The concluding chapter discusses the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious politics within the global context of democratic backsliding and spontaneous mass mobilizations. We highlight the contributions of our theoretical framework and the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious pathways for hybrid regimes and beyond.

This chapter examines the ideologies of language use in the context of an EMI university in multilingual Hong Kong from the perspectives of a group of international students. Based on the findings of the study, the chapter shows that international students’ ideologies of language use in the EMI university classroom are much more complex and nuanced than what is written in the institution’s official language policy documents. The majority of international students are found to hold ideologies of English as the default language for university education and English monolingualism as the norm in the EMI classroom. However, there is also evidence of varying degrees of acceptability of multilingual language practices in the classroom. The chapter draws attention to the complex ways in which international students’ language ideologies intersect with their concerns about social exclusion, linguistic disadvantage and educational inequality in the EMI classroom. It also demonstrates how their language ideologies contribute to sustaining and reproducing linguistic hegemony and social injustice in EMI higher education.

Chapter 2 analyzes the formation of Hong Kong’s entrenched liberal oligarchy from a historical-institutional perspective. We trace the emergence of a tripartite coalition consisting of the Chinese party-state, civil servants, and business elites. We also delve into the complex dynamics between this coalition and the burgeoning opposition, examining how protests have been managed and contained since the 1980s, until shortly after the handover.

This chapter provides a history of sweatshops during the industrial revolution in the United States and Great Britain and explains how higher wages and better conditions were eventually attained. It then looks at the postwar East Asian economies that had sweatshops and that developed more rapidly than Great Britain and the United States did. Finally, the chapter looks at how economic development has taken place over the last two decades in countries that had sweatshops identified in the first edition of this book and how sweatshop wages have improved.

The Conclusion revisits the takeaway messages of the book’s research strategy and empirical inquiry. Lawyering Imperial Encounters tells the story of the relentless hangover of the past in the present. Law remains the vernacular of Africa’s uneven and unequal relationship with the world economy precisely because it is imprinted by the past Scrambles into the continent. Foremost, law’s position as the cutting edge of Africa’s relationship with capitalism reflects legal imperialism as a core variable in the deployment of power. This is illustrated by the conversion of Hong Kong as a gateway for the expansion of Chinese business interests abroad, which builds, itself, on the globalisation of the Wall Street model of the corporate law firm.

The rise of The Port and the Mo clan coincided with the “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia and the peak of the Qing dynasty’s power. Their story also demonstrates a world whose core areas were not only at rough parity but also converging with both ends of Eurasia meeting, trading, and learning from each other in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this period implanted the seeds for an eventual divergence. European mercantile organizations and, later, states came to dominate the sea-lanes and control the flow of silver and finance. They were able to shape and set the rules for an emerging new order. Chinese merchants and immigrants eventually lost their military and political agency and were absorbed into the expanding European empires. Meanwhile, more firmly bounded states and nativist sentiments emerged in mainland Southeast Asia. Both factors deprived The Port of relatively unhindered access to the maritime trade routes and translocal networks. Nonetheless, the Mo continued to enjoy significant autonomy until the French colonization of the water world in 1867, taking advantage of the hazy and ill-defined borders in the water world.

Hong Kong’s Handover from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 could have brought about rapid and momentous changes to Hong Kong’s language regime. Change, however, has for the most part been incremental, and much of the British-era’s language regime remains largely intact today, including the salience of English in many domains. At the same time, language policy changes did occur, mainly through the educational policy of biliteracy and trilingualism, which added Mandarin to the de facto English-Cantonese bilingual regime. However, nearly half-way through the transition period, Mandarin use has made few notable inroads in Hong Kong society, though there are signs that this may be about to change - perhaps drastically so. This paper analyzes the evolution of Hong Kong’s language regime from its unique perspective as a city connected to the global community like few others, and located between two state traditions - one marked by pluralist, laissez-faire capitalism, and the other by Communism and totalitarian state nationalism. Overall, this case study of Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of colonial legacies, competing mobilizations, incremental change, and multilevel governance as it helps to expand the STLR framework.

There is an extensive literature devoted to analysing the common features of the Four Dragons – Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is generally acknowledged that all emerged under authoritarian tutelage, although all are now experiencing pressures for democratisation; all prospered in a regional economic and security order underwritten by the United States, although one in which increasingly the United States is being displaced by Japan; all were the beneficiaries (although to an uneven degree and with uneven results) of a Confucian social inheritance. The approach taken by Australian policy makers to the Dragons is to a great extent a consequence of their rapid rise as major economic entities in the Western Pacific within the United States-dominated Pacific economy and security complex. Relations with the Dragons are relations with what, for Australians, is the vibrant Asia of rapid economic modernisation, as opposed to the timeless Asia of subsistence agriculture. The fact that these systems have ascended so rapidly is a particular test of each country’s capacity to engage with the region, given their relative lack of significance before the later 1980s.

This is the first variationist sociolinguistic study of Cantonese tone-merger using conversational recordings. These data differ from experimental data exploring tone mergers: the speech is continuous and spontaneous, the tones appear in diverse contexts, and speakers are from both Toronto and Hong Kong. We investigated the status of three reportedly ongoing mergers: T2/T5忍 / 引, T3/T6 印 / 孕, and T4/T6 仁 / 孕. We measured three cues (i.e., mean pitch, pitch at 90% duration of the syllable, and pitch slope) in 12,000+ tokens from thirty-two speakers. Using normalized duration and speaker pitch, mixed-effects models showed that unmerged tones are statistically distinguishable in spontaneous speech, but that two of the three “ongoing-merger” pairs are fully merged, and the third is nearly merged. Analyses included segmental and suprasegmental (i.e., phrasal position, word position, adjacent tones) factors affecting pitch. We found no differences between heritage and homeland speaker samples.

This chapter considers trends and developments in legal education in Asia through the lens of some representative polities, namely China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. The experience of these polities indicates that understanding of legal education in Asia cannot be divorced from colonisation and the imposition (or reception) of Western law. It has also been influenced more recently by globalisation as seen from increased cross-border flows of faculty and students, the teaching of transnational law subjects, the development of particular forms of teaching practice such as legal clinics and programmes equivalent to the Juris Doctor, explicit focus on transnational rankings, and transnational scholarly communities engaged in teaching and research collaboration.

The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region allows judges from other common law jurisdictions to sit on the Court of Final Appeal. Since 1997, one overseas non-permanent judge has sat on the bench of the Court of Final Appeal in nearly all substantive appeals. The chapter provides an overview of the identities of the overseas non-permanent judges over the Court’s 24-year history and outlines how the working practices of the Court have developed to support their involvement in Hong Kong’s judiciary. An assessment of the benefits that overseas non-permanent judges provide the Court of Final Appeal and the contributions they have made to the development of the law and legal system of Hong Kong show that the use of foreign judges in Hong Kong has been highly successful.