Public Scholarship

In 1997, the United Kingdom transferred the sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Before and during the sovereignty transfer, the PRC promised not only to keep the city’s ways of life unchanged for 50 years but also to democratise the city’s governance. In the ensuing years, we have instead witnessed what Ching Kwan Lee has recently called ‘double coloniality’, as Hong Kong’s residents have continued to find themselves subject to external powers economically, politically, and culturally. This framework has enabled Lee to interpret the history of Hong Kong’s political movements, including the well-known 2014 Umbrella Movement and 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, as a history of decolonial movements in which Hong Kongers fought to assert subjecthood and agency against a colonial power structure.

Interpretive frameworks and historical discourse on Hong Kong take on new urgency as this city approaches the thirtieth anniversary of the sovereignty transfer. On the one hand, the Chinese and Hong Kong governments have tightened their censorship regimes and accelerated the pace of producing pro-regime narratives and propaganda, especially since the enactment of the 2020 National Security Law (NSL). On the other hand, Hong Kongers, both at home and in the diaspora, have been searching for alternative means to retain and exercise their agency in the post-NSL era. There is an urgency, then, to recover nuanced memories from different positionalities and generate diverse narratives of Hong Kong’s history of repression and resistance, as a way of responding to the official narrative-building and broader autocratisation project underway in the city.

To do so, we need to unravel at least four key puzzles: 1) What historical memories, and whose memories, are at risk of being erased or obscured under dominant historical and political accounts? 2) With what frameworks, and from whose perspectives, could we make sense of Hong Kong’s history of repression and resistance? 3) What are the political stakes in adopting one perspective over another? 4) What lessons could we draw from these histories and memories for our political present, both in Hong Kong and beyond?

For this special issue of Made in China Journal, we invite contributions that approach Hong Kong’s past 30 years of repression and resistance from different angles and approaches. We welcome both scholarly work and practitioners’ recollections that revisit overlooked experiences, question established interpretations, or reflect on what lessons may be drawn from this history for understanding Hong Kong and the world today. We are especially interested in issues, actors, events, and perspectives that have been marginalised in existing narratives. We welcome practitioners, professionals, and academics to contribute in diverse formats (research articles, interviews, forums, book reviews, photo essays, etc.) in English or Chinese. 

Submission Details: Pitches of up to 300 words in English or 450 words in Chinese should be submitted by 30 September 2026. Full manuscripts, upon acceptance, will be due by 31 January 2027. Please send your abstracts and inquiries to editors[at]madeinchinajournal[dot]com. For specific inquiries about this call for papers, please contact our guest editors:

Yan-ho Lai, Georgetown Center for Asian Law, yl1445[at]georgetown[dot]edu

Kai Yui Samuel Chan, Occidental College, kyschan[at]oxy[dot]edu

I was part of a team that documented Hong Kong's long history of civic struggles leading up to 2019 and its aftermaths through collecting the voices of participants from different generations and positionalities.  This project culminated in, among other things, a bilingual (English and Chinese) edited volume that contains many of these stories and conversations in the form of oral history.

You can find a digital copy of the edited volume on Internet Archive.

An expanded version of this oral history can be found on the Project's Medium account.

Media Coverage:

"Hong Kong Diaspora uses Oral History to Preserve a Half-Century's Memory of Social Movements" (CNA)

"Hong Kong Social Movement Oral History in the Construction of a Hong Kong Diaspora" (Photon)

"Resisting History of the Victors; Overseas HK Scholars Writing HK's 2019 Protests Oral History" (RFA)