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This article attempts to locate Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities at the intersection of discourses between ethnic diversity, immigration, citizenship and identity. The literature informs categorizing and matching Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities, ascribing different characteristics attached to each category. This helps conceptualize the positionality of ethnic minorities in Asia’s ‘world city’, Hong Kong. The article is informed by in-depth interviews with twenty ethnic minority young people who provided perspectives on their constructions and negotiation of identity.

Most discourse related to refugees has been and continues to be related to humanitarian issues. Yet, humanitarianism as a theoretical framing is no longer sufficient for understanding refugee-fuelled migration. The politics of such migration currently dominate policy discourse and Hong Kong is no exception. Asylum seekers continue to seek refuge in a city that neither wants them, nor is sympathetic towards them. The study reported here seeks to understand this context from the point of view of asylum seekers and their supporters in the community and offers an alternative theoretical framework that reflects Hong Kong asylum seekers’ experiences. A qualitative methodology was employed to understand the contexts and asylum seeker experiences. Results indicated that extraordinary institutional pressure is exerted on asylum seekers who cannot settle in Hong Kong but who, in the meantime, are forced to rely on inadequate social protection to survive.

Purpose The recent mobilization of many Hong Kong youth to engage in what are regarded as radical political activities is not a new area of investigation. Much has been discussed about this growing political activism and localism often giving an impression that Hong Kong youth are radical and disengaged from China as a nation. Yet little is known about the possible antecedents of such disengagement. The purpose of this paper is to identify whether there is empirical evidence of growth or decline in civic trust and national attitudes amongst Hong Kong young adolescents over the ten-year period from 1999 to 2009. Design/methodology/approach In this study latent profile analyses were used to classify cohorts of Hong Kong secondary students according to the levels of their self-reported trust in civic institutions and attitudes toward the nation. The cohorts were separated by a ten-year gap. Comparisons were made across groups and across the ten-year time span, in order to trace changes in civic attitudes of young adolescents following the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Findings Three distinct groups were identified in both cohorts – Activists, who had negative attitudes to trust and toward the nation, Nationalists who had positive attitudes toward trust and the nation and Moderates who endorsed average responses to the, two variables. The gaps between the groups tended to be greater in the 2009 group compared to the 1999 groups suggesting greater polarization amongst adolescents on these measures. Originality/value Young adolescents cannot be assumed to be politically neutral or lacking social values. Citizenship education needs to take this into account so that values can be clarified and major issues can be discussed in a safe and supportive environment.

The context of Hong Kong has not always been favourable for the integration of ethnic minorities, who face various difficulties in education, employment, and daily life. Research, however, has show...

Singapore’s electoral autocracy is well known for its innovative use of political institutions such as Parliament and elections to enhance its durability, but relatively little attention ha...

Immigration has become a controversial issue in Singapore, an enduring Southeast Asian electoral autocracy. One of the controversies concerns how immigrants would influence Singapore’s domestic pol...

Religion plays an important part in the lives of many immigrants. The second generation is assumed to have a higher level of integration into the host society and lower religious and ethnic identification. This assumption, however, views acculturation as an essentialist process producing common outcomes for all groups. Yet such an assumption needs to be tested with different ethnic groups. This chapter, therefore, explores the cases of second generation Pakistani and Indian immigrant youth in Hong Kong. The findings indicate that it is not possible to generalise across these groups. Indian youth seem to have acculturated with a lower sense of religious and ethnic identification. Pakistani youth, on the other hand, reported relatively strong religious affiliation and sense of belonging to their heritage culture. This suggests that acculturation is a more nuanced process than is often portrayed and is strongly context dependent, influenced by group values, commitments and practices.

Internationally there have been serious efforts to identify effective modes of delivering civic education for preparing youth for the future challenges of citizenship. This article addresses the research question, ‘why is an independent subject not preferred in civic education by Hong Kong civic education teachers?’. It starts with a brief review of international debates and of the development of civic education policy in Hong Kong. Then it moves on to discuss why teachers tend to reject civic education as an independent subject based on the findings from an interview informed research study. The findings reveal that teachers' misunderstandings of the nature of civic education are the major reasons. Treating civic education as comprising educational activities involving the nurturing of attitudes, values and skills of students with little content knowledge, the teachers consider that civic education is best accomplished through, for example, extra-curricular activities and not as a subject that demands time slots in the school timetable. It is argued that these misunderstandings will have negative impacts on the effectiveness of civic education, which is unfavourable to the nurturing of democratic cultures necessary for the development of the democratic system in Hong Kong and has to be rectified. Lastly, some recommendations for rectification that relate to civil society are discussed. Hopefully, this article can shed light on the understanding of the preferences towards the modes of implementation of front line practitioners in schools internationally, since this phenomenon is common in some other nations.

This article explores and conceptualizes the individual mobilization processes into political party membership of a sample of young people in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous and semi-democratic region under Chinese sovereignty where political parties are relatively underdeveloped. Based on life history interviews with 23 young party members, I found that the mobilization of young people into party membership comprises three different steps. I also found that not all young party members went through the same order of steps. In total, three orders of steps are identified, which create three different paths into party membership. Lastly, this article found that each mobilization path is shaped by a specific set of macro-, meso-, and individual level influences. Keywords: Party Membership, Young People, Life History, Hong Kong, MobilizationAmple evidence from recent years show that party membership in many Western democracies have shrunk substantially and this decline is particularly evident in the younger generations (van Biezen, Mair, & Poguntke, 2011; van Biezen & Poguntke, 2014). Young people in many Western democracies are increasingly turning away from institutional forms of political participation such as voting and tending to favor extra-institutional forms of activism such as protests, single-issue movements, and online activism (Flanagan & Levine, 2010; Norris, 2003; Quintelier, 2007). This phenomenon has stimulated scholars to investigate the reasons behind the decline of party membership (Scarrow, 2007; Seyd & Whiteley, 2004; van Biezen & Poguntke, 2014) and how and why some young people still choose to join and engage in political parties (Bruter & Harrison, 2009; Cross & Young, 2008a; 2008b).The reluctance of the young people to join political parties also exists in non-Westem democracies and semi-democratic regimes such as Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong (Choy, 1999; Lin, 2013; Ma, 2007; Tan, 2010). However, limited research has been conducted in these contexts. Moreover, most literature on party membership focuses on finding the contextual factors leading individuals to join political parties but neglects the processes through which individuals are mobilized into party membership and how the factors are temporally woven together to produce the outcome (Harley et al., 2009).This paper contributes to bridging these research gaps by exploring and conceptualizing the processes through which a sample of young people came to join political parties in Hong Kong, which is a semi-democratic and semi-autonomous regime under Chinese sovereignty where political parties are relatively underdeveloped and noninstitutionalized (Lam, 2010; Lau & Kuan, 2002). Specifically, I use life history method (Denzin, 1989; Roberts, 2002) to examine the processes that resulted in the decision of 23 young people in Hong Kong to join political parties and to identify the important contextual and individual factors at play in the processes.It was found that the mobilization of young people into party membership is a threestep process shaped by a variety of macro- and meso-level contextual factors as well as the individual agency of the young people. The different configurations and interactions of the factors lead young people to go through the steps in three different orders, which in turn create three paths into party membership.This paper is divided into six sections. The first section is the background, which gives a brief description of the development of political parties and party membership in Hong Kong. The second section reviews a host of influences explaining individual participation in political parties and explains why we should go beyond the search for factors and shift the focus to the processes through which people are mobilized into parties. The third section describes the methodology of the study. The fourth section presents the results. It first presents the steps and paths into party membership identified from the interview data, and then describes the contextual and individual factors at play in the mobilization processes. …