Search

Empirical research has shown that self-help groups are not purely about individual change and intra-personal empowerment, but also about policy change and collective empowerment. In North America and Europe, such groups have been in the forefront of social change, and self-help represents a new political potential. However, findings of this study of self-help groups in Hong Kong indicate that social change has never been their common objective. In addition, members of the Hong Kong groups feel unable to impact social policies that affect their lives, despite wanting to do so. It is contended in this paper that this feeling of powerlessness among members might be related to the nature, size and length of existence of the self-help groups. It is further argued that self-help groups should form coalitions and seek professional assistance in order to effect social change and to strengthen and broaden their power base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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's 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the diffusion of activism in post-colonial Hong Kong through the lens of the political regime and eventful analysis. It first reveals the institutional foundations of the hybrid regime that allowed the creation of a nascent movement society. It then explains how the historic 1 July rally in 2003 and a series of critical events since 2006 have led to a shift in scale and the public staging of street politics. A time-series analysis and onsite survey further capture the dynamics that spawned the collective recognition of grievances and reduced participation costs, leading to the Umbrella Movement. While the spontaneous, voluntary and decentralized organizational structure sustained protest momentum, the regime has adopted hybrid strategies to counter-mobilize bottom-up activism. The result is widening contention between the state and civil society and within civil society, or the coexistence of regime instability and regime longevity, a trend that is increasingly common in hybrid regimes encountering mass protests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Under the "one country, two systems" model fashioned after its handover to China in 1997, Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China, is to retain its rule of law, capitalist system, and accompanying political and ideological independence. However, tensions remain centered on concerns held by many Hong Kong citizens over the "resinicization" of Hong Kong, related to anxieties regarding the putative erosion of political and ideological freedoms. This paper examines the claims-making of the student activist group Scholarism, who effectively used Facebook to raise awareness of and successfully resist a government proposal to introduce a national education curriculum into Hong Kong schools. Scholarism's resistance and ability to mobilize mass demonstrations against the government is significant considering the lack of democratic channels in Hong Kong. Implications are explored for the examination of how claims-making in cyberspace impacts the social problems process, especially in non-democratic and post-colonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the New Taiwan Series (NTS), a journal published between 1947 and 1948 in Hong Kong by Taiwanese socialists who fled the island following the 228 Uprising. It does so to intervene in ongoing debates in the field of Sinophone studies. While two major theorizations of the Sinophone exist—one that sees the field as a network of minoritized sites that operate against China-centrism, and the other grounding the Sinophone in a lyrical negotiation with cultural China—neither framework is sufficient for understanding the complex subject positions taken by Taiwanese socialists during these years. For the NTS, social activism was not a flattened binary of either ethnic identification with or resistance to a "China" articulated in terms devoid of political-economic analysis. Rather, politics had to dialectically integrate minoritarian aspirations (Taiwanese sovereignty) with majoritarian projects (the Chinese Revolution). The NTS thus encourages us to reimagine the Sinophone in socialist terms, where two analytical lenses—one grounded in the endogenous local and the other in the exogenous revolutionary center—are dialectically intertwined. The NTS navigated the resulting tensions of such a dialectical stance, making it a critical archive of Taiwanese socialist thought before the 1949 rupture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Management of apartment buildings is never straightforward because of the need for collective homeowner action. Mancur Olson suggests that a rational individual will not participate in collective action which provides no positive net benefit for him or her. Based on this premise, it would seem that rationality drives homeowners to free-ride on others’ efforts and that, as a result, no collective action will take place. However, some homeowners do actively participate in housing management, and it is worthwhile to examine why some participate and others do not. Building on the wide-ranging applications of the collective interest model (CIM) in explaining political participation and environmental activism, this paper expands its relevance to the arena of housing management. The explanatory analysis which is based on the findings of a structured questionnaire survey in Hong Kong corroborates the central propositions of the CIM and provides a theoretical account of housing management activism. In brief, housing management activism is a function of beliefs about personal and group efficacy, the value of the collective good, and the selective benefits and costs of participation. These findings have far-reaching implications for the formulation of government policies promoting homeowners’ active involvement in housing management in Hong Kong and other megacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the resilience of Christian faith-based activism in Hong Kong from the Umbrella Movement (2014) to the protests against the China extradition bill (April-September 2019). The anti-extradition struggle became part of an intense moment of local upheavals against the Chinese Communist state. This study defines "Christian faith-based activism" as a variety of nonviolent faith practices and socio-political activities inside a house of worship and in the surrounding environment, intended for church members, and "civic engagement" as private actions taken by conscientious citizens who seek to influence governmental decision-making. In Hong Kong, the analytical boundary between "Christian activism" and "civic engagement" has blurred, when Catholics and Protestants marched into the public square to fight for their civic rights since 2014. Even when the Hong Kong Police Force resorted to excessive violence against civilians in 2019 and when China pursued policies of non-negotiation and securitization through the imposition of a national security law in 2020, Christian citizens, out of their deep religious conscience and their concern for universal values, remain committed to bringing about conflict resolution and systematic change. This example highlights a wide range of innovative strategies for faith-based activism among Christian activists against a Chinese authoritarian state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on Hong Kong's history have viewed the 1967 riots as a watershed in the formation of Hong Kong identity in the 1960s and 1970s. However, by considering MacLehose's social policies as the main contribution to Hong Kong identity formation and defining China as 'the Other' in that process, the prevailing view overlooks the multifaceted nature of Hong Kong identity formation and the continuity of Hong Kong's historical development between the mid-1960s and the 1970s. This article questions that view by investigating the Cultural Revolution discourse in three rarely examined yet representative Hong Kong youth and student journals: Undergrad (Xueyuan), Chinese University Student Press (Zhongda xuesheng bao), and Pan Ku (Pangu). Through examining the three publications' interpretations of the Cultural Revolution during nationalist moments and movements in Hong Kong—the 1967 riots, the Chinese Language movement, the Defending the Diaoyu Islands movement, and the 'Learning about China, Caring about Society' campaign—the article discusses the ways in which the Cultural Revolution profoundly affected educated youth and students by contributing to the mutual development of their national and local identities at the intersection of political, ideological, cultural, and geographical perspectives. By documenting the local practices of the Cultural Revolution and the concept of 'serving the people,' the article demonstrates that Chinese nationalism, along with Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, played an important role in the formation of Hong Kong identity in the colonial setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the world status of China, one would be concerned that Hong Kong is left with 32 more years, by 2047, to demonstrate how “one country, two systems” works, and to make the case that, by the time the 50-year period of “no change” promise for the Special Administrative Region expires, its people deserve a fair review of the arrangement of their future. Having endured 18 years of increasingly unpopular and ineffective government since 1997, citizens find little patience to delay full recognition of the root causes and engagement with the long-standing problems that weigh dangerously on the tipping point. In anticipation of the promised move to a fair and democratic political system, the community realises that they are now at a crossroads of whether to trust, to evade, to fight for, or to accept what will be allowed and given by the Beijing authority. Ordinary people have awakened to see a Hong Kong they never imagined plausible, in an endless process of Kafkaesque metamorphosis, whereby the core values and way of life are subject to the ultimate twist of logic, reason and normality. At this crucial juncture of history came the Umbrella Movement of 2014, the collective action of civil disobedience against the status quo that shocked the world. The 79-day occupy action has transformed the city, which can no longer be the same again. It would be pertinent to identify the cultural-political factors that precipitated the public discourse, to re-shuffle the power hierarchy, and to shape the social body that engenders the deep crisis of subjectivity among the local people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the activities, initiatives and strategies of Zi Teng, a women's nongovernment organisation (NGO) mobilising around sex workers' rights, in Hong Kong. Although 'transnational' feminist practices have opened up new spaces of resistance for Zi Teng, women activists recognise the continued importance of the 'local' as a space that has to be negotiated and entry into which is ultimately mediated by local economic, political and social forms. At the same time, activists are wary of fostering transnational linkages and networks on equal terms, because advocacy and activism concerning migrant sex workers involves researching, theorising and writing about women who are differently positioned to themselves according to hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender and race. My ethnography documents activists' efforts in engaging in critical reflection of local NGO objectives and priorities in response to global processes and in imagining new activities, initiatives and strategies. In so doing, I illustrate the competing demands facing activists working at both the local and transnational levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of Hong Kong's human rights situation tend to focus on the ex-colony's struggle to protect civil and political rights against the encroachment of the Chinese state. Without contradicting the well-grounded concern with Hong Kong's human rights future articulated in these discussions, this article offers a complementary narrative of human rights development in post-1997 Hong Kong that looks beyond the national frame of such discussions. Drawing attention to Hong Kong's position as a regional centre in the struggle for human rights in Asia under globalisation, the article argues that the activities of local and transnational human rights advocacy groups in the city show positive and promising possibilities of coalitional solidarity on the ground of human rights. Notably, the protests against national security legislation opened up opportunities of articulating diverse struggles for the rights of various social groups, including migrant groups, with the local struggle fur civil and political rights. A perspective of Global Asia enables a reading of this important episode in Hong Kong's struggle for human rights that suggests more open-ended future possibilities than the common nationally-framed accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs anti-essentialist Marxist analysis to shed light on the diverse economic activities that Filipina contract migrants are engaged in at home and overseas. We point to the limitations of dominant representations of these women as 'heroes' of national development or 'victims' of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labour migration. In drawing on a fluid theory of class, we investigate how contract domestic workers are involved in multiple class processes that allow them to produce, appropriate and distribute surplus labour in innovative ways. We also discuss the activities of the Asian Migrant Centre, a non-governmental organization working with domestic workers in Hong Kong, whose efforts to inspire the entrepreneurial aspirations of these women reflect the importance of recognizing migrant workers' multiple economic identities. This analysis has implications for how we imagine the agency of contract workers, as well as the performativity of research and advocacy work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]