Early screen culture in Hong Kong remains underexplored, despite the rigorous work of film historians. According to new evidence on film exhibitions in Hong Kong from 1897 to late 1907, early screen practice was multi-faceted. It ranged from technological marvels and the co-programming of motion pictures with musicals and magic shows to the enjoyment of theatre spaces, in addition to the on-screen excitement projected to the audience. Given the heterogeneity of early film screening in the Crown Colony, I present three accounts of early screen culture in colonial Hong Kong: the primacy of technical marvels and the management of cinema machines; the symbiosis between motion pictures and established forms of entertainment; and the emergence of film exhibition as a commercial institution. To understand the implications of cinema in connection to colonial governance, I use the concept of dispositif, a machine of display and a device of power relations, to analyse the role of cinema in the deployment of colonial power.

Using Evans Chan’s documentary Raise the Umbrellas (2016) as a springboard, this essay examines the role gender identity and sexual orientation plays in Hong Kong’s rich history of protest culture.

The main focus of this article is the Haiphong shipping boycotts of 1907 and 1909–10, which were conflicts over freight rates on rice which arose between several Chinese rice hongs in Haiphong (Hải Phòng), the main port in northeastern French Indochina, and three European tramp shipping companies. When these companies set up a joint agreement in 1907 unilaterally increasing the freight rates for shipping rice to Hong Kong, the affected merchants felt unfairly treated and boycotted the companies’ ships. Furthermore, in 1909, they formed a rival charter syndicate and set up a steamship company chartering the vessels of other companies to apply additional pressure on the
firms to return to the previous rate. Although the Chinese suffered direct financial losses due to their insufficient expertise in this business, they were successful in achieving a considerable decrease in the freight rate on rice, which shows that boycotting, even when costly, proved to be an effective means to push for reductions and better arrangements with shipping companies. In contrast to a similar incident in the same trade—the shipping boycott of 1895–96 when the French government intervened with the Chinese government on behalf of a French shipping company — the later boycotts did not provoke the intervention of Western powers. This case suggests that growing anti-imperialism and nationalism in China, expressed in public
discourses on shipping rights recovery and in the use of economic instead of political means, had an impact on the boycotts. Economic, not imperial, power determined the outcome of this struggle.

The often-heated debates concerning Hong Kong’s literary representations all take as a premise that Hong Kong has an urban identity, defined by its mythic transformation from a fishing village to a metropolis. On the return of the sovereignty to mainland China in 1997, the discourse stresses Hong Kong’s exceptional status, reflecting a general anxiety that Hong Kong could be replaced by or even become just another Chinese city. This anxiety
for the future is evident in an ecocritical turn, manifested in both the social realm (popular movements and organic communities) and artistic circles (independent cinema and literature). This article looks at Hong Kong literature—Wu Xubin’s 吳煦斌 (1949–) stories, Dung Kai-cheung’s 董啟章 (1967–) literary experiments, and a recent edited volume about plants—to determine how ecotopian imaginaries and cultural identities are closely linked to different moments in Hong Kong history. The author finds that the ecocritical turn in Hong Kong literature has opened a new space for Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity.

Oyster cultivation has a long history in Pearl River Delta area and is one of the traditional aquaculture depending strongly on the natural coastal resource because of the expected variation of salinity, temperature and diversity of infaunal organisms for the cultivation practice. Apart from being the traditional knowledge inherited through the coastal communities over the centuries, oyster aquaculture is also embedded in the long-term socio-economic relationships among communities that have a rich experience regarding the quality and quantity controls for the long-term sustainable coastal resource management, together with a strong sense of responsibility for safeguarding and promoting the local food heritage for various reasons. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Chinese regional cuisines have developed their own flavors and presentation styles. Huaiyang cuisine (淮揚菜) in the Jiangsu area emphasizes excellent cutting skills, culinary techniques, and the use of ingredients cultivated in the Yangtze River Delta area. There is no doubt that regional cuisines have distinctive local characteristics. However, with increased migration since the 1950s, it has become important to investigate how these local cuisines have changed in relation to the culinary skills and tastes of people in different regional contexts. To gauge the discrepancy between the historical construction of the cuisine in modern times and everyday food practices, Hong Kong will be used as a case study. Since most people in Hong Kong are unfamiliar with Huaiyang cuisine, this paper explains why there has been an overemphasis on official historical discourse from the national perspective and how the change of regional should be understood as a living practice from the diasporic context.

Studies on Hong Kong’s history have viewed the 1967 riots as a watershed in the formation of Hong Kong identity in the 1960s and 1970s. However, by considering MacLehose’s social policies as the main contribution to Hong Kong identity formation and defining China as ‘the Other’ in that process, the prevailing view overlooks the multifaceted nature of Hong Kong identity formation and the continuity of Hong Kong’s historical development between the mid-1960s and the 1970s. This article questions that view by investigating the Cultural Revolution discourse in three rarely examined yet representative Hong Kong youth and student journals: Undergrad (Xueyuan), Chinese University Student Press (Zhongda xuesheng bao), and Pan Ku (Pangu). Through examining the three publications’ interpretations of the Cultural Revolution during nationalist moments and movements in Hong Kong—the 1967 riots, the Chinese Language movement, the Defending the Diaoyu Islands movement, and the ‘Learning about China, Caring about Society’ campaign—the article discusses the ways in which the Cultural Revolution profoundly affected educated youth and students by contributing to the mutual development of their national and local identities at the intersection of political, ideological, cultural, and geographical perspectives. By documenting the local practices of the Cultural Revolution and the concept of ‘serving the people,’ the article demonstrates that Chinese nationalism, along with Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, played an important role in the formation of Hong Kong identity in the colonial setting.

As Hong Kong’s landfills are expected to reach saturated conditions by 2020, the city can no longer rely on landfilling alone as the sole solution for waste treatment in the long term. Drawing on five months of archival research at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Public Records Office (PRO) in 2016 as well as 17 months of fieldwork conducted between 2012, 2013 and 2016, this article provides a much-needed overview of why sustainable waste management has always been such a challenge for Hong Kong. Focusing on the city’s dependence on landfills and its failure to integrate alternative waste management technologies, namely incineration, into its current waste management regime, we explicate Hong Kong’s waste management predicaments from the 1950s to the present day. Through a historical lens, we argue that Hong Kong’s waste problems have a historical root and that they are unlikely to be resolved unless the government is willing to learn from its past mistakes and adopt a much more proactive approach in the near future.

This paper maps the spectral temporalities of Hong Kong in the wakes of the official opening of the high-speed rail link in West Kowloon. Probing the spectral figurations of time in the city through Jacques Derrida’s spectrality discourse, the paper connects spectrality with the method of “deep mapping” as proposed by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in Theatre/Archaeology
(2005). This method aligns the poetic with the discursive, the fictional and the historical in order to set up an alternative archive of a locale with narratives that traverse and overlay the past, the present, and the future. I consider the notion of time through the act of “counting down” to 1997 and to 2047, and center this deep map on the site of West Kowloon. The reflection is placed in the context of the high-speed rail link, Wong Kar-wai’s train to 2046, a censored, or “disappeared” artwork originally presented on the International Commerce Centre (ICC) by Sampson Wong Yu-hin and Jason Lam Chi-fai “Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now / Countdown Machine” (2016), and the West Kowloon Cultural District.

This paper argues that Christian churches should educate their congregants on sociopolitical issues, so that both the church and individual congregants can speak to the world prophetically, as a part of Jesus’ teaching in caring for the weak. Civil disobedience should not be the main means for the church to express social concerns. Rather, a godly life that witnesses Jesus as Lord should be how Christians exert their power to effect changes in society. This witness cannot be short-term, like civil disobedience is so often; it must be sustained and life-long.