Americans living in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and China's treaty ports encountered a contradiction. The British dominated elite foreign society, their political, social, and cultural agendas often setting the pace for life within the community. But as citizens of a country that had recently wrested its independence from its one-time imperial overlord, Americans arriving in China were ostensibly averse to imperialism and the culture of empire. They maintained a belief that theirs was a benevolent republic that championed international amity and self-determination. Still, as Elisa Tamarkin notes, if Americans were wary of the British Empire, many found the spectacle of it appealing—a tendency evident in Hong Kong and the foreign enclaves along China's coast. Americans eager to enter elite foreign society proclaimed newfound sympathies for British belligerence in China, in turn developing increasingly prejudiced opinions about their Chinese neighbours and staff. Their derisive expressions of racial difference reinforced efforts to reconcile Anglo-American cultural incongruities. Such sentiments reflect the entangled processes through which extraimperial groups such as Americans fashioned themselves as members of the colonial elite. I argue that through such processes, the British and Americans subordinated national rivalry in the interest of entrenching racial divisions between white and non-white communities.

The current Hong Kong situation is the product of a long-term accumulation of crises and the consequences of the broader interplay of clashes among nations. Taiwan has long seen the PRC's treatment of Hong Kong as a barometer of its Taiwan policy. The “One Country, Two Systems” formula was proposed with an eye on Taiwan. In recent years, Beijing seemed to decouple the Hong Kong-Taiwan nexus as it began to turn the screws on Hong Kong. Taiwan has played a significant but often misunderstood role in Hong Kong's resistance to Chinese domination. This article explores the political impact of the Hong Kong-Taiwan civil society nexus from the early 2010s, through the Umbrella Movement (2014), to the Anti-Extradition Movement (2019) and the implementation of the National Security Law (2020). The ever-more repressive measures China imposed on both Hong Kong and Taiwan have given rise to close and lively exchanges between both civil societies. Taiwan may play a supporting role in Hong Kong's resistance to Chinese repression and subordination.

At a time when the prospects confronting Hong Kong are overshadowed by the combination of the popular movement for democratic rights and the corona virus epidemic that is challenging Hong Kong as well as China, issues of income inequality and declining economic prospects deeply affect the future of Hong Kong youth. This article documents the pattern of growing income inequality with specific reference to educated youth of Generation Y in spheres such as income distribution, the relative stagnation of income of young graduates, and soaring housing prices that make Hong Kong among the most expensive real estate markets in the world.

This article addresses the return of popular protests in Hong Kong in 2020, after the government's adoption of emergency measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong and following calls by the Chinese Communist Party for the government to take a much more repressive stance against protests. The pandemic has also accelerated the downturn in U.S.-China relations. The article reviews the parallel, and at times intersecting, evolution of popular protests and pandemic control measures in Hong Kong. It also outlines the ways in which the 2019 protests were departures from previous protest cycles.

Although Hong Kong historically has a weak trade union culture, in mid-2020 activists in the movement turned to demanding union representation and began forming dozens of small unions from the ground up. Within a few months of their existence they were able successfully to mount an important strike protesting against the government's policy to deal with Coronavirus pandemic. But since the passing of the National Security Law in July, the unions' future is fraught with challenges.

While Hong Kong's Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) Movement in 2019 did not lead to systemic policy changes, the protests provided coalitional moments for mainstream Hongkongers to connect with the city's marginalised South Asian community. This essay first contextualises the positionality and history of marginalisation of South Asians in Hong Kong. It then examines moments of rupture during the Anti-ELAB Movement that fostered solidarity between the two ethnic groups. This case study illustrates how anti-authoritarian social movements and the affective charge of protests help cultivate a politics of relation that supersedes racialisation.

We study the value of foreign judges and foreign case citations for emerging courts in postcolonial democracies, with a specific focus on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeals (HKCFA). The HKCFA, Hong Kong’s highest appellate court since the transfer of its sovereignty to China, features foreign judges as full members of the court. Using a novel dataset of all publicly available HKCFA decisions from 1997 to 2020, we show that there is a significantly higher number of foreign case citations in cases where foreign judges have participated. Further analyses show that this correlation is stronger where the Hong Kong government is a disputing party, and more specifically, where the court rules in favor of the Hong Kong government. The findings are consistent with the possibility that foreign judges’ expertise in foreign case law is relevant for upholding the perception of the court’s independence from the executive branch. This explanation is in line with existing theories on the role of foreign judges on domestic courts.

Hong Kong is an intermediate tuberculosis (TB) endemicity city dominated by reactivation diseases. A cross-sectional study on the clinical and epidemiologic data of newly diagnosed TB cases was conducted in such a setting, to examine the association between ambient PM2.5 and TB reactivation. After the exclusion of cases most likely resulting from recent infection, four distinct TB population phenotypes were delineated by latent class analysis based on their reactivation risk and clinical profiles (N = 2,153): ‘Elderly male’ (26%), ‘Otherwise healthy younger adult’ (34%), ‘Older female’ (19%) and ‘Male smoker’ (21%). Overall, exposure to high concentrations of ambient PM2.5 6 and 12 months before the notification was significantly associated with ‘Otherwise healthy younger adults’ membership (OR = 1.07 and 1.11, respectively) compared with ‘Elderly male’. Such association was less evident for other phenotypes. The differential pattern of association between ambient PM2.5 exposure and TB population phenotypes suggested the role of ambient PM2.5 in TB reactivation.

This article investigates the career trajectories of Hong Kong solicitors during two historical turning points, specifically 1994–1997 and 2018–2021, when hundreds of lawyers left private practice to pursue alternative career options such as business and finance, government and politics, or relocation to other countries. Data are sourced from the career mobility records of law firm partners reported in 336 monthly issues of the Hong Kong Lawyer journal between 1994 and 2021, as well as other relevant archival sources. The research examines the underlying forces that led these law firm partners to abandon their high-status positions and pursue alternative career paths during these pivotal moments in Hong Kong’s history. The findings suggest that the career trajectories of these elite professionals are not solely based on individual choices but are also shaped by their social origins and the physical and social spaces that influence their careers over time. This study contributes original insights into the complex interplay between individual, spatial and temporal factors that drive career mobility among legal professionals.

This article explores the decolonization of heritage politics in 1970s Hong Kong. It firstly revisits recent scholars’ work on Hong Kong heritage politics and the transformation of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. It shows how people’s perceptions of their colonial heritage and history in Hong Kong have changed since the 1970s. Secondly, it outlines the city’s cultural heritage policy framework after the 1967 Riots, inspired by the Cultural Revolution. It analyses how the colonial government intentionally rebranded the city’s colonial heritage as an anachronism to justify its new narrative of Hong Kong and its cultural identity in the 1970s. It also employs the demolition of the former Kowloon Railway Station building in the 1970s as a case study to discuss how the colonial government decolonized local colonial structures through its new cultural heritage policy approach after the Riots. Finally, by employing the case study of the demolished Central Star Ferry Pier in the 2000s, this article argues there was a change in people’s perceptions of the city’s colonial history in the early postcolonial period of Hong Kong. A more active notion of Hong Kong’s cultural identity is also being articulated in the uncertain future due to the city’s recent rapid political and social changes influenced by the mainland authority.

A survey of Hong Kong residents finds that public support for government technology, as understood through the concept of smart cities, is associated with concept-awareness and official communications. The statistical analysis identifies moderating effects attributable to personal social media use and controls for personal ideological views about scope of government intervention and perceived political legitimacy of smart city policies. The study builds on a growing body of empirical scholarship about public support for government technology, while also addressing a practical trend in urban governance: the growing sophistication of technologies like artificial intelligence and their use in strengthening government capacities. The Hong Kong case exemplifies ambitious investments in technology by governments and, at the time of the survey, relatively high freedom of political expression. The study’s findings help refine theories about state-society relations in the rapidly evolving context of technology for public sector use.