The chapter outlines the colorful history of power and resistance in pre-British Hong Kong. Many communities involved in this part of Hong Kong’s history continued to play a part in the colonial and post-colonial struggles. The chapter also discusses how the rise of Hong Kong as an industrial and financial center fomented different social groups that were mobilized in the struggle for Hong Kong’s future by competing political forces at the height of the Cold War. Most significant is the rise of a new middle class in tandem with the transformation of Hong Kong’s economy into a finance and service-centered one in the 1970s and the 1980s. This new middle class, combined with the plurality of grassroots social movements, charted a course for the locally rooted democratic movement that continued to grow after the sovereignty handover, constituting the backbone of the resistance in its quest of greater autonomy of Hong Kong under Beijing’s rule.

Chapter 2 covers the years from 1740 to 1840, a period that some scholars refer to as the “Chinese century” in Southeast Asia and a period that partially overlaps with what Chinese historians call the High Qing and was known to contemporaries as the “prosperous age.” The chapter demonstrates that migration across the Qing frontiers and to destinations abroad was linked to the extraction of resources in Inner Asia and Southeast Asia for the Chinese market. This was a period in which Chinese laborers – miners and farmers – became distinct types of migrants. The chapter introduces a new diasporic trajectory, that of Hakkas to Borneo and other areas in Southeast Asia. It traces the development of such diasporic institutions as native-place associations, or huiguan, and the emergence of others, such as revenue farms, brotherhoods, and kongsi. It also further explores the issues of split families, maintained through remittances, and of unmarriageable men for whom migration became a means of ascending the marriage ladder. The chapter ends with an example of another diasporic community, the Chinese mestizos in the Philippine town of Malabon.