This article aims at investigating local developmental trajectories of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian movement with an emphasis on the ecstatic religious experiences of the Holy Spirit and practices of spiritual gifts, since the late twentieth century and the phenomena of its recent socio- political engagements in Hong Kong. However, it has received insufficient academic attention. The research question of this article is: how have different Pentecostal churches and Christians interacted with the socio- political sphere in today’s Hong Kong? This article argues that in today’s Hong Kong, Pentecostal communities have been phenomenally and theologically kaleidoscopic in their socio-political engagements, in which no single Pentecostal theory can fully depict and interpret their complex realities. An analysis of Pentecostalism and its socio-political dynamics in context needs to take the local context into consideration.

本文以香港錫克家庭回訪印度為例,探討回鄉探親這類活動, 如何反映香港印度人與他們故鄉之間的跨國聯繫,以及他們 如何運用這種聯繫去維持本身的宗教信仰及進行各項經濟活 動。根據筆者自 2005 年在香港錫克教廟長期持續的田野調 查,以及伴隨香港錫克家庭到印度旁遮普邦的探訪,本文考 察香港錫克人回印探親對當地錫克家族跨國網路整合及本地 日常活動的影響。以參與觀察所得的資料為基礎,本文分析 香港錫克家庭回訪印度這一行為背後一系列的歷史及社會文 化因素,並藉此展望在回鄉探親中展現的跨國聯繫,在全球 疫情漸緩之後或會發生的轉變。

The Chinese white dolphin is not only the most loved animal in Hong Kong but also the flagship species of the city, mobilized by conservationists to publicize environmental issues and drum up support for the conservation of the species’ habitat. In addition, the cetacean has also been instrumentalized to convey political messages. This article aims to make sense of the social prominence of the Chinese white dolphin in Hong Kong by revisiting the cetacean’s trajectory with the city while examining the efficacy and the potential negative impacts of the symbol in relation to conservation. Historically, public awareness of the species first surged due to the construction plan for Hong Kong International Airport, followed by the 1997 Handover, during which the dolphin was turned into a mascot to call for a more intimate relationship between China and Hong Kong, although some citizens professed their pessimism over the change of sovereignty by reading their misery into the mammal. The two events have offered fecund resources for conservationists to build up the flagship species. However, while citizens show general awareness and concern over the dolphins, the efficacy of the flagship species is low when leveraged against reclamation initiatives. The Chinese white dolphin can also be a double-sided sword for Hong Kong’s conservation, given their absence in specific sites was used to justify various ecologically disruptive development plans. An additional observation is that there has been a resurgence among Hong Kong people to draw parallels to the plights of the cetacean after the political turmoil unveiled in 2019.

Public opinion in Hong Kong has been moving toward a narrative that diminishes the value of the humanities both within its society and in the broader context of Mainland China. This influences how theology is understood in Hong Kong. Theological education in Hong Kong often uses Western Enlightenment paradigms, theories, and materials, but what if Hongkongers were to ground their understanding of contextual theology in their experiences? What does it mean to value local theological knowledge in Hong Kong? The practices of Hong Kong’s laity could be important to local theologians’ theorization of Hong Kong theology.
What do Christian lay people in Hong Kong consider theology to be? In what ways does theology grow out of their lives? Questions like these must be understood and analyzed to enable Hong Kong theology to develop based on the lived theologies of its people, reflecting theological lessons learned from post-Handover socio-politics.
First, I argue for the public value of theological education in Hong Kong. Second, in a culture where theological education is largely seen as vocational training for ministers, I explore why Hong Kong lay Christians wish to study theology, and I suggest the necessity of lifting local, lay knowledge. Finally, I propose rethinking theological education in a comprehensive, liberal arts style to stimulate the laity’s critical thinking about their faith. Working out one’s theology in community with others is crucial, because it is in communities that the emotional and affective dimensions of religion have their place and where theologies are cross-checked with lived experience.

The Hong Kong government has administered new public management in the public sector to address the impact of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Guided by the principles of efficiency, effectiveness, and economy, the Government re-examined its expenditures across different sectors. Higher education encountered financial strain after the Government adjusted its funding for education. Meanwhile, many young people were unemployed or failed to pursue further studies. The Government thus launched Project Yi Jin in 2000, authorizing qualified higher education providers to offer an unprecedented and self-financed study path for young people to meet their educational needs. Despite the project’s implementation spanning over two decades, studies focusing on it were outdated and inadequate. Therefore, we proposed a study to revisit the project in the aforementioned context, aiming to bridge the academic gaps. This article argued that by offering young people hope for their futures, the project has enhanced society, especially young people, to respect law and order. The project has also helped higher education to survive and exercise its function by alleviating the financial stress attributed to new public management in the public sector. This article will become one of the significant references for higher education and education policymakers, particularly regarding sustainability and governance.

This article presents an alternative perspective to the prevailing view that the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens were established solely through negotiations between colonial authorities and the Hong Kong government. We argue that the role of the imperial botanical network should also be considered. The network facilitated the explorations, imaginations, and connections of botanists in Hong Kong from the British occupation to the establishment of the gardens, revealing their contribution to Hong Kong's significance in the field of imperial botany. Through exploring the people and events surrounding the gardens' establishment, the article offers a unique perspective on revealing Hong Kong's early colonial period.

This article aims to mediate the fleeting notion of the border of Hong Kong through the lens of contemporary art, the participatory creativity during recent social movements. The subjectivity of Hong Kong, its people often underpins social movements in Hong Kong after 1997, in the past two decades is negotiated in the forms of confrontation, contention on geopolitical, nationalistic, ethnic borders between Hong Kong, the Mainland. The social unrests indicate that nationality, ethnicity may not be the prevailing attribution for devising one’s attachment to a place. The notion of identity, its boundaries are complex orchestrations that involve confounding subjective, variable aspects of humanity, such as emotion, psychological attachment. In this sense, the notion of border is a transient one, whereby Hongkongness is constantly manifested. The works of three Hong Kong artists—Samson Young, Luke Ching, Tang Kwok-hin—illustrate, mediate both the fluidity of multiple assemblages on the boundaries of Hong Kong SAR, the trans-border correlations between Hong Kong, Taiwan. The participatory creativity, namely the Lennon Wall, diverse creativity once spread across the city during the 2014, 2019 protests, also allegorize the diverse, mutated boundaries of individuals that comprise the subjectivity of Hong Kong.

The Kitchen Shorthand (KS) has amused and bemused many Hongkongers but has hitherto not been systematically studied. This paper explains that KS principles are motivated by the imperative of efficiency and include redundancy removal, use of (near-)homophony, extraction of distinctive graphemes, use of convenient idiosyncratic symbols and strategic positioning of information on the writing space. Novel strategies like grapheme extraction and recombination speak to the cognitive properties that must underlie the Chinese scribe who despite possible low literacy may intuit the KS enabled by the sociocultural context of Hong Kong.

This article looks at two recurring cinematic motifs—neon signs and skyscrapers—as constitutive signifiers of Hong Kong’s urban topography, and charts the shifting construct of the city through its filmic representations. Focusing on Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs (2002) with the aid of a few others including Her Fatal Ways and Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell, I aim to juxtapose the two architectural icons and their filmic presences alongside the city’s changing symbolic landscape, and to remap its transition from a product of colonial modernity to that of post/modernity. Rather than fixing themselves to two successive temporalities, I argue, these motifs are often manifested in a way that inverts the time–space of Hong Kong on screen, giving rise to a fluid identity that is unique to its cityscape.

本文討論1945至1975年期間港英政府的管制﹑社會的道德恐慌舆香港漫畫題材轉變的關係。本文運用用Stanley Cohen的道德恐慌理論，比较1970年前後港英政府不干預的態度，以及它1970年代初立法管制的論述和行動如何掀起社會輿論指责色情和武打漫畫敗壞社會風氣，以及標籤這些刊物为不良通俗文化，從而說明媒體自身不足以建媾社會對漫畫的道德恐慌，以及政府的管制促使香港漫畫家改變武打漫畫的主题和風格。

In an attempt to de-Westernize film studies, this article first compares the different literary precursors, cultural references, and developments of horror as a film genre in Hong Kong and Hollywood to highlight their difference in cultural provenances. It then illustrates how the film evokes nostalgia for the “golden past” of Hong Kong horror through nostalgia casting and slipshod cinematography and extrapolates how the local spectators’ criticisms of Coffin Homes reflect a cinematic amnesia and detachment from Hong Kong horror as the result of the Westernization and modernization of movie theaters. By inventing a new subgenre called “slipshod horror,” I separate this de- Westernizing local subgenre from other horror-related subgenres, such as B films, exploitation films, and cult films. This distinction highlights its unique combination of cultness, low budget, cultural specificity, genre hybridity, and political awareness. Additionally, I explain how the film employs both cinematic and meta-cinematic techniques to practice a de-Westernizing approach that seeks to problematize, recalibrate, and reimagine the horror genre through a local, non-Westernized perspective.

Despite sustaining enviable economic growth after its Handover to China, Hong Kong has witnessed an increasingly contentious society where citizens have continued to protest for their political freedoms. This article is an attempt to rethink the ways of studying popular contention in a subnational, hybrid context, focusing on the case of Hong Kong. How has Hong Kong’s long trajectory of popular protests, despite not being able to bring about institutional changes, reshaped the dynamics and contours of political participation? Departing from what we will identify as the structural– functionalist and neo-institutionalist approaches, we propose to deploy a bottom–up, movement-oriented approach—what we call the “movement field” approach—to identify how state, non-state and quasi-state actors interact to operate between different issues of activism, adopt various contentious practices, and transcend established boundaries of contention. We aim to identify new analytical levers for revealing the neglected dimensions of the city’s contentious politics and for identifying the interplay between their changes and continuities. Our aim is to reveal the impetus and mechanisms for social-political changes in an open society dictated by increasingly authoritarian protocols, and to offer new conceptual and methodological directions that might yield a more profound and nuanced understanding of contentious politics both in and beyond Hong Kong.

This article analyses the experience of “One Country, Two Systems” to flesh out a continuous and divisible understanding of sovereignty. A binary and exclusive concept of sovereignty is too contingent on statehood to describe an international system marked by divided authority. Hong Kong, as a sub-state that legally lacks sovereignty yet has high levels of autonomy and authority over its population, is a unique opportunity to help create a new, more flexible organizing principle for the international system.
The article focuses on “tests”: instances where Hong Kong’s political process and local authority came into conflict with external factors, be they Chinese objectives or engagement with the international system. The tests fall into three categories, which could be seen as the most salient elements of authority: the ability to enforce legislation inside a defined jurisdiction (i.e. territoriality); the ability to define problems, priorities and solutions (i.e. policy autonomy); and the ability to engage with the international system (i.e. foreign engagement and diplomatic recognition). These tests help determine what elements of Hong Kong’s autonomy (and, by extension, any instance of high, but not complete, autonomy in a sub-state) are the most politically salient.

本文回顧九七回歸後香港詩刊上的詩歌翻譯作品， 從文化翻譯的角度來檢驗詩刊的翻譯實踐與文化身份之間的關係。文化翻譯過程中的不可譯性保證文化的存活。本文指出香港譯者有意識地主動尋求文化翻譯來呈現各種文化特質，而不是在被動地在(後)殖民話語中將它們逼迫出來。這些香港文化的特質都帶有「中間」、「過渡」、「跨越」等特點，它們共同構成了一種翻譯的文化身份。

The post-Handover years of Hong Kong have witnessed an escalating visibility of local celebrities in its political scene. Responding to a society that is clouded by civil unrest and social tension, some famed individuals have readily given their voice on political issues in the media-shaped social environment. This article will study the Hong Kong-based Cantopop singer Denise Ho as a case in point to scrutinize how “performance” is interpreted as strategic and discursive framing of one’s mediated image within the changing celebrity culture of Hong Kong. Rather than a quality that individuals possess or inhabit, this article reconceptualizes celebrity as a process, or a “frame” through which the persona is configured, addressed and negotiated. The article will identify two performative “moments” pertinent, directly or laterally, to the 2014 Umbrella Movement which also marks the pinnacle of Ho’s politically-charged image: first, the arrest of Ho in a police clearance action on December 11, 2014, and second, a free substitute concert held by Ho on June 19, 2016, in place of the one canceled by the French cosmetic company Lancôme. The analysis will delineate two vectors in Ho’s performance—to impress and to express—and will argue that the performance is an outcome of the interplay of multiple forces such as the audience, the media, and the celebrity herself, which works to reconstruct her personality as versatile, dynamic, and impactful. This article will shed light on the vital convergence of celebrities and politics in post-1997 Hong Kong, providing a theoretical discourse for understanding how local public personalities operate at this historical and political juncture.

In protests, music and sound often play a cardinal role in unifying individuals via social performances in which they voice out mutual political demands. During the 79-day Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in the autumn of 2014, many forms of music and sound that are expected in local protests were heard, including slogan-chanting, booing, and the collective singing of Cantopop songs. However, performances of “Happy Birthday to You” and other “inappropriate” songs—that is, “nonsensical” events—were heard as well. These sonic events first occurred unexpectedly and ironically in the demonstration sites, but were nonetheless grasped and performed as a political act, functioning as nonviolent weapons used to “attack” political opponents. These nonsensical musical acts soon began to make sense or sound meaningful as protesters recontextualized the lighthearted nature of these songs to particular situations in the protest and adapted this paradoxical experience into the idea of 無厘頭 mouleitau, a cultural phenomenon that appears in Hong Kong films and other media platforms to represent a sense of localism. Drawing from insights in musicology, sound studies and critical theory, this article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to study the role of these unexpected sounds in the Umbrella Movement. In particular, this article explores how and why nonsensical musical acts were appropriated and put to political use in the protest space.

The guiding principle of the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong was stability. The city’s status quo is guaranteed by Article 5 of the Basic Law, which stipulates the continued operation of economic and political systems for fifty years after the transition from British to Chinese sovereignty. Since the Handover, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) have imposed purposive interpretations on the Basic Law that restrict Hongkongers’ civil participation in local politics. Some official documents of Hong Kong, such as court judgments and public statements, show how the Hong Kong government avails itself to perpetuate such discursive violence through manipulating a linguistic vacuum left by translation issues in legal concepts and their cultural connotations in Chinese and English languages.
Twenty years after the Handover, the promise of stability and prosperity in fifty years of unchangedness exists in name only. Highlighting this connection, this article exemplifies the fast-disappearing space for the freedom of expression and for the nominal status quo using the ephemeral appearance of a light installation, Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now. Embedding the artwork into the skyline of Hong Kong, the artists of this installation adopted the administration’s re-interpretation strategy and articulated their own projection of Hong Kong’s bleak political future through the motif of a countdown device. This article explicates how Hongkongers are compelled to explore alternative spaces to articulate counter-discourses that bring the critical situation of Hong Kong in sight. The artwork also sheds light on two levels of dimensional shift in Hongkongers’ struggle for democracy—namely, the exploration of alternative discursive space, as well as the efforts to retain “Hong Kong” in the discourse of global politics.

This essay uses an analysis of Fruit Chan’s 2016 film Kill Time to reflect on the legacy of the Handover, and on the significance of its upcoming twentieth—and, later, fiftieth—anniversaries. Although Chan’s film is set in contemporary Beijing, is based on a novel by a ainland Chinese author, and at first glance appears to have little to do with Hong Kong, this essay argues that if we look beyond the film’s surface narrative, we find that the work explores a set of concerns relevant to the Handover and its legacies. Of particular interest is the sense of anticipation and anxiety that the Handover has generated, as well as the sense of potentiality and foreboding contained in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration’s guarantee that Hong Kong would enjoy a post-Handover moratorium of “fifty years without change.”

This article analyzes how two narratives about Hong Kong function as hidden resistance transcripts against Chinese state sovereignty in different historical periods. First, maritime piracy on southern Chinese coasts has been appropriated in Hong Kong regional narratives to reflect the city's collective imaginary. Pirate gang was regarded as an epitome of the refugee society of the 1950 s , projecting liberation from state control. Second, inchoate agrarian narratives under the looming power of the Chinese sovereign state after the 1997 Handover seeks to secure the community as a self-sufficient place. It advocates the revival of farming in order to voice the dissent from the increasingly centralized rule, while embedding sentiment for the locality within a series of modern global discourses, such as ecology movements, organic farming, food sovereignty, and preservation of heritage. The two narratives are hidden transcripts that represent potential events to be reactivated under oppression and to play strategic roles in power politics.

This article investigates the decision-making process behind a part of the constitutional advancement in Hong Kong before the 1980s. I will answer one question: why did the colonial government, before and after the Shek Kip Mei Squatter Fire, entrust low-cost housing and squatter resettlement responsibilities to the Urban Council, the only institution with elected members in the then Crown Colony's constitutional system? Housing affairs were proper municipal responsibilities: in Metropolitan Britain, public housing matters were under the municipal authorities' control; in Hong Kong's port colony counterpart, British Singapore, a municipal authority was indirectly involved in such functions. It was natural and logical that the Hong Kong Government followed Britain's and Singapore's practices when it had to commence a public housing program, which was completely new to the colony. Nevertheless, many colonial officers and business figures were skeptical to such partially elected institution and the politicians therein, and hence opposed the proposal of granting public housing functions to the Council. However, their oppositions were ignored, as Governor Alexander Grantham intended to implement a "minor constitutional change" after major plans such as the Young Plan had been shelved indefinitely. In addition, with public housing functions being added to the Council's purview, the government could win the Councilors' support and keep itself informed of public opinion regarding housing affairs. Through being heavily involved in public housing affairs, elected Councilors enjoyed a rise in popularity among the people. In this sense, the vesting of housing-related responsibilities in the Urban Council substantially enhanced the elected Councilors' political influence in the colony.

Popular culture in Hong Kong has long been perceived as a pivot in the fostering of an identity for this former British colony and current Chinese Special Administrative Region. From the production of horror spanning across the period of the 60s to the recent decade, especially along the fantastical invention and stereotypical representation of a spectralized Southeast Asian cinema, this particular geopolitical imagination of Hong Kong is projected through an otherworldly phantasmagoria of black magic, curses and spells, eerie happenings and, often, pornographic images. While delineating the border between the city of Hong Kong and its Southeast Asian neighbors, such imaginaries are perceived as compensation for Hong Kong’s national ambiguity, which originates from a filtering of nationality in colonial governance and an obsession with ethnic revival in the post-colonial era. Hauntings as such illustrate a process of un-imagining the nation in Hong Kong’s popular culture: although the former Southeast Asian colonies have all become independent sovereign states since decolonization, they have yet to be fully grounded in secular modernity, capitalistic progression and ethical abstinence. As a form of inter-Asian Orientalism which dictates Hong Kong geopolitical imaginary of Southeast Asia, the cinema of black magic is a collective defensive mechanism against the intrusion of the eerie and, most essentially, against the normalcy of nationality.

This article addresses the relation between the political environment during, immediately after the2019pro- democracy movement, two Hong Kong artists’ situated responses, experiences. As the movement forges its strength in the name of unity of citizenship provisionally formed, it risks failing to recognize artists’ lateral engagement with it. The movement demands that participants forgo specificities of identity as it prioritizes a unified citizenship antagonistic to the ruling power. Artists face the dilemma of having the capacity to contribute to the movement by creative, non-antagonistic means, but not having the discursive space to actualize this capacity. This article proposes that Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition is productive for understanding such contentions. It raises the question of whether forfeiting differences that constitute the value of particular cultural groups is a price the sustainability of democratic values can pay for. The works of Sharon Lee Cheuk-wun, Lau Wai demonstrate that a creative space for experimenting with what ruling power is, what it does to citizens, is as important as a space for contesting against it. Their works can be interpreted as associating with Roland Barthes’ figure of the Neutral, at once a figure of experimental thought, a dwelling for playfulness, an open, atopic space without location or ownership for multiple modes of engagement with meaning-making processes(an ethics).