Hong Kong South Asians in crisis : contesting statelessness, citizenship, and decolonization at the end of British Hong Kong

Few scholars have paid attention to the crises of non-white, non-Chinese communities in Hong Kong in the run-up to the handover to China in the 1980s and 1990s. As an outcome of British citizenship reforms and future arrangements for Hong Kong, Hong Kong South Asian business and social elites demanded full British citizenship from the British government as a remedy to their fears that they would become stateless after Hong Kong’s scheduled handover to China in 1997. The resultant prolonged struggle between the diasporic elites and the British government would be known as the “statelessness crisis.” In this thesis, I employ official records, newspaper and magazine clippings, reports, internal documents from local organizations, and council minutes from Britain, Hong Kong, and India to assess the historical, legal, and intellectual significances of the “statelessness crisis.” During this crisis, contrasting understandings of “statelessness,” “citizenship,” and “diaspora” were imposed and contested among the different parties. Through these contestations, I call attention to the violent and exclusionary logic of Hong Kong’s decolonization process: despite the handover’s bloodless nature, it threatened to displace minoritized communities from Hong Kong amid longstanding, competing attempts by Britain, China, and other parties to advance colonial and national interests. I also reframe Hong Kong South Asians as historical agents by demonstrating how they problematized, confronted, and interrupted such logics of decolonization and state-making through the crisis, specifically ethnocentric narratives of Hong Kong’s history, the colonial logic behind national citizenships, and the liberal logic of statelessness prevention and reduction.