Épisodes

  • Christopher Munn, "Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2025)

    Christopher Munn, "Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2025)
    Mar 17 2026
    Who bore the burdens of empire? Christopher Munn's Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2025) explores how judges, juries, and lawyers strove to deliver justice during the 150 years when the death penalty was in force in Hong Kong. Nine main chapters focus on key capital trials in the first century of British rule. Among the cases are piracies, assassinations, and crimes of passion and desperation. These chapters describe the proceedings in court and the participants involved. They also explore the debates surrounding each case and the exercise or denial of mercy by governors. Two final chapters discuss the decline of the death penalty after World War II, its suspension after 1966, and the controversies leading to its formal abolition in 1993. Penalties of Empire traces the evolution of criminal justice at its highest levels. It also offers a prism for understanding some of the broader forces at work in Hong Kong’s history. Christopher Munn served as an administrative officer in the Hong Kong Government and in various positions in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. His publications include Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880 and (with May Holdsworth) Crime, Justice and Punishment in Colonial Hong Kong. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
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    1 h et 11 min
  • Christine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2018)

    Christine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2018)
    Mar 1 2026
    There can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused on pro-democracy protests, abducted booksellers or PRC Mainland integration plans, most of this news has revolved around a common theme - namely questions over Beijing's ruling Chinese Communist Party and its influence in Hong Kong. On this background, Christine Loh’s book Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong(Hong Kong University Press, 2018) is an indispensable guide to the Party's approaches to Hong Kong over time. As a former-lawmaker in the city’s Legislative Council, founder of the think tank Civic Exchange, and many other things, Loh makes the most of her unique vantage point on contemporary CCP affairs, as well her invaluable access to insights from the her hometown's colonial past. This book sets its analysis of how the Party seeks to maintain supremacy in Hong Kong within all-important historical context, and consequently will be a vital resource for anyone wishing to understand the questions of political culture, power and influence which are pivotal to the future of East Asia and the world at large.
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    1 h
  • Ray Yep, "Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

    Ray Yep, "Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)
    Feb 20 2026
    In Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024), Ray Yep explores the latest available archival materials and re-examines MacLehose’s pivotal governorship in Hong Kong (1971–1982). MacLehose arrived in the challenging 1970s, when there were expectations for social reforms, uneasiness in the relationship between Hong Kong and London, and the 1997 factor looming large. The governor successfully carried out various social reforms and he also handled various major issues, including the anti-corruption campaign, the Vietnamese refugee crisis, and the granting of land lease of the New Territories beyond 1997. Yep unveils the tension and bargaining between the British government and explains how interest of the colony could be asserted, defended, and negotiated. This book is an important study of Hong Kong’s ‘golden years’ when the city’s economy took off. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of how local autonomy was defined. Ray Yep is research director of the Hong Kong History Centre, University of Bristol. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.
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    1 h et 4 min
  • Stacie A. Kent, "Coercive Commerce: Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

    Stacie A. Kent, "Coercive Commerce: Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)
    Apr 2 2025
    In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global economic entanglements intruded on Qing territory and governance. Previously understood as an era of “semi-colonialism,” Stacie A. Kent reframes this century of intervention by shedding light on the generative force of global capital. Based on extensive research, conducted with British and Chinese government archives, Coercive Commerce (Hong Kong University Press, 2024) shows how commercial treaties and the regulatory regime that grew out of them catalyzed a revised arts of governance in Qing-administered China. Capital, which had long been present in Chinese merchants’ pocketbooks, came to shape and even govern Chinese statecraft during the “treaty era.” This book contends that Qing administrators alternately resisted and adapted to this new reality through taxation systems such as transit passes and the Imperial Maritime Customs Service by reorganizing Chinese territory into a space where global circuits of capital could circulate and reproduce at an ever greater scale. Offering a deep dive into the coercive nature of capitalism and the historically specific ways global capital reproduction took root in Qing China, Coercive Commerce will interest historians of capital and modern China alike. Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University.
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    55 min
  • Francisca Yuenki Lai, "Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)

    Francisca Yuenki Lai, "Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)
    Aug 25 2024
    Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires (Hong Kong UP, 2021) is the first book about Asian female migrant workers who develop same-sex relationships in a host city. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the book explores the meanings of same-sex relationships to these migrant women. Instead of searching for reasons to explain why they engage in a same-sex relationship, this book provides an ethnographic perspective by addressing their Sunday activities and considering how migration policies and the practices of Hong Kong people unintentionally produce alternative sexuality and desires for them. The author contrasts the migrant experiences of same-sex relationships with the Western discourse that individuals carry a strong sense of sexual identification prior to migration; same-sex desires among Indonesian domestic workers are often not realized until they leave home. Addressing the changes from maid to queer, this book documents the intersections of domestic work, labor migration, race, and religion on the sexual subject formation, specifically how Indonesian women negotiate heteronormativity and remake a space for their love, sex, and intimacy. For those interested in lesbian studies, Asian labor migration, sexual citizenship, and queer migration, this ethnography fills an important gap in explaining how the feminization of international migration and the constraints imposed on live-in domestic workers unintentionally become productive possibilities of queerness and normativity. Qing Shen is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.
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    1 h et 2 min
  • Kathe Geist, "Ozu: A Closer Look" (Hong Kong UP, 2022)

    Kathe Geist, "Ozu: A Closer Look" (Hong Kong UP, 2022)
    Dec 21 2022
    Based on a close reading of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s extant films, this book provides insights into the ways the director created narrative structures and used symbolism to construct meaning in his films. Against critics’ insistence that Ozu was indifferent to plot and unlikely to use symbols, Geist reveals the director’s subtle iconographic paradigms. Her incisive understanding of the historical and cultural context in which the films were conceived amplifies her analysis of the films’ structure and meaning. Ozu: A Closer Look (Hong Kong UP, 2022) guides the reader through Ozu’s earliest silent films, his sound films made during the wartime period and subsequent American Occupation of Japan, and finally takes up specific themes relevant to his later, better-known films. Geist also examines the impact that Ozu’s films had on specific directors in Europe, America, and Japan. Intended for film scholars, students, and fans of the director, this book provides fresh insights into the director’s films and new challenges in studies on Ozu. Kathe Geist is an art historian and author of The Cinema of Wim Wenders. Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez.
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    1 h et 27 min
  • Michael Keevak, "On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation" (Hong Kong UP, 2022)

    Michael Keevak, "On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation" (Hong Kong UP, 2022)
    Oct 21 2022
    In On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (Hong Kong UP, 2022), Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. It involves proper behavior and the avoidance of conflict, encompassing every aspect of one’s place in society as well as one’s relationships with other people. One can “give face,” “get face,” “fight for face,” “tear up face,” and a host of other expressions. But when it began to become known to the Western trading community in China beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was distorted and reduced to two phrases only, “lose face” and “save face,” both of which were used to suggest distinctly Western ideas of humiliation, embarrassment, honor, and reputation. The Chinese were judged as a race obsessed with the fear of “losing (their) face,” and they constantly resorted to vain attempts to “save” it in the face of Western correction. “Lose face” may be an authentic Chinese expression but “save face” is different. “Save face” was actually a Western invention. Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (2017), Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011), The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (HKUP, 2008), The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (2004), and Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (2001). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.
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    1 h et 15 min
  • Lin Song, "Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)

    Lin Song, "Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)
    Jun 10 2022
    China has one of the largest queer populations in the world, but what does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of paramount importance? This book analyzes queer cultures in China, offering an alternative to western blueprints of queer individual identity. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, questioning the Eurocentric assumption of the separation of queerness from family ties. Offering five case studies of queer representations, Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China (Hong Kong UP, 2021)also challenges the tendency in current scholarship to understand queer cultures as predominantly marginalized. Shedding light on cultural expressions of queerness and kinship, this book highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture. Dr. Lin Song is a scholar of media and cultural studies, and Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. He holds a PhD in Gender Studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is currently working on projects related to Emotional and algorithmic governance in China during the COVID-19 outbreak, and Erotic self-representation and queer cultural production in Chinese DIY pornography. Cody Skahan (cskahan@ksu.edu) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog at where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on.
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    1 h et 4 min