Conference 2019

Annual Conference 2019

Annual Conference 2019 was held on 22 June 2019 at the University of Hong Kong. At this inaugural conference of the Society, we have served more than 20 sessions, 150 panelists and 200 attendees.

The first annual conference of SHKS featured a keynote address on the early attempt to study Hong Kong, a plenary session by leading journal editors on journal publication and the development of academic fields, and 20 concurrent thematic panels across different disciplines. The conference included sponsored panels from a few professional associations including the  Hong Kong Political Science Association, Hong Kong Sociological Association, and Hong Kong Linguistics Society. In total, the one-day conference attracted more than 200 participants of different backgrounds from Hong Kong and overseas.

Keynote Speech: Reflections on Some Early Moments in Hong Kong Studies

Speaker Biography

Elizabeth Sinn, PhD., BBS
Honorary Professor
Hong Kong Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Hong Kong

Born and educated in Hong Kong, Elizabeth Sinn is a historian with a general research interest in Modern China and Hong Kong and a special interest in the history of charity, business, culture, the press, and migration. Before retiring in 2004, she was the Deputy Director of HKU’s Centre of Asian Studies and a member of HKU’s University Research Committee.

Outside the University, she sat on the Humanities Panel of the Research Grants Council and the Lord Wilson Heritage Trust Council. For her many years of service on the Antiquities Advisory Board, she was awarded a Bronze Bauhinia Star. She is an Honorary Advisor to the Hong Kong Museum of History.

Between 2006 and 2013, she led the Hong Kong Memory Project to create an online platform for multimedia materials on Hong Kong’s history, culture and heritage.  Her publications include Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital (1989), Growing with Hong Kong: The Bank of East Asia 1919-1994 (1994), The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas (1998), Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (2013).

Plenary Session: Dialogue with Journal Editors in Asian and China Studies

Journal editors play a central role in shaping the boundaries, debates, direction, and dissemination of a field of knowledge. As the Society for Hong Kong Studies seeks to promote Hong Kong Studies as a nascent field of scholarship, we would like to learn from the experiences and perspectives of editors of leading Asian/China Studies journals. We ask our panelists to (1) shed light on the black box of journal editing, or how to get published in a journal; (2) discuss how your journal and field of study have been shaped by political, economic and scholarly trends over time; and (3) suggest how the emerging field of Hong Kong Studies can be better represented in journal publications.

Speakers Biographies

Lowell Dittmer is Professor of Political Science at University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches Chinese and Asian comparative politics, and editor of Asian Survey.   He has also served as a visiting professor at universities in Malaysia, Taiwan, China, and currently in Singapore. Recent works include China’s Asia: Triangular Dynamics since the Cold War (Roman & Littlefield, 2018); (with Maochun Yu, eds.), A Handbook of Chinese Security (2015);  China, the Developing World, and the New Global Dynamic (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2010;  (with Samuel Kim, eds.) China’s Quest for National Identity (Cornell, 1993), China Under Reform (1994), Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (rev. ed., 1997); (with Haruhiro Fukui and Peter N.S. Lee, eds.) Informal Politics in East Asia (Cambridge, 2000), and many scholarly articles.  He is currently embarking on a study of Chinese political morality. 

Kevin Hewison is Weldon E. Thornton Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Asian Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an Adjunct Professor at University of Macau. He has recently held visiting positions with University of Malaya, Kyoto University, and University of Stockholm. Since 2015, he has been the editor-in-chief of Journal of Contemporary Asia and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

Mark Selden is a Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell and Editor of The Asia-Pacific Journal apjjf/org. His interests include the modern and contemporary geopolitics, political economy, history, and social movements of the Asia Pacific. Books include China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited, Chinese Village, Socialist State, The Atomic Bomb: Voices From Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance. “Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn and the Lives of Chinese Workers,” coauthored with Jenny Chan and Pun Ngai, is scheduled for publication in 2019.

Tim Pringle is a Senior Lecturer in Labour, Social Movements and Development at SOAS University of London (@LSMDatSOAS) and Editor of China Quarterly. His research focuses on labour movements, industrial relations, and trade union reform in China, Russia, and Vietnam. Tim’s authored books include Trade Unions in China: The challenge of labour unrest, re-issued in paperback by Routledge in 2013, and co-authorship of The Challenge of Transition: Trade Unions in Russia, China and Vietnam (2011, Palgrave). Recent peer-reviewed journal articles include ‘A Class Against Capital: Class and Collective Bargaining in Guangdong’, Globalizations, 2017: 14 (2); ‘A Solidarity Machine? Hong Kong Labour NGOs in Guangdong,  Critical Sociology (2018, 44 (5); ‘Taming Labour: Workers’ struggles, workplace unionism and collective bargaining on a Chinese waterfront’) ILRReview (2018, 71 (5) with Meng Quan; and ‘Shades of Authoritarianism and State-Labour Relations in China’,  British Journal of Industrial Relations (2019) with Jude Howell.