Hong Kong and Shenzhen: Border Crossings, Local and Global

Please note that registration is required and must be approved for attendance. Please register by September 25th. 

The keynote is open to the public without registration.

This two-day international conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to consider the relationship between Hong Kong and China through its border history. Historians have described Hong Kong as an “in-between space” and proposed a “Hong Kong-China nexus.” Recent historical studies have examined the borderland as a liminal space that ordinary people and local officials leveraged. Social scientists have theorized the border as China’s “restive frontier” and the meeting between two tectonic plates. Metaphors applied to this boundary, at once local and global, describe its gates as a sluice and its layers as a palimpsest. In an era of wartime and revolution, this border facilitated migration and smuggling; Hong Kong was an off-shore site. During the Cold War, this space was both closed and open (cold and hot), a so-called “bamboo curtain.” After 1997, when Hong Kong transitioned from British colony to China’s Special Administrative Region, the border has persisted. Throughout, people, goods, and ideas have traversed the border—though the nature of migration and the kinds of resources have changed over time.

Over the course of two days, we plan to examine the following questions, among others:

1. Local and Global: What happens when we center, as recent work has suggested, China’s South or China’s “Southern Periphery?”
2. Scale and Scope: How does our archival research and ethnographic fieldwork both build on longer traditions of scholarship on South China as well as contribute new frameworks to the study of the city, the village, and the zone?
3. Comparative: What can these sites and this region bring to the study of China’s borders and of borders around the world? Why should scholars of other borders care about this one?