Download or read book The Economic Roots of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong written by Louis Augustin-Jean and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the autumn of 2014, thousands of people, young and educated in their majority, occupied the chief business district and seat of the government in Hong Kong. The protest, known as the Umbrella Movement, called for ‘genuine democracy’, as well as a fairer social and economic system. The book aims to provide a dynamic framework to explain why socioeconomic forces converged to produce such a situation. Examining increasing inequality, rising prices and stagnating incomes, it stresses the role of economic and social factors, as opposed to the domestic political and constitutional issues often assumed to be the root cause behind the protests. It first argues that globalization and the increasing influence of China’s economy in Hong Kong has weighted on salaries. Second, it shows that the oligopolistic nature of the local economy has generated rents, which have reinforced inequality. The book demonstrates that the younger generation, which is still finding its place in society, has been particularly affected by these phenomena, especially with social mobility at a low point. Offering a new approach to studying the Umbrella Movement, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in Hong Kong's political landscape, as well Chinese politics more broadly.

Download or read book The Umbrella Movement written by Ngok Ma and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the most spectacular struggle for democracy in post-handover Hong Kong. Bringing together scholars with different disciplinary focuses and comparative perspectives from mainland China, Taiwan and Macau, one common thread that stitches the chapters is the use of first-hand data collected through on-site fieldwork. This study unearths how trajectories can create favourable conditions for the spontaneous civil resistance despite the absence of political opportunities and surveys the dynamics through which the protestors, the regime and the wider public responses differently to the prolonged contentious space. *The Umbrella Movement: Civil Resistance and Contentious Space in Hong Kong* offers an informed analysis of the political future of Hong Kong and its relations with the authoritarian sovereignty as well as sheds light on the methodological challenges and promises in studying modern-day protests.

Download or read book Take Back Our Future written by Ching Kwan Lee and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a comprehensive and theoretically novel analysis, Take Back Our Future unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The essays presented here by a team of experts with deep local knowledge ask: how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? Take Back Our Future argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The contributors outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, Take Back Our Future demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.

Download or read book Hong Kong in the Shadow of China written by Richard C. Bush and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close-up look at the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong. Hong Kong in the Shadow of China is a reflection on the recent political turmoil in Hong Kong during which the Chinese government insisted on gradual movement toward electoral democracy and hundreds of thousands of protesters occupied major thoroughfares to push for full democracy now. Fueling this struggle is deep public resentment over growing inequality and how the political system—established by China and dominated by the local business community—reinforces the divide been those who have profited immensely and those who struggle for basics such as housing. Richard Bush, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on East Asia Policy Studies, takes us inside the demonstrations and the demands of the demonstrators and then pulls back to critically explore what Hong Kong and China must do to ensure both economic competitiveness and good governance and the implications of Hong Kong developments for United States policy.

Download or read book The Hong Kong Protests and Political Theology written by Kwok Pui-lan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hong Kong protests that began in the second half of 2019 captured the world’s attention as demonstrations against an extradition bill grew into a larger civil liberties movement. While protests began as peaceful demonstrations, the disproportionate police force with which the government responded escalated the situation to an international crisis. Kwok Pui-lan and Francis Ching-wah Yip bring together an international cohort to discuss the relation between Christianity and Communism and the neoliberal economy, as well as civil disobedience, religion and social movements, and the roles of the churches in social conflict. This interdisciplinary volume showcases theological reflections by many scholars and activists in Hong Kong.

Download or read book City on the Edge written by Ho-fung Hung and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, Hong Kong has maintained precarious freedom at the edge of competing world powers. In City on the Edge, Ho-fung Hung offers a timely and engaging account of Hong Kong's development from precolonial times to the present, with particular focus on the post 1997 handover period. Through careful analysis of vast economic data, a myriad of political events, and intricate networks of actors and ideas, Hung offers readers insight into the fraught economic, political, and social forces that led to the 2019 uprising, while situating the protests in the context of global finance and the geopolitics of the US-China rivalry. A provocative contribution to the discussion on Hong Kong's position in today's world, City on the Edge demonstrates that the resistance and repression of 2019-2020 does not spell the end of Hong Kong but the beginning of a long conflict with global repercussions.

Download or read book Reinventing the Chinese City written by Richard Hu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1970s, China has undergone perhaps the most sweeping process of urbanization ever witnessed. This is typically understood as a story of growth, encompassing rapid development and economic dynamism alongside environmental degradation and social dislocation. However, over the past decade, China’s leaders have claimed that the country’s urbanization has entered a new stage that prioritizes “quality.” What does China’s new urban vision entail, and what does the future hold in store? Richard Hu unpacks recent trends in urban planning and development to explore the making and imagining of the contemporary Chinese city. He focuses on three key concepts—the “green revolution,” “smart city movement,” and “great innovation leap forward”—that have become increasingly influential. Through case studies of Beijing, Hangzhou, and Hefei, Hu analyzes how attempts to achieve greater sustainability, promote data-driven governance, and foster innovation have fared on the ground. He also considers the experimental city Xiong’an in terms of China’s idealized vision of the urban future and investigates how the recent experiences of Hong Kong relate to regional and national development projects. Reinventing the Chinese City provides a careful accounting of the ideas that have dominated urban policy in China since 2010, emphasizing key continuities underlying claims of novelty. Shedding light on the transformations of the Chinese city, this book offers a new perspective on the factors that will shape the trajectory of urbanization in the coming decades.

Download or read book Civil Unrest and Governance in Hong Kong written by Michael H.K. Ng and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines important social movements in Hong Kong from the perspectives of historical and cultural studies. Conventionally regarded as one of the most politically stable cities in Asia, Hong Kong has yet witnessed many demonstrations and struggles against the colonial and post-colonial governments during the past one hundred years. Many of these movements were brought about in the name of justice and unfolded against the context of global unrest. Focusing on the local developments yet mindful of the international backdrop, this volume explores the imaginaries of law and order that these movements engendered, revealing a complex interplay among evolving notions of justice, governance, law and order and cultural creations throughout the under-explored history of instability in Hong Kong. Underscoring the apparently contrasting discourses on the relationship among the rule of law, law and order and social movements in Hong Kong, the contributors emphasise the need to re-examine the conventional juxtaposition of the law and civil unrest. Readers who have an interest in Asian studies, socio-political studies, legal studies, cultural studies and history would welcome this volume of unique interdisciplinarity.

Download or read book Handbook on Gender Diversity and Federalism written by Jill Vickers and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful Handbook offers a comprehensive exploration of the third generation of gender and federalism studies. In this timely and authoritative examination, feminist scholars in both the West and the global south debate the impact of state architectures on women’s movements, partisan organizations and policy advocacy using innovative discursive, institutional and intersectional approaches.

Download or read book Politics Managerialism and University Governance written by Wing-Wah Law and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interplay between politics, managerialism, and higher education, and the complex linkages between politics and public universities in Hong Kong. Since the mid-20th century, literature on the state, market, and higher education has focused on the state’s shifting role from the direct administration to the supervision of higher education, and its increased use of market and managerial principles and techniques to regulate public universities. However, very few studies have addressed the political influences on university governance produced by changing state-university-market relationships, the chancellorship of public universities, or students’ and academics’ civic engagement with regard to sensitive political issues. The book examines both the positive and problematic outcomes of using market principles and managerialism to reform public higher education; questions the longstanding tradition of university chancellorship; explores the issue of external members holding the majority on university governing boards; probes into the dilemma of either relying on the system or a good chancellor and external members to preserve universities’ autonomy and academic freedom; and assesses the cost of students’ and academics’ civic engagement with regard to politically sensitive issues.

Download or read book Economic Policy Making In China 1949 2016 written by Pieter Bottelier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the key ideas and the key people who were responsible for the development of China’s economy from 1949 through 2016. It discusses how economic policy evolved, how economic policy was formulated and how the role of economists in decision making evolved. It considers the interplay between ideological and practical questions, provides biographical details of key economists and includes a clear annotated chronology of events. The book is especially valuable because the author, as a senior World Bank official, was a close observer of the situation and to some extent a key participant.

Download or read book China s Virtual Monopoly of Rare Earth Elements written by Roland Howanietz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rare Earth Elements are a group of 17 metals which have a central role in modern industry, increasingly used in the fields of green technologies, high technological consumer goods, industrial and medical appliances and modern weapons systems. Although deposits of Rare Earths are globally dispersed, over 90% of global demand has been provided by Chinese mines since the late 1990s, leading to a situation where China has a virtual monopoly. This book surveys the Rare Earths mining industry, discusses the extent to which Rare Earths really are scarce elsewhere in the world and assesses the economics of production, considering arguments for the rationing of supply, for higher pricing and for a total export embargo. This actually occurred in 2010, demonstrating the vulnerability of the rest of the world to China’s control of these increasingly vital resources.

Download or read book Urbanization Regional Development and Governance in China written by Jianfa Shen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rapid urbanization in China in recent decades and the challenges of social and regional integration and governance have been issues of major concern. This book explores the course of urbanization and development in China over recent decades. It considers a range of issues including urbanization, changing urban and regional systems, regional integration and governance. The book pays particular attention to the economic relations between Hong Kong and mainland China and how regional development, integration and governance unfold in the Hong Kong-Pearl River Delta region.

Download or read book China s Regions in an Era of Globalization written by Tim Summers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of China has been shaped and driven by its engagement with the global economy during a period of intensified globalization, yet China is a continent-sized economy and society with substantial diversity across its different regions. This means that its engagement with the global economy cannot just be understood at the national level, but requires analysis of the differences in participation in the global economy across China’s regions. This book responds to this challenge by looking at the development of China’s regions in this era of globalization. It traces the evolution of regional policy in China and its implications in a global context. Detailed chapters examine the global trajectory of what is now becoming known as the Greater Bay Area in southern China, the globalization of the inland mega-city of Chongqing, and the role of China’s regions in the globally-focused belt and road initiative launched by the Chinese government in late 2013. The book will be of interest to practitioners and scholars engaging with contemporary China’s political economy and international relations.

Download or read book Midwifery in China written by Ngai Fen Cheung and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-27 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to present the history, ideas, life and works of Chinese midwives and birth attendants, this volume seeks to encapsulate and explain the changing ideas about the practice of midwifery in China. Using participant observations and interviews, it examines each phase of the development of midwifery in depth. Providing a systematic study of the existing literature and contemporary national health policies, it analyses the factors contributing to the current demise of midwifery in China, such as the absence of national regulation, high standards of education and national midwives’ associations. Furthermore, it argues that China’s national statistics in the past six decades demonstrate clear evidence that minimising maternal mortality rates will only happen through wider availability of services, rather than through obstetric technology or facility based care. Ultimately, therefore this book supports the view that humanity and midwifery will survive to overcome domination by both technology and market forces and that economic growth and medical technology alone will not be sufficient in providing effective healthcare. This book is an indispensable resource for the study of Chinese midwifery, both in theory and in practice. As such it will be useful to students and scholars of Midwifery, Women’s Health, Sociology and culture and society in China.

Download or read book China s Financial Opening written by Yu Wai Vic Li and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-first century has not only seen China become one of the world’s largest trading nations, but also its gradual integration into the global financial system. Chinese-sponsored project financing schemes, such as the Belt-and-Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the expanding international footprint of the renminbi, have raised the specter of Beijing shaping established market rules and practices with its financial firepower. These dramatic developments beyond the "Great Wall of Money" have overshadowed the equally remarkable opening of China’s domestic capital markets. These include initiatives that make cross-border equity trade and investment easier; attempts to internationalize exclusively domestic-oriented equity markets; and creation of the first offshore renminbi hub in Hong Kong, paving the way for the "big bang" of renminbi use worldwide. Li interrogates the domestic political dynamics underlying the dizzying switches between liberalization and restriction. This book argues that the interplay between the pro-opening coalitions and dissenting parties has been central to the policymaking process. Financial opening has not only been driven by central bureaucratic actors, but also by financial industry interests and the local authorities of financial centers acting in concert as coalitions. The local and financial constituents have shaped policy agendas and priorities, and defined and framed liberalizing initiatives in ways that appealed to bureaucratic entities. They also sought wider political support by capitalizing on connections with top decision-making elites. To allay opposition and maintain political and technical consensus, the coalition constituents have offered concessions to dissenting parties over implementation specifics. This, however, has not always succeeded. Dissenting parties who recognized adverse distributional and policy risk implications inherent in the opening initiatives might decline concessionary offers, leading to policy tendencies other than opening. As one of the very first political economy contributions to studies of China’s financial opening from the 2000s, this book will appeal to researchers of international political economy, East Asia and China specialists, and financial practitioners and policymakers wanting to make sense of the country’s liberalizing logic.

Download or read book China s Hydro politics in the Mekong written by Sebastian Biba and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s Hydro-politics in the Mekong explores the intricate processes of conflict and cooperation over the use of water resources in the Mekong river basin between upstream China and the downstream countries of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The book tackles two gaps in the empirical literature: first, the neglect of international hydro-politics as one specific and increasingly important issue area of China’s foreign policy behavior, especially its neighborhood diplomacy; and second, the disregard of China’s role in Mekong River politics. In particular, this book scrutinizes the ‘spring 2010 Mekong crisis’ and the events surrounding it which led to a series of complex multi-level, security-related interactions among various state and non-state actors in the region, with China at the center. Analyzing this crisis, the book not only employs securitization theory as its theoretical framework and adds a couple of innovations to this theory, but also gives a detailed account of China’s hydro-political behavior in one specific and particularly revealing case study. Moreover, the book embeds China’s Mekong hydro-politics in the bigger picture of its (sub-)regional international affairs, as the former does not take place in a vacuum, but rather is a part of China’s overall foreign relations with its neighbors. The book acknowledges this link and provides new insights into the role of hydro-politics and its relationship vis-à-vis other issue areas of China’s foreign policy.