Hong Kong Divided?

Hong Kong is not alone in experiencing a widening income gap. Citizens of the entire world have in fact witnessed an almost universal trend of rising income inequality within their own societies since the last decade of the twentieth century. One key question is how far and in what ways this global trend towards more inequality has been manifested in each society.

It is in this spirit that the papers in this volume suggest that inequality in Hong Kong, a divided global city, is a far more complicated issue than one of globalization versus technological change. Working from a variety of disciplinary vantage points (economics, social work, education, and sociology), our authors emphasize the point that pre-existing social structures, government policies, and even household strategies, are important factors that have mediated between forces of globalization and technological change and the resultant inequality.

This volume reopens the discussion of social inequalities in Hong Kong and puts it back onto the public and academic agendas. Globalization has certainly been responsible for rising levels of inequality seen in the past decades, but as the papers in this volume emphasize, it does not dictate the forms that such inequality might take. We hope that this is the beginning of a new wave of efforts to address the issue.