Event Date
Cosponsors: UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, Pomona College Asian Studies Program, UC Davis East Asian Studies.
[Pacific Time] November 2, 2021 8PM - 9:30PM
[Hong Kong Time] November 3, 2021 11AM - 12:30PM
Book Abstract
Between 1949 and 1997, Hong Kong transformed from a struggling British colonial outpost into a global financial capital. Made in Hong Kong delivers a new narrative of this metamorphosis, revealing Hong Kong both as a critical engine in the expansion and remaking of postwar global capitalism and as the linchpin of Sino-U.S. trade since the 1970s. Analyzing untapped archival sources from around the world, this book demonstrates why we cannot understand postwar globalization, China’s economic rise, or today’s Sino-U.S. trade relationship without centering Hong Kong.
Book Author
Peter E. Hamilton
(Lingnam University)
is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Lingnam University. His research focuses on transnational commercial and educational circulations between China and the United States. His first book, entitled Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization, offers new explanations for both Hong Kong’s phenomenal economic development during the Cold War and the rapid growth in Sino-US trade since the 1970s.
Discussants
Leo Shin
(The University of British Columbia)
is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies as well as the Convenor of the Hong Kong Studies Initiative (HKSI) at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on how the ideas of “China” and “Chineseness” have evolved, and how the production, transmission, and consumption of beliefs and practices have shaped not only how the boundaries of China have been drawn but also how China has been historicized.
Florence Mok
(Nanyang Technological University)
is assistant professor in the History Department at Nanyang Technological University. She holds a PhD in History from the University of York. Her doctoral research examined governance and political culture in colonial Hong Kong in the 1970s. She specialises in the history of Sino-British relations, state-society relations in Hong Kong and Cold War politics. Her current projects explore water supplies in Hong Kong in the 1960s and Chinese Communist cultural activities during the Cold War.