We are pleased to announce that Alex Chow has received a dissertation fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, which supports research and scholarly exchange in Chinese studies and related fields. The fellowship will support Chow's dissertation project, “Feeling Freedom: Affective Politics, Monetary Order, and Hong Kong’s Modernity (1950s–2019).”
Chow's project examines how ideas and feelings of freedom in Hong Kong were shaped by the convergence of socialist China’s economic statecraft, British colonial Hong Kong’s economic governance, and the wider U.S.-influenced global economic order. It traces how these systems developed in relation to one another in the postwar period and increasingly converged from the late 1970s and 1980s onward through China’s reform and opening, Hong Kong’s role as a financial and commercial intermediary, Sino-British negotiations, and global capital flows.
At the same time, Chow's dissertation asks how people in Hong Kong interpreted and contested freedom, sovereignty, and democracy across local, national, and transnational scales. Drawing on archival research, oral history/interviews, participant observation, affect theory, and geographical political economy, the project explores how freedom became attached or detached from economic (in)security, institutional trust, democratic aspiration, and later forms of political crisis and diaspora.