Understanding The Political Culture Of Hong Kong The Paradox Of Activism And Depoliticization

This book challenges the widely held belief that Hong Kong's political culture is one of indifference. The term "political indifference" is used to suggest the apathy, naivete, passivity, and utilitarianism of Hong Kong's people toward political life. Taking a broad historical look at political participation in the former colony, Wai-man Lam argues that this is not a valid view and demonstrates Hong Kong's significant political activism in thirteen selected case studies covering 1949 through the present. Through in-depth analysis of these cases she provides a new understanding of the nature of Hong Kong politics, which can be described as a combination of political activism and a culture of depoliticization.

Over the past six or more decades, John Friedmann has been an insurgent force in the field of urban and regional planning, transforming it from its traditional state-centered concern for establishing social and spatial order into a radical domain of collaborative action between state and civil society for creating ‘the good society’ in the present and future. By opening it up to theoretical engagement with a wide range of disciplines, Friedmann’s contributions have revolutionised planning as a transdisciplinary space of critical thinking, social learning, and reflective practice. Insurgencies and Revolutions brings together former students, close research associates, and colleagues of John Friedmann to reflect on his contributions to planning theory and practice. The volume is organized around five broad themes where Friedmann’s contributions have risen to challenge established paradigms and generated the space for revolutionary thinking and action in urban and regional planning – Theorising hope; Economic development and regionalism; World cities and the Good city; Social learning, empowered communities, and citizenship; and Chinese cities. The essays by the authors reflect their engagement with his ideas and the new directions in which they have taken these in their work in planning theory and practice.

This book explores the dynamics of China’s new united front work in Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese penetrative politics can be seen in the activities of local pro-Beijing political parties, clans and neighborhood associations, labor unions, women and media organizations, district federations, and some religious groups. However, united front work in the educational and youth sectors of civil society has encountered strong resistance because many Hong Kong people are post-materialistic and uphold their core values of human rights, the rule of law and transparency. China’s new united front work in Hong Kong has been influenced by its domestic turn toward “hard” authoritarianism, making Beijing see Hong Kong’s democratic activists and radicals as political enemies. Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” is drifting toward “one country, two mixed systems” with some degree of convergence. Yet, Taiwan and some foreign countries have seen China’s united front work as politically destabilizing and penetrative. This book will be of use to scholars, journalists, and observers in other countries seeking to reckon with Chinese influence.

The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In this telling, migrants thrived under British colonial rule, transforming Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city and an industrial and financial hub. Unsettling Exiles recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world. Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging, including refugees, deportees, “undesirable” residents, and members of sea communities. She emphasizes that flows of people did not stop at Hong Kong’s borders but also bled into neighboring territories such as Taiwan and Macau. Chin develops the concept of the “Southern Periphery”—the region along the southern frontier of the PRC, outside its administrative control yet closely tied to its political space. Both the PRC and governments in the Southern Periphery implemented strict migration and deportation policies in pursuit of border control, with profound consequences for people in transit. Chin argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. Drawing on wide-ranging research, Unsettling Exiles sheds new light on Hong Kong’s ambivalent relationship to the mainland, its role in the global Cold War, and the origins of today’s political currents.

This book offers an interpretive and critical comparative politics analysis of the post-1945 development trajectory of the broad East Asian region and its component countries. The discussion considers the region and its countries in terms of their historical legacies (colonialism, war and the preoccupation with development) and argues that each country has constructed their own way of ordering political life, each created its own political logic. Arguing that it is an error to judge these countries’ performance against the model of Europe or America, Preston discusses the era of expansionist colonialism, the episode of breakdown in highly destructive regional warfare in the early twentieth century and the subsequent diverse records of China (with its party-state turned towards a nominal state-socialism), Hong Kong (confronting the problems of living with distant masters), Singapore (with its elite directed national building) and Thailand (mired in elite-resistance to popular political reform).

In a comprehensive and theoretically novel analysis, Take Back Our Future unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The essays presented here by a team of experts with deep local knowledge ask: how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? Take Back Our Future argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The contributors outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, Take Back Our Future demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.

This is the first sustained exploration of the anti-colonial campaign that was inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, recent events in Macao, and fuelled by inequalities in Hong Kong society. The riots presented a sustained challenge to British authority. As leftist-led demonstrations evolved into a terrorist bombing campaign, the British security response was also markedly strengthened. Using recently opened archival records, the authors explore the course of the events, their international and imperial contexts, and their connection to the upheaval in China, and Britain's own changing world role. The events of 1967 are also grounded in the wider sweep of Hong Kong's history.The second part of the book presents testimonies from Hong Kong residents, participants in different ways in the unfolding events, which speak to the salience of 1967 in Hong Kong's popular memory. There has been an awkward silence about this episode for almost forty years, and this book begins to normalize discussion about it, and its place in Hong Kong, Chinese and British imperial history.

This title describes the present political system and development in Hong Kong. The second edition assesses the main strands of continuity and change in Hong Kong's government and politics since the creation of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 1997.