Imagining Hong Kong Feminist Futures on the Eve of the 1997 Handover

In 1984, a group of local Hong Kong women formed The Association for the Advancement of Feminism, Hong Kong’s first self-identified feminist organization. That same year, Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping met in Beijing to negotiate the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China. The convergence of these events fundamentally shaped the nature and focus of Hong Kong’s feminist movement. On the one hand, the political transition and the restructuring it entailed introduced a rare opportunity to instill a gender-informed justice in Hong Kong’s political systems as they were being built from the ground up. At the same time, this opportunity was shadowed by unease. As women began to reckon with the reality of living under Beijing’s sovereignty, feminist activists grew increasingly concerned that their space for activism and organizing might disappear.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the politics of the handover impacted how Hong Kong feminists imagined a feminist future for the city. It explores how activists capitalized upon British willingness to secure gender rights in Hong Kong before the handover while also leveraging relationships with a new crop of women political leaders to push for feminist reforms. From key victories —such as the restoration of women’s inheritance rights in the New Territories and the creation of an Equal Opportunities Commission—disappointing setbacks— such as the failure to secure direct electoral democracy or citywide retirement support—and causes left underexamined— such as protections for cross-border laborers from the PRC and international domestic workers from Southeast Asia—this chapter asks what became possible, and what was foreclosed, when feminist politics intersected with the realities of colonial withdrawal, rising national sentiment, and the uncertainty of local autonomy.