The rise of The Port and the Mo clan coincided with the “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia and the peak of the Qing dynasty’s power. Their story also demonstrates a world whose core areas were not only at rough parity but also converging with both ends of Eurasia meeting, trading, and learning from each other in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this period implanted the seeds for an eventual divergence. European mercantile organizations and, later, states came to dominate the sea-lanes and control the flow of silver and finance. They were able to shape and set the rules for an emerging new order. Chinese merchants and immigrants eventually lost their military and political agency and were absorbed into the expanding European empires. Meanwhile, more firmly bounded states and nativist sentiments emerged in mainland Southeast Asia. Both factors deprived The Port of relatively unhindered access to the maritime trade routes and translocal networks. Nonetheless, the Mo continued to enjoy significant autonomy until the French colonization of the water world in 1867, taking advantage of the hazy and ill-defined borders in the water world.

Hong Kong’s Handover from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 could have brought about rapid and momentous changes to Hong Kong’s language regime. Change, however, has for the most part been incremental, and much of the British-era’s language regime remains largely intact today, including the salience of English in many domains. At the same time, language policy changes did occur, mainly through the educational policy of biliteracy and trilingualism, which added Mandarin to the de facto English-Cantonese bilingual regime. However, nearly half-way through the transition period, Mandarin use has made few notable inroads in Hong Kong society, though there are signs that this may be about to change - perhaps drastically so. This paper analyzes the evolution of Hong Kong’s language regime from its unique perspective as a city connected to the global community like few others, and located between two state traditions - one marked by pluralist, laissez-faire capitalism, and the other by Communism and totalitarian state nationalism. Overall, this case study of Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of colonial legacies, competing mobilizations, incremental change, and multilevel governance as it helps to expand the STLR framework.

There is an extensive literature devoted to analysing the common features of the Four Dragons – Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is generally acknowledged that all emerged under authoritarian tutelage, although all are now experiencing pressures for democratisation; all prospered in a regional economic and security order underwritten by the United States, although one in which increasingly the United States is being displaced by Japan; all were the beneficiaries (although to an uneven degree and with uneven results) of a Confucian social inheritance. The approach taken by Australian policy makers to the Dragons is to a great extent a consequence of their rapid rise as major economic entities in the Western Pacific within the United States-dominated Pacific economy and security complex. Relations with the Dragons are relations with what, for Australians, is the vibrant Asia of rapid economic modernisation, as opposed to the timeless Asia of subsistence agriculture. The fact that these systems have ascended so rapidly is a particular test of each country’s capacity to engage with the region, given their relative lack of significance before the later 1980s.

This is the first variationist sociolinguistic study of Cantonese tone-merger using conversational recordings. These data differ from experimental data exploring tone mergers: the speech is continuous and spontaneous, the tones appear in diverse contexts, and speakers are from both Toronto and Hong Kong. We investigated the status of three reportedly ongoing mergers: T2/T5忍 / 引, T3/T6 印 / 孕, and T4/T6 仁 / 孕. We measured three cues (i.e., mean pitch, pitch at 90% duration of the syllable, and pitch slope) in 12,000+ tokens from thirty-two speakers. Using normalized duration and speaker pitch, mixed-effects models showed that unmerged tones are statistically distinguishable in spontaneous speech, but that two of the three “ongoing-merger” pairs are fully merged, and the third is nearly merged. Analyses included segmental and suprasegmental (i.e., phrasal position, word position, adjacent tones) factors affecting pitch. We found no differences between heritage and homeland speaker samples.

This chapter considers trends and developments in legal education in Asia through the lens of some representative polities, namely China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. The experience of these polities indicates that understanding of legal education in Asia cannot be divorced from colonisation and the imposition (or reception) of Western law. It has also been influenced more recently by globalisation as seen from increased cross-border flows of faculty and students, the teaching of transnational law subjects, the development of particular forms of teaching practice such as legal clinics and programmes equivalent to the Juris Doctor, explicit focus on transnational rankings, and transnational scholarly communities engaged in teaching and research collaboration.

The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region allows judges from other common law jurisdictions to sit on the Court of Final Appeal. Since 1997, one overseas non-permanent judge has sat on the bench of the Court of Final Appeal in nearly all substantive appeals. The chapter provides an overview of the identities of the overseas non-permanent judges over the Court’s 24-year history and outlines how the working practices of the Court have developed to support their involvement in Hong Kong’s judiciary. An assessment of the benefits that overseas non-permanent judges provide the Court of Final Appeal and the contributions they have made to the development of the law and legal system of Hong Kong show that the use of foreign judges in Hong Kong has been highly successful.

The members of the Singapore International Commercial Court (‘SICC’) include both Singaporean and non-Singaporean ‘international’ judges. The SICC is domestic, in that it is established under Singaporean law as a division of the Singapore Court system, and international in the sense that it hears international commercial disputes, including cases which have no connection with Singapore apart from a choice of court agreement designating the SICC as the forum for dispute resolution. This chapter identifies the rationales for the appointment of international judges to the SICC, contrasting the SICC with domestic courts which use foreign judges and with nine other international commercial courts around the world. It shows how the different objectives and target markets of international commercial courts, as well as the constitutional laws and traditions of the host state, influence the decision whether or not to appoint foreign judges. The chapter suggests that international commercial dispute resolution today favours the appointment of specialist foreign judges to commercial courts having similar aspirations as the SICC.

This chapter discusses three common criticisms of using foreign judges on domestic courts. First, that the foreign judge, ignorant of local laws, customs and circumstances, will reach decisions that are legally wrong, assertive of colonial values and principles, or simply unacceptable to members of the local community. Second, the foreign judge, not being a citizen or resident of the local jurisdiction, has divided patriotic ties rendering him or her ill-suited to consider questions of constitutional significance, national security or foreign affairs. Third, the expertise of the foreign judge is no longer needed as there is already abundant domestic legal expertise. The chapter responds and reflects upon these criticisms in the context of the evolving system of overseas non-permanent judges of Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal since 1997.

Since 2008 Pacific Asia has been reconfigured as a region, with China as its center. In economics, China has been the central driver and partner in growth. In politics, China has become the central concern of its neighbors. China’s GDP surpassed Japan’s in 2000, and by 2009 it equaled the combined totals of Japan, ASEAN, and Korea. While this shows China’s demographic power, it is not simply a matter of size. Its per capita GDP is now at eye level with countries such as Malaysia and Thailand. China is again the major presence in Pacific Asia, with a majority of its population and its production. Re-centered China is quite different from premodern China. China and its region are now globally integrated, and its former, cautious thin connectivity has been replaced by assertive thick connectivity. China now tries to maximize win-win contact. However, the new asymmetries worry the neighbors. China’s challenges of integrating Greater China and avoiding hostility with Japan are vital for China’s global prospects as well as its regional stature.

This chapter focuses on the experience of Hong Kong refugees in Macau. It addresses the role the British consulate in Macau played in refugee management and intelligence networks, explaining how the enclave was an important base and a connecting node for British operations. This chapter argues that Macau played an important supportive role to many in and from Hong Kong from late 1941 to the end of the war. It allowed for escapees to reach unoccupied China, for a great number of refugees to receive assistance, for intelligence to be gathered and for resistance activities to be coordinated. The chapter highlights the significant experience of colonial transplantation that allowed the British to keep a foothold in South China and facilitated the reoccupation of Hong Kong.

With an international focus, this chapter analyses Portuguese neutrality in wartime China before the fall of Hong Kong in late 1941, with reference to the British and Japanese imperial presence in the region. It argues that the war in South China saw Macau and its Portuguese administration engaged constantly with these two major imperial powers in a precarious balance marked by continuities in Portugal’s relations with its old ally, the United Kingdom, and a novel proximity to Japan that generated contradictory practices on the ground.