Zongyue Liu

My thesis investigates the changing features of HK localism in the last decades of the 20th century and the 2000s by looking into five main areas: education, immigration, labour market, local politics, and gender.

This thesis builds on one of the three themes of my MPhil thesis (ESH, Oxford), which reviewed the economy of HK from 1982 to 1996. The three themes are: the effects of the Sino-British negotiations on HK’s economy; the efforts made by the HK government to improve the resilience of its financial system; and the response of the HK Chinese population to the city’s political future. Before starting this MPhil in 2018, I completed a MRes in Economics from the University of Essex and a BSc in Mathematics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Besides the economic and social history of HK, I am interested in the economic history of China and Japan from the late Qing dynasty to 1949, the change of Chinese art from the Han dynasty to the Ming dynasty explained by socio-economic factors, and the development of fine art market in the West in the modern period.

Supervisor: Professor Catherine Schenk