources and tend to affect the child’s preferences over time-allocations among leisure, market- and non-market-labor. Empirical applications in this paper focus on a situation with pervasive health problems, lack of social safety network, and a substantial gender gap in labor market return. Exploiting Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) for the period 1994–2004, empirical results indicate that a father’s poor health status is a significant predictor of lowering a daughter’s educational attainment and working probability during her subsequent, adulthood years.     

A Qualitative Study of Parents’ and Children’s Views on Mediation

This qualitative study examined the benefits to children of family mediation for divorcing couples and the limitations of such mediation. To capture the perspectives of parents and their children, we invited 40 parents and 10 children to participate in the study. The parent informants reported that mediation improved the efficacy of their parenting and alleviated their children’s stress about their divorce. In contrast, the child informants felt they were powerless when involved in the mediation process and that they received limited support from the mediators. Strategies are proposed for improving the cultural applicability of mediation services for children in a Chinese society.     

“The Compass of Our Life”: A Qualitative Study of Marriage and Faith Among Chinese Immigrants

Twenty highly religious Chinese Christian married couples (n = 40) were interviewed to examine how religious faith influenced their perceptions of marriage and family life. Most participants held advanced graduate degrees (14 PhD and 13 MS degrees). Their ages ranged from 28 to 66, and the number of children ranged from one to four. Grounded theory methods (including open coding and axial coding) were applied to analyze the data. Based on the interview data three emergent themes were identified: (1) Moving from atheism to theism (“God is love”), (2) changing perceptions of marriage (“Marriage is established by God”), and (3) a new priority (“Put God first”). Supporting qualitative data are presented in connection with each theme. Implications for research and practice related to Chinese immigrants’ marriage and family in the United States are discussed.     

The Lovers of Venice: Musset’s Works and Life in Kuzmin’s A New Rolla

The title of Mikhail Kuzmin’s Novyi Rolla [A New Rolla] has been considered cryptic despite its evident allusion to Alfred de Musset’s “Rolla,” a poem with which it shares little. In this article I argue that the link to Musset is clear if we read A New Rolla as responding not just to “Rolla,” but also to Musset’s novel La Confession d’un enfant du siècle [The Confession of a Child of the Age] and his biography. From this composite source Kuzmin takes up the themes of a debauchee finding love, love as serial yet serious, and a love triangle in Venice, as well as an apostrophe to the kiss. Kuzmin endorses most of Musset’s idea of love, but rejects the egalitarian ideal implicit in the sympathetic treatment of the prostitute Marion in “Rolla.” A secondary allusion to Nikolai Nekrasov’s “Kogda iz mraka zabluzhden’ia” [When, out of the darkness of error] reinforces Kuzmin’s rejection of the egalitarian ideal of sexual love. The allusions to Musset and Nekrasov amount to anachronisms that partially undermine the precise temporal setting of A New Rolla. Kuzmin’s work thereby occupies an intermediate position among his period pieces, as it is neither openly playful like Venetsianskie bezumtsy [Venetian Madcaps] nor constructed with its seams hidden like the Aleksandriiskie pesni [Alexandrian Songs].     

Contesting middle-class civility: place-based collective identity in Hong Kong’s Occupy Mongkok

The global wave of popular protests since 2011 has highlighted the importance of place to contentious politics. Focusing on Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, this article analyzes how place, when dramatized by the practice of protest camping, shapes collective identity formation and contestation. By examining the Mongkok protest camp, I argue that the symbolic meanings being attributed to the place have shaped a collective identity distinctive from other local protests. This place-based collective identity was constituted by two dimensions: a tactical dimension that advocated militant actions against the police and counter-protesters; and an associational dimension that sought to identify with the grassroots in political activism. While its formation helped to galvanize protesters’ solidarity at the early stage of the movement, the two dimensions gradually generated intensive conflicts, which eventually weakened solidarity and the movement claims.     

Live-in Foreign Domestic Workers and their Impact on Hong Kong’s Middle Class Families

This paper discusses the impact of foreign domestic workers (FDWs) on parental roles and family dynamics of Hong Kong’s middle class families. The increase in married women’s labor force participation in Hong Kong has led to a greater demand for childcare, which has been filled by FDWs. Based on interviews with 15 dual-earner couples in middle class nuclear families employing FDWs, how FDWs affect the mother’s gender role and family dynamics is discussed. Boundary work is used by parents in their daily interaction with their children and their FDWs so as to reconcile the perceived indispensability of these workers on the one hand, and the challenges they pose to the definition of parenthood on the other. This research was funded by a Lingnan University Social Sciences Program Research Grant RES/SOC010/978. I am grateful to the guest editors and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.     

The other side of Malaysia’s enviable economic and multiethnic stability: the obstinate resilience of ‘money politics’

Many governments, in their zeal to progress and deliver the fruits of development, are caught in a web of unsavory habits and practices that impair not only their international image but also domestic legitimacy. One such perennially persistent and resilient disease is ‘money politics.’ Taking Malaysia as a case study, we note that despite sustaining a remarkable record of economic and multiethnic stability, the country has also been helpless in mitigating this obstinate issue. In this article, it is posited that the phenomenon is not a new or recent portent but has actually persisted even prior to independence. We shall then contend that unless the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition government attaches greater priority in stamping out this political bug, the country’s otherwise enviable development trajectory and the quest to reach a ‘developed nation’ status via its Vision 2020 declaration, even if fulfilled, are not cause for celebration, given its implications to the country’s economic sustainability and multiethnic stability.     

Nonprofit Development in Hong Kong: The Case of a Statist–Corporatist Regime

This paper adapts Salamon, Sokolowski, and Anheiers social origins theory to argue that the nonprofit regime in Hong Kong can be characterized as statist–corporatist. This statist–corporatist regime displays the hybrid character of both a statist and a corporatist regime: its statist character can be seen in the high degree of autonomy of the state, its tendency to limit freedom of association, and the low commitment to social provision. Its corporatist character is evident in the high level of participation by designated nonprofit organizations in selected areas of social provision under state funding. It is shown how the development of this nonprofit regime was historically shaped by four factors; namely, the interest of the colonial state in maintaining domination, economic and public financial policy, the historical formation of the welfare system, and political regime change. The findings illustrate the distinct historical forces and the path of development in an Asian state that might affect nonprofit development.     

Why Do Women Want Children? The Case of Hong Kong,China: A Lowest-Low Fertility Context

ABSTRACT

Governments in low fertility countries tend to tackle low birth rates by addressing macro-level factors rather than the meaning that having a child holds for men and women. Yet whether or not an individual decides to have a child depends in part on what they think having a child will mean for their lives. This study examines the meanings that constitute reasons for wanting a child among a sample of middle-class, married, Hong Kong Chinese women who wanted children. These women were living in Hong Kong when it had one of the lowest total fertility rates in the world and the lowest in its history. Using semi-structured, in-depth interviews, it finds that for these women, to have a child makes one’s family complete; is the next stage of life; provides happiness, fun, and enjoyment; brings care and company in old age; and children are “lovely” and “cute.” Governments concerned about low birth rates can use research on what having a child means for women to improve policy so as to make having a child more attractive, and to create messages that hold greater appeal to women.     

The self in the other: Aleksandr Griboedov’s Orient

While scholars of Russian orientalism have diverged somewhat in their interpretation of Aleksandr Griboedov, they have in the main viewed him as a supporter of Russian expansion and seen in his works a justification of Russia’s conquests in the East. This essay seeks to complicate that view. By taking a comprehensive look at Griboedov’s Eastern-themed works (including his poems “There, Where Flows the Alazani”, “Kal'ianchi”, and “Predators on the Chegem”, the play Georgian Night and a series of editorials, letters, and travel notes written from the Caucasus and Persia) and situating them in the context of contemporary literary and political debates, the author argues that Griboedov undercuts rather than supports the orientalist conception of the East’s alterity. By portraying “Eastern” ways as possibilities latent within all humans and by pointing out the Russian past in the Persian present, Griboedov is able to question Russia’s role in the Caucasus and to explore the costs of Russia’s progress towards European-style civilization.     

Neighborhood Residents’ Fear of Crime: A Tale of Three Cities

Neighborhood characteristics impact residents’ fear of crime. Empirical research supports these ideas, but the majority of these studies are based on residents of a single city. The relationship between social control, disorder, perceptions of crime, and residents’ fear of crime has not been fully explored across multiple cities. The current study examines the relationship between residents’ perceptions of neighborhood safety, disorder, and social control using survey data from residents across three cities in the United States. The findings suggest that shared expectations lead to decreased fear, while increased levels of social disorder lead to a greater fear of crime across each of the three cities. Other factors, including perceptions of crime, exposure to victimization, and demographic characteristics are not consistently related to the fear of crime. This suggests the structural impact of city factors, or increases in disorder and crime, might be influencing the perceptions of risk and constrained behaviors of residents.