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A Chinese Melting Pot: Original People and Immigrants in Hong Kong’s First ‘New Town’ traces the transformation of Tsuen Wan from a poor and marginal district of agricultural villages, culturally distinctive in that all were Hakka. Like others present in the New Territories in 1898, they enjoyed special privileges under British colonialism as ‘original inhabitants’. This study is focused, in part, on one of their villages: its history, lineages, relationships among and through women, and their songs and laments. In the aftermath of the Japanese occupation and revolution in China, the town, with its daily coastal market, rapidly grew into a major industrial area and assumed an intense, if chaotic, urban form. Its industries attracted enormous numbers of immigrants from China, who created a large variety of voluntary associations to ease their adaptation to the new environment, while the original inhabitants, as property owners, benefited financially from the immigrants’ need for housing, and politically from continuing government support. In the 1980s, changes in economic policies in China led to Tsuen Wan’s present post-industrial form. The original inhabitants remain as a small fragment of the population, their villages intact, although re-sited away from the town centre as part of greatly increased government intervention in creating a planned ‘new town’. Their language and traditions are disappearing as they, like the immigrants, are absorbed into the wider Hong Kong lifestyle.

Tales of Hope and Tastes of Bitterness sheds light on Chinese-led development from below, revealing its contested nature. Zooming in on everyday encounters between Chinese managers and Ethiopian laborers on a road construction site in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, the book shows that Ethiopians define Chinese-led development as much as they are defined by it. By mobilizing civic and legal authorities, Ethiopian workers have managed to increase their leverage to such a degree that they occasionally outplay Chinese management. On the other hand, Chinese narratives of bitterness reveal that Chinese road builders perceive themselves as lacking agency. Speaking, as they do, of thwarted goodwill, these narratives are not only linked to the everyday challenges of Chinese–Ethiopian encounters and the chasm between their confident expectations and the much less rosy realities on the ground, but also to workers’ socioeconomic backgrounds and their state of suspension, as they try to stay afloat in the competitive Chinese society to which they hope one day to return.

Tracing China’s journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China. Spanning decades of rural-urban divide, it finally uncovers China’s global reach and Hong Kong’s cross-border dynamics. Helen Siu traverses physical and cultural landscapes to examine political tumults transforming into everyday lives, and fathom the depths of human drama amid China’s frenetic momentum toward modernity. Highlighting complicity, Siu portrays how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals—laden with historical baggage—venture forward. But have they victimized themselves in the process? This essay collection, informed by critical social theories and shaped by careful scrutiny of fieldwork and archival texts, is woven by key historical/anthropological themes—culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation. Siu stresses process and contingency and argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. Challenging the notion that social/political changes are mere linear historical progressions, she traces layers of the past in present realities.