Precarity of belonging? Belongingness and race of ethnically diverse young people in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper attends to the belongingness of a group of ethnically diverse young people in Hong Kong. The quest for belonging is no less intense for them during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement in Hong Kong. Resulting from such sociopolitical climate are paradoxical questions of who might (not) count as Hong Konger. This study draws on focus groups with ethnically diverse young people conducted at the height of the Anti-ELAB protests. It considers how belonging is segmented across racial lines and different temporal locations. The analysis illustrates tacit links between ethnically diverse young people's non-belonging resulting from their past experiences of structural racism and belonging realized in the collectivity that sits with the movement's sociopolitical climate. The precarity of belongingness, we argue, is contingent upon an acute consciousness and redrawing of cultural membership in Hong Kong's shifting sociopolitical realm.