John Wong

An associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, John D. Wong’s research focuses on the flow of people, goods, capital and ideas. With a particular interest in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta/Greater Bay Area, John explores how such flows connected the region to the Chinese political center in the north as well as their maritime partners in the South China Sea and beyond.

Studying the China trade in the context of early-nineteenth-century global exchange, his first monograph—Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016)—demonstrates how China trade partners sustained their economic exchange on a global scale long before Western imperialism ushered in the era of globalization in a Eurocentric modern world.  In his recently published Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub (Harvard, 2022; Chinese edition, HKU Press, 2023), John explores the development of commercial aviation in Hong Kong as the city grew into a powerful economy after WWII.  By not accepting Hong Kong’s development into a regional and global hub as preordained, this study aims to describe globalization and global networks in the making.

His recent publications have appeared in business history journals such as Business History Review and Enterprise & Society, as well as area studies journals such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and Modern China.  John’s research has received funding support, which to date has included Mellon, Luce, Fulbright awards as well as GRF grants and the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

John serves on the editorial board of Business History and is an editor of the Asian Business Histories series at the Hong Kong University Press.