Talk - The struggle for Hong Kong: A decolonisation lens

This talk offers a new interpretation of popular protests in Hong Kong since 1997, when Britain handed its sovereignty over the territory to China. While most academic and journalistic accounts call these "movements for democracy and freedom," Prof Lee argues that the totality of people’s demands and aspirations over two decades actually amounted to a decolonisation struggle against the legacies and realities of British and Chinese colonialisms respectively. A central question this talk addresses is: how and why did ordinary citizens transform themselves from complacent colonised subjects to rebellious agents of decolonisation?

Join us as Prof Ching Kwan Lee discusses the protests in Hong Kong through a decolonial lens, chaired by the Lau China Institute's Dr Charlotte Goodburn, on 9 Feb, 13:30-15:00 at King’s College London Waterloo campus.

This is an in-person event. Registration is required. Those without tickets will not be admitted.

Prof Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA, with a research focus on political sociology, labor, development, popular struggles, global China, global South and comparative ethnography. She is the author of three award-winning monographs on contemporary China’s turn to capitalism: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Recipient of the Distinguished Career in Political Sociology Award by the American Sociological Association, she also writes on Hong Kong’s political movements, including her most recent book Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle (2025).

Dr Charlotte Goodburn is Reader in Chinese Politics and Development and Deputy Director of the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. She is also attached to the Department of International Development at King’s. Before starting at King’s, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Dr Goodburn’s research and teaching engages with the politics of internal migration; urbanisation; the comparative development of India and China; and the movement of policies and “models” into and out of China. She completed her PhD in the Department of Land Economy at Cambridge and has a BA Hons (in History) and an MPhil (in Contemporary Chinese Studies), also from the University of Cambridge.

Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions or specific participatory requirements.

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Host or Publisher Lau China Institute, King's College London