Hong Kong Unbound
Professor Ching Kwan Lee (University of California, Los Angeles)
This keynote reflects on the intellectual and ethical challenges of building a “global Hong Kong studies” grounded in intimate, lived knowledge yet engaged with global theory. Drawing on a career moving from China to “global China” and back to Hong Kong, the speaker argues that studying one’s own society exposes the gap between scholarship and everyday experience in ways that cannot be theorised away. The talk contrasts three approaches: Hong Kong as a comparative case; an “outside‑in” view shaped by forces such as colonialism, capitalism, and global China; and an “assemblage” approach that centres Hong Kong’s own projects and subjectivity. Drawing on reflections on the 2019 movement, the address invites a collective rethinking of how to keep Hong Kong in the driver’s seat of knowledge production.
Hong Kong 1997-2022: The Rise and Fall of a Political Community
Professor Jean-Philippe Béja (CNRS/CERI-Sciences-Po)
This keynote examines the rise and threatened dismantling of Hong Kong’s political community over the past four decades. It traces how a largely sojourner population gradually became a more settled community, then developed a distinct political identity and culture through language campaigns, Cantonese popular culture, and, crucially, exclusion from Sino–British negotiations over Hong Kong’s future. The Basic Law debates, attachment to an “imagined” rule of law, the emergence of democratic institutions, and mass mobilisations, crystallised around the June 4th vigil, are argued to have constituted the core of a mature political community. The talk then analyses how COVID restrictions, the National Security Law, and electoral overhaul have systematically targeted this community’s institutions, civil society, and commemorative rituals. It concludes by insisting on the historical continuity of Hong Kong’s democratic movement and the foundational role of June 4th in its political identity.
Generational differences in local identities, participation in social movements, and migration intention among Hongkongers
Professor Man-Yee Kan (University of Oxford)
This keynote examines generational differences in local identities, participation in social movements, and migration intentions among Hongkongers in the wake of recent political changes. Drawing on three waves of randomly sampled surveys collected between February 2021 and June 2022 (N=3,003), the talk highlights how participation in social movements varies over time and across cohorts, reflecting both changing political conditions and selective migration. Younger, single, and more educated respondents, as well as those identifying as “Hongkongers” rather than “Chinese,” are more likely to have participated in social movements, though this identity effect is weaker among those born before 1965. Generational location, local identity, and protest experience also shape migration intentions: pre‑1965 cohorts show the lowest and 1980–1997 cohorts the highest propensity to migrate. The keynote will discuss how these patterns of identity, activism, and migration may reshape Hong Kong’s social fabric, political future, and transnational connections.
Experiencing the coloniality of ‘Global Britain’ from below: Hong Kongers and the citizenship-migration-asylum nexus after Brexit
Professor Michaela Benson (Lancaster University)
This paper offers a view from below onto the Hong Kong BN(O) visa, one of the flagship schemes in the UK Government’s suite of ‘safe and legal routes’. It centres the voices of Hong Kongers arriving in the UK since 2021, exploring how they make sense of these provisions, narrate their experiences of their immigration status, and how they understand this in relation to routes on offer to others arriving in the UK post-Brexit, and within the context of the politicisation of migration and asylum. Through this empirical focus, it offers new insights that reveal how Hong Kongers position themselves on the migration-asylum continuum; how they interpret and reproduce the UK’s ‘generosity’, including how they navigate understandings and expectations of what it means to be a ‘good migrant’; and what this makes visible about the coloniality of migration and citizenship in the UK’s post-Brexit migration regime.
(Re)envisioning realities in practice: what can “Studies” projects do?
Professor Meaghan MORRIS (University of Sydney)
What happens to intellectual visions facing the test of practice in institutional conditions changing over time? Projects are open to unsympathetic interference once they materialise beyond the page, so how do we maintain collective creativity while working, over time, to survive? As an accidental veteran of several academic “studies” projects evolving in Australia and Hong Kong over the past fifty years, I am fascinated by this problem. Typically for my generation and gender, I had a disciplinary foundation in “English” and “French” when these were given institutional forms. I wanted to write an English PhD on Australian social realist literature using methods acquired in French, but in the mid-1970s neither department would allow this. So I left and made a path through film studies, cultural studies, Australian cultural studies, Inter-Asia cultural studies and then creating “Cultural Studies with Hong Kong characteristics” for undergraduates with colleagues in Lingnan University.
Drawing on these experiences (and inspired by an ancestral practice of sheep-stealing when times are hard), I will propose three practical principles for protecting the visionary impulse of studies amidst the variety of things that go wrong: watching the sky, watching the weather and, above all, seizing the time.
Understanding transnational repression and co-optation through the Hong Kong diaspora case
Professor Eva PILS (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg) with Ray WONG Toi-Yeung