This book is about feminism and women’s movements in post-1997 Hong Kong. In 1984, Britain and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration to revert Hong Kong’s sovereignty from the former to the latter on July 1, 1997. This marked the beginning of the political transition in Hong Kong, which saw women play a more prominent role as participants in collective action for change. However, their subsequent underrepresentation in the primary pillars of government—the Executive Council, the Legislative Council, the judiciary, and the civil service—is as evident in the Special Administration Region (SAR) as...

When I first embarked on my field research, I was overwhelmed by the scale and scope of women’s activism in Hong Kong. Women’s movements address a wide range of issues—economic (employment discrimination, valuation of women’s work), family (household division of labor, maternity and parental leave, provision of childcare, reproductive rights), and sexual (domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, sex workers’ rights), and engage in various strategies—lobbying and policy formation, public education, research and publications, and service provision. This chapter outlines the major historical aspects of women’s activism during the British colonial period (1843–1997) and the emergence of feminist...

Following the developments of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, institutionalized and professionalized women’s groups were established alongside more informal feminist collectives around the world, with both predominantly concentrating their efforts on popular education, political mobilization, and poor and working-class women’s empowerment. Since the 1990s, however, women’s groups oriented towards gender policy assessment, project execution, and social services delivery began to replace earlier movement-oriented initiatives (Staggenborg 1988; Lang 1997; Alvarez 1999). In Hong Kong, women activists confront this difficult dilemma of balance, and often have to compromise between their feminist ideals and the realities and demands of their sociopolitical environment. This...

In Hong Kong, the significance of the political transition is apparent in the development of oppositional politics, characterized by movements enabling the collective contestation of economic and political power relations, organizing to impede their impingement into wider society, and maintaining freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press. As disparate outsiders, they are constantly articulating oppositional and, at the same time, competing frames of democracy, human rights, and feminism with the insiders. In such a terrain, the first local Chinese women’s groups have been conscious of the importance of collaboration as more women’s groups are formed to mobilize particular sectors of...

Through their experiences of being excluded from the political arena, rights-based, grassroots-oriented women’s groups find that solidarity is necessary, even if it means grappling with diverse feminist organizational forms, rhetoric, and strategies. As we saw in the previous two chapters, some women activists are hesitant about the efficacy of state engagement and prefer to concentrate their efforts on grassroots mobilization. With more women’s groups formed to mobilize various marginalized communities of women, however, the framing of feminism is complicated by the fact that women’s positions in Hong Kong intersect with the “scattered hegemonies” associated with global movements of capital and...

Labor migration is shaping feminism as a collective action frame as women activists engage across national borders. As we saw in the last chapter, women activists are incorporating global understandings of prostitution into local organizing agendas and processes as well as building transnational networks and initiating cross-border initiatives. This chapter examines local and migrant domestic workers’ unions in Hong Kong, in the context of the international domestic workers movement for the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (C 189). Indeed, globalization itself is creating the conditions to organize global unions in the service...

Since its emergence as a social, intellectual, and institutional movement, feminism has had to confront contradictory critiques. First were the voices and writings of women in the East/South/Third World as they drew attention to the ethnocentrism of, and their exclusion from, the rhetoric of a predominantly West/North/First World-centric feminist theory with its emphasis on gender. The response was to acknowledge women’s specificity and social location in terms of geography, culture, and embodiment. This fragmentation and multiplication of representations of women subsequently led to the occlusion of a unifying basis so necessary to agency and resistance in feminist politics. This book...