Berlin of the East. Pearl of the Orient. Edge of Empires. Hong Kong has always upheld an “in-between” reputation over the last centuries. Such status could make it difficult to situate Hong Kong in historical writing, given the centrality of sovereign nation-state as our primary unit of analysis in the modern age. As Tsai Jung-fang (2001) observes, traditional scholarship has used to approach Hong Kong history from the perspectives of China or the British Empire, emphasizing the people’s Chinese patriotism or underscoring the legitimacy of colonial rule respectively. Both trends, while offering valuable analyses on the conditions of colonial Hong Kong, tend to treat Hong Kong as peripheral to the histories of larger, more powerful players, and in the process neglect the voice of the Hong Kong people themselves. In recent decades, however, new trends of scholarships have emerged to stress the subjectivity of Hong Kong and the people living there. While diverse in their disciplinary focus and scholarly interventions, at their core they advocate placing Hong Kong at the center of their studies, demonstrating the people’s sentiments and the city’s unique mechanism in coping with difficult challenges across time. In doing so, they follow what Tina Chen (2021), Christine Yano (2021), and others have called “Global Asia/s” in scrutinizing how the transgeographic flows of the likes of ideas and practices shaped the development of Hong Kong society across the twentieth century.

The purpose of this roundtable is to present a cross-section of new, innovative studies on Hong Kong history. While diverse, they are connected by their insistence on centering Hong Kong and its people as important historical actors in the modern world. As such, they collectively emphasize Hong Kong’s critical role in our collective understanding of global narratives at the heart of the historical discipline: colonialism and decolonization, nationalism, identity formation, governmentality, borderland, political economy, and social activism. Chen, Tam, and Wu demonstrate how activists from the 1950s to 1970s drew on both local and global ideas to imagine different futures of a postcolonial Hong Kong. In particular, Chen focuses on local leftist movements and the colonial government's response, Tam assesses women’s leading role in labor and student movements, and Wu studies Hong Kong anti-imperialist students in the United States. Foreman and Ho scrutinize ideas of community-building, with Foreman studying the Eurasian community of Hong Kong at the turn of the twentieth century and Ho investigating contesting property rights on agricultural land bordering Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. Ngo and Thai center transnational border-crossing in their projects, with Ngo situating Hong Kong history through the lens of Southeast Asian history and Thai exploring Hong Kong’s role in facilitating global underground economies of narcotics and illicit goods.