Roundtable discussion
Speakers:
Jacob Dreyer (卓睿), commissioning editor at Palgrave and an independent writer
Pan Lu (潘律), Associate Professor, Dept. of Chinese History and Culture, PolyU
Daniel Vukovich (胡德), Professor, Dept. of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Time: 4:00–6:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Room 417, 4/F, The Jockey Club Tower, The University of Hong Kong
This roundtable examines and opens up to discussion the significance of Hong Kong as a part of China, in its recent past and in its present moment as a part of China’s developmental and global projects, such as the GBA and Belt Road. What can Hong Kong offer to China and vice versa, what can the mainland offer the SAR in its south? This requires both empirical and practical as well as cultural or humanistic analyses.
Our main presentation will be by Jacob Dreyer, who will present hypotheses about Hong Kong’s changing role as a financial center. In what some recall as the glory days, Hong Kong was the funnel of overseas capital into a rapidly developing China. Today, the sluice operates in the other direction, as Chinese capital seeks to interface with the world using Hong Kong as an intermediary. What makes Hong Kong so crucial to the evolving Chinese economic model, and how does Hong Kong relate to the manufacturing powerhouse of the GBA? As the 15th five year plan beckons, what distinctive functions can Hong Kong perform that Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, and Shenzhen cannot?
This will be followed by shorter presentations and responses by Professor Pan Lu (author of the volume, The 70’s Biweekly among other germane books), and Professor Daniel Vukovich (author of a new, revised Chinese edition of After Autonomy, on Hong Kong’s second handover in progress).
Jacob Dreyer (卓睿) is a writer and editor based in Shanghai. He writes about Chinese science and political economy for the NYTimes, Nature, NOEMA, and American Affairs, and publishes books under the Palgrave imprint with authors from greater China.
PAN Lu (潘律) is Associate Professor at Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Pan is author of three monographs: In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (2016), Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (2015), and Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China (2020). She is chief editor of The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong (2023) and The (Im)possibilities of Art Archives: Theories and Experience in/from Asia (2024). As a filmmaker, she co-directed Many Undulating Things (2019), Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017), Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong (2016) with Bo Wang and Anachronic Chronicles: Voyages Inside/Out Asia (2021) with Yu Araki.
Dan Vukovich (胡德) is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on issues of colonialism/imperialism and critical theory in relation to the intellectual and political history of the “China-West” relationship. He has worked in Hong Kong since 2006, after earlier stints at Hocking College and UC Santa Cruz before and after his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is currently Chair of the Comp Lit Program at HKU and has been an Advisory Research Fellow at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing and a Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University (华东师范大学). He is the author of three monographs, including China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019) and most recently After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In these three books and in numerous articles he is concerned with the age-old problems of representation, the politics of knowledge (and ‘real’ politics), and the dialectics of difference and universality.
