Ching Kwan Lee, Professor of Sociology at UCLA, delivered the second annual EAC China Lecture. In her talk titled, "Decolonizing Hong Kong: A Global Event," Lee traced two decades of protests in Hong Kong under Chinese rule, culminating in a mass uprising in 2019. Most analyses understand this history as a social movement for democratization and freedom against Communist authoritarian rule of the People’s Republic of China. Prof. Lee argued that popular resistance in Hong Kong is a decolonial struggle against “double coloniality” at the interface of the world’s two major political economic systems. Delayed and denied for 155 years, decolonizing Hong Kong from below has far-reaching global implications.
During her visit to UCSB, Prof. Lee was in conversation with two UCSB undergraduate students on her research on China. She spoke with Isabella Genovese (UCSB, Global Studies major) on global China; view the video here. She spoke with Lucas Hou (UCSB, Statistics and Data Science major) on Chinese investment in Africa; view the video here.
Lee has published three monographs on contemporary China, forming a trilogy of Chinese capitalism through the lens of labor and working class experiences. Her most recent book is Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier (Cambridge, 2022). She is currently working on a monograph Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Struggle for Decolonization.
This lecture was organized by the UCSB East Asia Center with generous support from the China Understanding and Peace Fund.