Covert Colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966–97

This is a hybrid event.

To register for in-person attendance at SHHK Conference Room, click here.

To register for virtual attendance on Zoom, click here.

This book fills the long-standing void in the existing scholarship by constructing an empirical study of colonial governance and political culture in Hong Kong from 1966 to 1997.Using under-exploited archival and unofficial data in London and Hong Kong, it overcomes the limitations in the existing literature which has been written mainly by political scientists and sociologists, and has been primarily theoretically driven. It addresses a highly contested and timely agenda, one in which colonial historians have made major interventions: the nature of colonial governance and autonomy of the colonial polity. This book focusing on colonialism and the Chinese society in Hong Kong in a pivotal period will generate meaningful discussions and heated debates on comparisons between 'colonialism' in different space and time: between Hong Kong and other former British colonies; and between colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong.

Dr. Florence Mok is a Nanyang Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is a historian of colonial Hong Kong and modern China, with an interest in environmental history, the Cold War and state-society relations. She completed her PhD in History at the University of York in 2019. Her doctoral research examined governance and political culture in the 1970s Hong Kong. Florence is one of the founders of the Hong Kong Research Hub (HKRH) at NTU and an Executive Board member of the Society for Hong Kong Studies (SHKS) . She is also the Series Editor of the ‘Cold War in Asia’ book series in Amsterdam University Press.