Twenty Years After the Handover Hong Kong’s Political and Social Transformation and Its Future under China’s Rule (original) (raw)
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Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal, 2017
1st July 2017 is the twentieth anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong by Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China, thus ending 156 years of British Crown rule (from 1841 to 1997, though from 1941 to 1945 it was actually under the Japanese occupation). There are three peculiar features that marked disturbingly the handover of Hong Kong to the PRC. First, the decolonisation process – the reversion negotiation – was conducted without the participation of the colonial subjects themselves, the Hong Kong people, but solely between the British and the PRC. Secondly, unlike the usual public mood that accompanied almost all decolonised territories’ return to the motherland which was marked invariably by joy and pride, the Hong Kong public and intellectuals’ feeling when the reversion was imminent and during the reversion had been one of unwillingness, sadness and trepidation. Thirdly, and probably most disturbingly, the Handover represents transferring the fate of a society that for 156 years had been enjoying the respect for human rights, freedom of thought and expression and independent judiciary, as subjects first of a crown colony and later a dependent territory (from 1981) of a liberal democratic colonial master into the hands of regime, arguably a new colonial master, which is a self-justifying one-party dictatorship that has been maintaining and continues to maintain its grip on absolute power through enforcing public amnesia, brainwashing the young, and brutal treatment of dissidents. It has been particularly ironic that this is a territory that has provided a safe haven for refugees from the PRC after 1949, escaping the economic policy disaster and brutal political excesses of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). http://rpb115.nsysu.edu.tw/var/file/131/1131/img/2374/CCPS3(2)-foreword(1).pdf https://www.dropbox.com/s/tkxjeii48j24trq/CCPS-V3N2-foreword-yeoh.pdf
Hong Kong in China: Trends, Explanations and Policy Options
IPP Review, 2018
This paper reexamines survey data on political identities in Hong Kong since 1997. It refutes the widespread assumption that national and local identities are in a zero-sum relationship and argues for a measurement of identities different from the standard approach. It finds that the major change in recent years was a diminishing sense of Chineseness instead of a strengthening of Hong Kong identity. It also notes substantial political cleavages over Chinese identity and finds that local identity is much more consensual and less politicized than often assumed. Based on this analysis, it provides thoughts on policy premises geared towards defusing tensions in society.
In search of trust and legitimacy: The political trajectory of Hong Kong as part of China
2010
In the 1980s and 1990s, the impending return of Hong Kong to China by 1997 had triggered a major confidence crisis in Hong Kong. A new logic of governance would have to be created to substitute the then colonial logic which emphasized administrative efficiency and the rule of convenience, a logic that the local population had implicitly accepted out of political acquiescence. However, the path towards a new Hong Kong as a special administrative region (SAR) had not been accompanied by the proper decolonization and democratization of the governance system. Old wine was put into new bottle. The political order as enshrined in Hong Kong's Basic Law had largely been a continuation (and at most a re-institutionalization) of the ancient regime. Since 1997, the Hong Kong SAR has been suffering from one legitimacy crisis after another. The infallibility of the administrative state, long held responsible for Hong Kong's success story in the final decades of British colonial rule, has by now been largely eroded. In 2002, government by bureaucrats was replaced by government by politically-appointed ministers, in the hope of enhancing executive accountability and improving policy performance and governance effectiveness. Yet, that failed to deliver results. This article traces the development of the post-colonial administrative state in Hong Kong from 1997 to the present.
After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave, 2022).
After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave, 2022). , 2022
This book offers a sharp, critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 antiextradition bill movement in Hong Kong, including prior events like Occupy Central and the Mongkok Fishball Revolution, as well as their aftermaths in light of the re-assertion of mainland sovereignty over the SAR. Reading the conflict against the grain of those who would romanticize it or simply condemn it in nationalistic fashion, Vukovich goes beyond mediatized discourse to disentangle its roots in the Basic Law system as well as in the colonial and insufficiently postcolonial contexts and dynamics of Hong Kong. He examines the question of localist identity and its discontents, the problems of nativism, violence, and liberalism, the impossibility of autonomy, and what forms a genuine decolonization can and might yet take in the city. A concluding chapter examines Hong Kong’s need for state capacity and proper, livelihood development, in the light of the Omicron wave of the Covid pandemic, as the SAR goes forward into a second handover era.
In Search of Trust and Legitimacy: The Political Trajectory of Hong Kong as Part of
2016
In the 1980s and 1990s, the impending return of Hong Kong to China by 1997 had triggered a major confidence crisis in Hong Kong. A new logic of governance would have to be created to substitute the then colonial logic which emphasized administrative efficiency and the rule of convenience, a logic that the local population had implicitly accepted out of political acquiescence. However, the path towards a new Hong Kong as a special administrative region (SAR) had not been accompanied by the proper decolonization and democratization of the governance system. Old wine was put into new bottle. The political order as enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law had largely been a continuation (and at most a re-institutionalization) of the ancient regime. Since 1997, the Hong Kong SAR has been suffering from one legitimacy crisis after another. The infallibility of the administrative state, long held responsible for Hong Kong’s success story in the final decades of British colonial rule, has by now ...
China Review International, 2008
Harvard University Press, 2005. xiv, 260 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Hardcover $39.95, ISBN 0-674-01701-3. Several recent publications related to the history of Hong Kong command attention. They include the works of Stephanie Chung, Chan Lau Kit-ching, Christopher Munn, and Philip Snow, of which I have written reviews for various journals. 1 John M. Carroll's Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong is a recent welcome addition to this list of solid works. It is a revision of a Harvard doctoral thesis by a diligent, bright young scholar, who writes with enthusiasm and some insights.