Autho: Kenneth Kai-chung Yung
Souce: Cold War History
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682745.2025.2485886
Abstract
The communist takeover of China in 1949 forced political dissidents to flee their homeland, never to return. Through a number of case studies, I examine the self-exiled intellectuals by looking into their life experiences during their sojourn in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s. By studying their perceptions of and interactions with Hong Kong society, I argue that Hong Kong’s ‘in-betweeness’, localisation and diasporic experiences of the self-exiled intellectuals were indeed compatible with each other in the cases of those who ended their self-exile in the city. The three concepts were not necessarily contradictory to each other.