10 March 2018, Volume 1 Issue 1

    

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  Hong Kong Studies: A Beginning

  Tammy Ho, Michael O'Sullivan, Eddie Tay Michael Tsang

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 1-6.

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  Rethinking Contentious Politics in Hong Kong: Change and Continuity

  Samson Yuen and Edmund W. Cheng

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 7-25.

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  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.
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  One Country, Two Systems: An Example of Divisible Sovereignty?

  Nicholas Gordon

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 26-40.

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  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.
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  翻譯的文化身份——論九七後香港詩刊中的文化翻譯

  宋子江

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 41-50.

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  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。
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  Reframing Celebrities in Post-Handover Hong Kong: Political Advocacy, Social Media, and the Performance of Denise Ho

  Dorothy Lau

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 51-65.

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  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.
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  “Happy Birthday to You”: Music as Nonviolent Weapon in the Umbrella Movement

  Winnie W. C. Lai

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 66-82.

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  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.
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  In Name Only: Democratic Paralysis and Potential in Post-Umbrella Movement Hong Kong

  Agnes Tam

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 83-99.

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  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.
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  Killing Time: The Handover and Its Afterlives

  Carlos Rojas

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 100-115.

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  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.”
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  Contributors

  Hong Kong Studies. 2018, 1(1): 116-117.

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