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。

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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).

Chen Kuan-hsing's “Asia as method” is “a critical proposition to transform the existing knowledge structure and at the same time to transform ourselves” (212). The prerequisite here is to first identify and excavate the “base-entity” of a culture, which has to be overcome for transcendence. However, the temptation to indulge in enunciating such base-entity is enormous. The rise of China seems to signify an insidious regression into essentializing her own base- entity and thereby muting the multitude. In view of this, this article aims to reveal that Wong Kar-wai’s career is a struggle to transcend such regression, which is “the myth of consanguinity” against which Rey Chow asks us to battle (24). Wong’s status as an era-defining auteur resides in how he uses his jianghu(江湖)as method to reimagine the identity of the people in Hong Kong and beyond. Before The Grandmaster (2013), Wong’s jianghu had always been an allegory of the nativization of a fetishized identity. A lost love and a usually primordial, archetypal and absent femme fatale represent a perfect, imaginary past that the protagonists want to repeat but in vain. In The Grandmaster, however, Wong moved on from the obsession with base-entity and realized that the wushu jianghu, the martial art universe in Ip Man’s time, could be a method to reimagine Hong Kong beyond Chen’s call for ethnic essentialization. In the inheritance of different martial art traditions during troubled times, Wong sees Hong Kong＇s vitality in cultural hybridization. After long years of representing the femme fatale in his films, Wong enunciates an identity of essence-transcending family resemblance.

The frame for the following interview with Professor Wong Kin-yuen(王建元) was provided by what may be called, in explicitly prescriptive terms, the “Hong Kong generation, 1967-1984”-a brief and unique pivot point attending the globalization of late-twentieth century comparative literary and cultural studies, with a Chinese focus, as it emerged in the Western(primarily American)academy. In the aftermath of Deng Xiaoping’s(Second)Open Door Policy of 1978, both late-colonial Hong Kong(administered by the United Kingdom)and The People’s Republic of China(PRC)were equally committed to the normalizing of relations between China and the West in the context of a broader rebalancing of the geopolitical order in Asia. Set against this historical backdrop, the purpose and aim of the present interview was to understand more effectively the personal motivations and collective capacities of this scholarly and expatriate “Hong Kong generation” as its members experienced PhD studies abroad, at the University of California at San Diego, and as recollected by one of its members.

In recent years, pro-democracy protests have increasingly challenged the legitimacy of Beijing rule, stressing that the "One Country, Two Systems" form of governance has not been upheld. Echoing the political unrest and the disillusionment of many pro-Hong Kong/anti-China citizens, the Hong Kong film industry has seen a rise in politically motivated works that emphasize the idea of the "local." This article examines contemporary pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and questions the role that social activism plays in the formation of individual and group identity in post-handover Hong Kong and how the very idea of the "local" is seen as subversive by the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Through analyzing Hong Kong's localist discourse in Ten Years (2015), a dystopian film that exemplifies the revival of political art and activism in Hong Kong, this article seeks to engage with contemporary developments of localist thought in relation to identity formation in a decolonizing space, to interrogate the dichotomy of the "local" and the "national" in order to understand how the former works to destabilize national narratives, and to examine the plethora of tactics employed by the CPC to silence social movements in Hong Kong, including censorship of film and social media. This article will ultimately argue that the extensive censorship of art and media in and related to Hong Kong reveals that the CPC's project is to enforce a unified and singular national identity, wherein Hong Kong localist thought is seen to delegitimize state authority and endanger national sovereignty.

In 2003, UNESCO introduced a new international instrument: The Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Intangible cultural heritage refers to social practices, languages, beliefs, festivals, oral traditions, and culinary customs. In 2004, the government of the People's Republic of China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (HKSARG) both agreed to be part of the Convention and implement its decrees. Building on the case of China's and Hong Kong's participation in the Convention, this article contributes to the understanding of cultural heritage governance in Hong Kong by focusing on intergovernmental relations. Three dimensions are explored. First, we try to situate the nature of Hong Kong's intergovernmental cultural governance by comparing it against a number of cases in Europe and North America. Second, we focus on the development of local structures that were put in place to implement the Convention in Hong Kong. This section reveals both practical and political dimensions associated with the policy's development and implementation. Third, we engage with the politics of intangible heritage in Hong Kong. This section examines the political nature of culture and pays attention to the administrative processes that tend to evacuate or neutralize social and political tensions and aspirations. The implementation of the Convention, in some cases, meshes, and in others, avoids engagement with intangible cultural issues that could be contentious or are part of Hong Kong's politics of localism.

This study aims to analyze and demonstrate the translocalism of Hong Kong popular culture through uncovering the sociopolitically alternative characteristics of an Internet meme that traveled across Hong Kong and China. In the theoretical sections, I explain how the culture-based concept of “translocalism” differs from the geography-based concept of “translocality,” review current studies that discuss the translocal characteristics of Hong Kong popular culture, introduce relevant international studies of Internet memes, critique current studies of Hong Kong memes, and provide an overview to the context of translocal meme-making across Hong Kong and China. In my empirical analysis, I examine a very popular Internet meme named “sorry, being wealthy really lets one get away with anything,” originally invented by Hong Kong netizens in 2014 and widely used and popularized in China in 2017 and 2018. Since 2018, Hong Kong netizens accepted the Chinese enhancement and used it broadly in Hong Kong’s social media. This meme illustrates how an originally Hong Kong-based cultural item successfully traveled across borders without the help of established institutions or groups, how Chinese co-creators contributed to enriching its usage and meaning significantly, and how the meme’s critical social value was enhanced with translocal co- creation. This study’s data were primarily collected from online sources and secondarily from informal interviews with meme-users. I traced numerous instances of the use of this meme to find out how netizens used and developed it between 2014 and 2019.

2014年,香港著名當代女作家黃碧雲出版了長篇小說《微喜 重行》,以獻給哥哥的遺書為名,對人生與創作階段進行了 整理與總結,重寫以重行。黃碧雲將小說定義為「懺悔錄」,並視自己為「告解」的人。本文認為,它除了是一部私我的「傷痕文學」,也是屬於作者與主人公的「香港故事」。在半自傳式的回憶框架裡,「我」藉著一次蒐集家族記憶的旅程,除了追溯本源和思索個人生命意義外,亦展現了作者對香港和個人身分定位的想像、省思與關懷。

Two Hong Kong professors reveal how their understanding of the term “retirement” has taken on an unexpected, meaningful, and rewarding definition.