Literature minus the local: Assessing the viability of a taught postgraduate program in literary studies in contemporary Hong Kong

Hong Kong has always been a site of internal migration within China, a fact that 150 years of colonialism has at once complicated and confirmed (Siu 2009). In recent years, given the Hong Kong government’s wish to liberalize access to the territory for labor coming from the People’s Republic of China, skilled and unskilled, the pace and scope of bilateral flows in human migration between Hong Kong and Guangdong province has quickened. The impact of these changes has required Hong Kong to recalibrate its own market balance of trade, as its shared investment in Guangdong businesses (and elsewhere in China) has grown. Commerce aside, Hong Kong has also had to make proactive adjustments, some visionary and others defensive, in response to its own shifting language and culture landscape as the first generation of Putonghua (Mandarin) speaking professionals arrives and, in many cases, settles in.