The Transnational China Research Hub at UCSC kicked off our Fall programming with a lecture by Prof. Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at UCLA. Her talk drew upon her prior work on Chinese investment in Africa and ongoing research on Hong Kong, to shed light on contemporary political, economic and social transformations in Hong Kong– Global China’s Restive Frontier.

LECTURE ABSTRACT:

How did Hong Kong transform itself from a “shoppers’ and capitalists’ paradise” into a “city of protests” at the frontline of an anti-China global backlash in 2019? Most analysts interpret the recent turmoil in Hong Kong as a political and ideological struggle between a liberal, capitalist democratizing city and its Communist authoritarian sovereign. This talk broadens the plane of analysis to argue that the Hong Kong saga is part of a larger phenomenon called “global China,” conceptualized as a double movement. On the one hand, Beijing deploys a bundle of power mechanisms — economic statecraft, patron-clientelism and symbolic domination – around the world, including Hong Kong. On the other, this Chinese power project triggers a variety of countermovements from Asia to Africa, ranging from acquiescence and adaptation to appropriation and resistance.

SPEAKER BIO:

Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA. She is the author of three award-winning monographs on contemporary China’s turn to capitalism: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt  (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her latest publication is Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier (2022), an open access book from Cambridge University Press. She is working on an ethnographic and historical monograph about Hong Kong’s decolonization struggle, with a particular focus on the 2019 uprising.