Iam-chong Ip

Lingnan University · Department of Cultural Studies

In her provocative essay ‘Connection at the Price of Collusion’, Sik-ying Ho argues that my works show ‘empathy’ towards right-wing nativism in Hong Kong by exonerating it from any political responsibilities. She further gives me the name of ‘Left in form, Right in essence’ and asserts that I suffer from ‘Left Melancholy’, in Wendy Brown term. Howe...

My research addresses how social actors “act upon” social change by generating self-interpretation and representation of social life on the one hand and control over values and cultural orientations against the authorities on the other. While the existing literature on social movements overemphasizes the moments of mobilization, this article examin...

Chinese migrations and the development of overseas Chinese communities have aroused scholarly concerns over the past two decades. Their scale, scope and varied features stun and perplex many scholars. Among the linguistic terms about contemporary Chinese transnationalism, the term piao (drifting) rises to prominence and characterizes the new logics...

Drawing on a recent wave of scholarship on urban development in East Asia, this article offers a critical account of the twists and turns of Hong Kong’s urban development by focusing on class recomposition, state strategies and their relationships with the city’s changing position in its regional political economy. To do so, it examines how the mid...

This article examines interns’ negotiation of their work identity, with a focus on the nexus of transformations in higher education and the “new” capitalist economy. The existing literature on internships emphasizes the restructuring of employment in creative and cultural industries, the surplus cultural labour supply, and the impact of internships...

This article examines interns' negotiation of their work identity, with a focus on the nexus of transformations in higher education and the " new " capitalist economy. The existing literature on internships emphasizes the restructuring of employment in creative and cultural industries, the surplus cultural labour supply, and the impact of internshi...

My research question focuses on the new surge of right-wing nativism, especially the anti-mainland visitors campaign, in Hong Kong. The recent hostility towards “China,” unprecedented in its scope, degree and complexity, arose when China departed from a poor socialist country to become a global capitalist power. Hong Kong's closer economic ties to...

European thought, rather than an overarching ideology imposed on the colonized, offers a concatenation of keywords and narratives for people to imagine their national community, yet, sometimes serving as political prison for the others, especially those internal and neighboring ones. Henceforth, coloniality does not reside merely in European or US...

While the " state-led urbanization " argument highlights the dominance of the state power in China's urban process, the notion of " local state/ village corporatism " pays attention to the significant stake of local governments and their rural collectivities in economic development and urban growth, especially in the region of Pearl River Delta, Gu...

In this chapter, we focus on the Guangdong provincial branch of the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) and the Gender Media Action (GMA) activist group. Both are based in the city of Guangzhou, and their members regularly engage in online political discussion. Due to the city’s geographic and linguistic proximity to Hong Kong, both groups have bee...

Hong Kong is awash in comparison. In the past two decades, the anxiety over its identity has been largely perpetuated by various reference points. As soon as Hong Kong began to develop its metropolitan image out of colonial modernity in comparison with its geopolitical other, “Mainland China,” in the late 1970s, it encountered the political uncerta...

Hong Kong's civil society has remained vibrant since the sovereignty handover in 1997, thanks to an active defense by the democratic movement against Beijing's attempts to control civil liberties. Hong Kong is becoming mainland China's offshore civil society, serving as a free platform for information circulation and organizing among mainland activ...

This article attempts to delineate the post-war development of the independent media in Hong Kong, with emphasis on the significant development over the past ten years. The independent media primarily emerged out of the youth movement and organizations in the 1970s. In the 1980s, more and more small publications were run by civic organizations. In...

This article is based on an on-going research project that examines how tourism is constructed in Hong Kong by using the specific tourist spot, Lei Yue Mun, as a case study. The article’s aim is to demonstrate how the local agents of a small, squatter-based community with a distinctive history and cultural traditions may, without making any claim t...

Like specters, "hybridity" and "marginality" hover over Hong Kong's cultural circle. In a cultural criticism forum, a speaker has said that a discourse on "hybridity"1 had appeared in Hong Kong cultural circles. Such discourse emphasizes "hybridity" and "marginality" as the most salient characteristics of Hong Kong's cultural identity, and they sup...