Kennedy Chi-Pan Wong

??As an ethnographer, I have spent years studying Hong Kongers in the US, Canada, the UK, Taiwan, and Japan (both online and offline), exploring why some align with Trump while others find the symbols of the so-called ‘left’ unrepresentative of their struggles. This has led to fractures and divisions between anti-racism movements and anti-dictatorship coalitions among Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, Thais, Burmese, Uyghurs, and Tibetans. I argue that scholars should understand both the forces of repression and agency by examining how shared symbols are enacted, contested, and conflicted in interactions that shape political participation, avoidance, and counter-mobilizations.

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In conceptualizing these puzzling findings from my field observations and interviews, I am working on a series of manuscripts that broadly study the relationality of collective actions, particularly extending the understanding of ‘boundary-spanning’ processes. I am deeply honored to receive recognition for one of my work-in-progress manuscripts, “Cross-National Alliance Against Authoritarianism: Mapping ‘Our’ Struggles to the Broader World,” which was awarded the Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award by the Pacific Sociological Association (PSA).
 

Another manuscript, recently published in American Behavioral Scientist, is titled “Sowing Hate, Cultivating Loyalists: Mobilizing Repressive Nationalist Diasporas for Transnational Repression by the People’s Republic of China Regime.” This article integrates transnational repression, diaspora governance, and nationalism to conceptualize the idea of ‘repressive nationalist diaspora.’ I argue that the Chinese Communist Party regime uses cultural and nationalist boundaries to territorialize and orientalize the “Chinese identity,” antagonizing dissidents at home and abroad as separatists and ‘foreign influenced.’ This low-cost cultural strategy encourages emigrants who are patriotic to their home country to engage in repressive behaviors within a broader network of emigrants, thereby aiding the autocrat in controlling the ‘voice’ abroad among Hong Kongers, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese, and mainland Chinese. The paper was selected to be featured at the XX ISA World Congress of Sociology representing the American Sociological Association (The Toolkit of Emerging Autocrats Section) in 2023.
 

Additionally, my other work-in-progress manuscripts, “How Should ‘We’ Talk About ‘We’,” “Dividing Asians,” and “We, the Hong Kongers?” have been selected for presentation at sections on culture, intersectionality, and political sociology at the American Sociological Association (ASA) conference.

My studies provide empirical insights while also raising questions about how and when institutional categories become interconnected in everyday life that exhibit domination as well as resilience. Some of my earlier work has examined the relationality of places, family, and social movements. “From Helmets to Face Masks,” examined how Hongkongers in the US have maintained their commitment to their homeland from the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill movement to the global pandemic. “Leaving the Homeland Again for My Family’s Future,” explores how the future-making processes shaped by broader political crises in pre- and post-colonial Hong Kong have continually shaped and reshaped family endeavors as transnational migrants move in and out of the homeland.

My upcoming book project will integrate these empirical and conceptual works, synthesizing an approach to deepen the understanding of how broader socio-historical and geopolitical power dynamics are compressed into articulations that create various forms of relationality among people and their collective lives.