From the start of the Chinese #MeToo movement in 2018 to the present, victims of sexual assault have used public attention to seek resolution for individual cases. They have gone through a process of first being silenced to gradually being allowed to make their voices partially heard. The most important reason for this shift is […]

In this essay, I will examine the relationship between the Chinese feminist movement and self-censorship in its temporal and spatial dimensions. Temporally, my analysis will take into account the period from 1989 up to the time of writing in July 2020. This temporal frame covers the Chinese political vicissitudes from the Tiananmen Square Incident of […]

The area that is today known as the Pearl River Delta in fact comprises two deltas, which were historically referred to as the Pearl River and the Lingding Sea. The Pearl River is formed by the confluence of three rivers, the West, North, and East. It runs through the city of Guangzhou and discharges at […]

In Hong Kong and Wuhan, recent facemask-wearing policies have forced people to wear their political allegiance on their faces. In Hong Kong in 2019, wearing a mask was interpreted within the context of ongoing protests against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In Wuhan in 2020, the same action became a signal of the efficiency of […]

In the first eight months of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally from China, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange still managed to raise more than US$19 billion in initial public offerings (IPOs) of corporate stock. This sum was a remarkable return to form after the region was rocked by protests in 2019; less than […]

‘Where are you from?’ Whenever this question is asked in Shenzhen, the usual expectation is that you will not hear ‘Shenzhen’ as a response. Rather, it is widely assumed that almost everyone is from somewhere else. As its nickname, ‘city of immigrants’ (移民城市), suggests, Shenzhen is widely regarded as a migrant-receiving destination. Mobility and migration […]

Walking alongside the Shenzhen River, overlooking the distinct difference between the two sides of the Shenzhen–Hong Kong border, one enters a space formed and captured by photography, maps, and monuments: Fishing Village (渔民村) in Caiwuwei, Luohu district. In fact, this is the famous ‘fishing village’ that Deng Xiaoping visited during his 1984 inspection tour of […]

Shenzhen is a migrant city, and every migrant must cross multiple borders—physical and administrative, social and cultural—to fully belong in the city. The 20,000 members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Engineering Corps (中国人民解放军基本建设工程兵), who arrived in Shenzhen between 1979 and 1982, were the earliest and largest batch of state-sponsored migrants during Reform and Opening […]

In the late morning of 11 March 1899, Hong Kong’s Colonial Secretary James Stewart Lockhart and Huang Zongxin, a representative of the Governor General at Canton in China’s Guangdong Province, met in Lockhart’s council chamber. Both men produced maps of China’s Xin’an (新安) County as guides to their discussion of the boundaries of the New […]

When global attention alights on the Shenzhen–Hong Kong border, it tends to focus on the geopolitical significance of a boundary that has morphed from the Sino-British border, to the Cold War ‘Bamboo Curtain’, to the demarcation between ‘One Country, Two Systems’. Most recently, Shenzhen has been given a mediating role within the Greater Bay Area […]