In this roundtable, Dr Daniel Vukovich's recent publication After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 will be discussed. This event's recording can be viewed here.
After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s First Handover, 1997-2019 offers a critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 anti-extradition 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 and the onset of what has been locally dubbed as the ‘second handover.’ Vukovich reads the conflict against the grain of those who would romanticize it as a spontaneous outburst of the desire for freedom from mainland oppression and for a self-explanatory democracy, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who would dismiss or condemn the protests in nationalistic or conspiratorial anti-imperialist fashion. Instead the book attempts to go beyond mediatized discourse to disentangle 2019’s and the SAR’s roots in the Basic Law system as well as in the colonial and insufficiently post-colonial contexts and dynamics of Hong Kong. Vukovich examines the question of localist identity and its discontents (particularly the rise of xenophobia), the problems of nativism, violence, and liberalism, the impossibility of autonomy, and what forms a genuine de-colonization 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. The book is an intervention into the study of Hong Kong and global politics as well as into critical theory and post-colonial studies.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Dr. Dan Vukovich (胡德) is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on issues of post-colonialism, politics, and critical theory in relation to the China-West relationship. He has worked at HKU since 2006, after earlier stints at Hocking College and UC Santa Cruz before and after his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is currently Chair of the Comp Lit Program within the School of Humanities, and an Advisory Research Fellow with the School of Marxism at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing. He is the author of three monographs, including China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019) and most recently After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In these and in other texts he is centrally concerned with the age-old problems of representation, the politics of knowledge or discourse, and the dialectics of difference and universality.
Dr. Edmund W. Cheng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at the City University of Hong Kong, where he co-directs the Centre for Public Affairs and Law and Political Analysis Lab. His research interests include contentious politics, political communication, and the sociology of knowledge, focusing on the comparative study of Asia. His work has appeared in Political Communication, Political Studies, Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Information, Communication & Society, New Media & Society, China Quarterly, China Journal and Modern Asian Studies. He is working on a monograph with the Cambridge University Press. He holds a PhD in Government from the LSE.
Prof. Bingchun Meng is a Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE, where she also co-directs the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. She is currently the Director of LSE PhD Academy. Her research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. Her book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation was published by Palgrave in early 2018. She is currently working on another monograph under contract with Columbia University Press about AI industries in China.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.