Exploring the trajectories, coping strategies and belonging of post-2019 Hongkongers in Belgium, the Netherlands and France.

In the wake of the 2019 anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill and of the insertion of the National Security Law into Hong Kong’s Basic Law, Hong Kong has witnessed a major population exodus. Most of those who left have moved to the United-Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, and the United-States. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some have headed to Western Europe.
Over the two decades that preceded the 2019 protests, the impact of China’s economic and global geopolitical rise, as well as the Chinese regime turn to national security and its increasing encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy all have shaped socio-political transformation and people’s subjectivities.
The extent and human consequences of the systematic destruction of Hong Kong’s regime of public freedom and of its partly-representative political system over the last four years is of an unprecedented nature. Up to now, no research has been carried out on the trajectories of those who left their home-city for reasons related to this unraveling. The repression and intimidation of social forces in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the 2019 protests, and the consecutive exodus, somehow partake to a process of erasure of the memory of the values and emotional attachment to what Hong Kong once was. Both Lee and Ho have highlighted how much political contention that unfolded in Hong Kong has contributed to crystallizing what it means to be a Hongkonger, both in Hong Kong and abroad (Lee 2022; Ho 2023). As Kwan noted, the belief that the city’s soul can be “kept alive” is quite widespread among Hongkongers abroad. But then, in a context of intensifying repression and intimidation in Hong Kong and abroad, how does one cope when one loses one’s home and when everything one is familiar with vanishes ? (Kwan, 2022).