Yuk Wah Chan

COVID-19 upended both the existing world order and the research agenda of academics. In both cases, one crucial feature was a net shift from an expansive ‘hyper mobile’ world to a strong emphasis on the immobilization of people. With growing anxieties about the risks and dangers involved in human mobility, there was a turn in mobility studies: an ‘immobility turn’ agonized by a rapidly evolving diseasescape shaped at the intersection of a rapidly evolving virus and rapidly evolving human responses to it. This paper seeks to examine the dynamic dialectical relationship between this diseasescape and human (im)mobility that has resulted in the formation of a new mobility hierarchy that stresses ‘sanitized mobility’. This in turn heightens human inequality. The pandemic has also forced a competition in ‘immobility governance’— testing different models of governing health security within and beyond borders. The paper sheds new light on the emerging scholarship on ‘immobility and pandemic’ by examining the multifariousness in ‘immobility governance’ and interrogating the uneven state capacity in ensuring ‘sanitized mobility’ and practicing ‘immobility governance’ that will bring different outcomes in national and international health security in the post-COVID era.

The second half of the 20th century witnessed a series of mass migration in Asia due to war, politics and economic turbulence. Combined with recent global economic changes, the result is that Asia is now the world region producing the most international migrants and receiving the second most migrants. Asian migration has thus been of central concern to both academic researchers and policy communities. This book (together with its forthcoming second volume) provides a full span discussion of Asian migration from historical perspectives to updated analyses of current migration flows and diasporas. The book covers six sub-regional areas through focused themes: * Northeast Asia: Coping with Diversity in Japan and Korea * East Asian Chinese Migration: Taiwan, Hong Kong and China * Vietnamese Migration and Diaspora * Cambodian, Lao and Hmong Diaspora and Settlement * Singapore: New Immigrants and Return Migration * South Asian Migration and Diaspora Academics as well as general readers wi...

Originating in China, the coronavirus is now taking its toll on most countries of the world, with more than five million confirmed cases and over 331,600 deaths as of May 23. What does this pandemic teach us about global governance of a health crisis? While the human world has championed globalization since the last century, are we now witnessing a more detrimental side of globalization? While the crisis is surely one of public health, it also alerts us to the different and intersecting areas of government, society, and culture. The intersectionality of coronavirus, in turn, takes a toll not only on human life, but on cultural perceptions, medical discourses, racial relations, regional and international health governance, and global politics. Globalization and its Discontents Arjun Appadurai has assessed global cultural flows in terms of five scapes-ethnoscape, mediascape, financescape, ideoscape, and technoscape-and stresses that such scapes overlap and do not flow in a single direction. 1 The coronavirus outbreak suggests we need to be heedful of one more scape, a diseasescape that intertwines with other scapes and likewise flows in multiple directions. In the age of hyper globalization, 2 everything moves faster: people, ideas, money, media information, images, and diseases too. Viruses spread faster with faster human movements. Governments that used to welcome foreign tourists and businesspeople have been mostly unprepared when border-crossers bring inflows of disease.

This commentary discusses the scope of institutionalization by providing a regional dimension of migration studies. A pivotal weakness of the article is its lack of understanding of Asian migration scholarship which has thrived in the past two decades and has been a great impetus for the development of migration studies.

Originating in China, the coronavirus is now taking its toll on most countries of the world, with more than five million confirmed cases and over 331,600 deaths as of May 23. What does this pandemic teach us about global governance of a health crisis? While the human world has championed globalization since the last century, are we now witnessing a more detrimental side of globalization? While the crisis is surely one of public health, it also alerts us to the different and intersecting areas of government, society, and culture. The intersectionality of coronavirus, in turn, takes a toll not only on human life, but on cultural perceptions, medical discourses, racial relations, regional and international health governance, and global politics. Globalization and its Discontents Arjun Appadurai has assessed global cultural flows in terms of five scapes-ethnoscape, mediascape, financescape, ideoscape, and technoscape-and stresses that such scapes overlap and do not flow in a single direction. The coronavirus outbreak suggests we need to be heedful of one more scape, a diseasescape that intertwines with other scapes and likewise flows in multiple directions. In the age of hyper globalization, everything moves faster: people, ideas, money, media information, images, and diseases too. Viruses spread faster with faster human movements. Governments that used to welcome foreign 1 2

COVID-19 has resulted in new anxieties about the risks and dangers involved in human mobility and forced governments to simultaneously re-engineer policies for temporary health control and longer-term border-crossing and migration policies; characterized by the sanitization of space and mobility. This special issue considers the policies, including health and non-health measures, that have impacts on migrant workers and migration. While COVID control measures are often phrased in medical language and policy discourses, they often serve multiple goals including political and social control. The papers in this issue cover different places in Asia and the Pacific. We propose the "politics of sanitization" as a conceptual framework to examine the multiple dimensions of state governance and the variegated impacts upon migrants, including: (1) sanitizing space and borders, (2) stigmatization and sanitizing migrants' bodies, (3) sanitizing ethnic borders and the national body, and (4) reorganizing the borders of sanitization and membership of society.

This paper explores the "sporadic hyper-precarity" encountered by migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong when the city was hit by the Omicron outbreaks in early 2022. Migrant workers have long been suffering from job insecurity and structural vulnerability due to the contractization and flexibilization of work. The paper discusses how this structural vulnerability came to intersect with the health risks induced by the COVID pandemic. Adding to the debates of the structural precarity characterizing migrant work, we will further interrogate how workers are also susceptible to "sporadic hyper-precarity"the kind of sporadic risks, uncertainty, vulnerabilities and stigmatization at times of crisis. The paper will elaborate on the "sanitized divide" and "care divide" between local families and domestic workers that has resulted in the unequal treatment of workers.

This concluding article serves as an epilogue summing up key issues about migration, labor migrants and development amid a crisis of public health. We predict the forging of an age of sanitization in which different kinds of sanitizing policies will still be in place, especially in Asia, to deal with the sporadic changes of the pandemic. Sanitization politics will continue to intersect with different policy sectors and powers, which will extend beyond the medical understanding of a pandemic and blur the division between science and politics. It will have varied impacts on the migration regime and global governance as a whole.

This paper seeks to examine food localism through the changing
transborder relations between Hong Kong (HK) and China. Before the
1980s, HK was still a city producing much of its own food. Since China’s
economic reform and opening, an increasing amount of fresh food from
China has been crossing the border into HK. The availability of cheap
vegetables and meat intensified market competition, and the rapid
urbanization and internationalization of the local economy have
contributed to the rapid decline of local food production. At the turn of
the millennium, HK witnessed a revival of interest in local vegetable
production. Both civil efforts and government-led programs have
boosted the momentum of local agriculture, with a focus on organic
food production. Despite the fact that HK still largely relies on
imported food from China, there has been a subtle moral boundary
between “local food” and “food from China”, which sees locally grown
food as cleaner and safer. During the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in
early 2020, there was increasing demand for fresh local food. Such a
wave of local food consumption coincided with a political economic development, namely the “yellow economic circle” which emerged
during the 2019 social protests, supporting local production and
democracy and opposing pro-China businesses and red capital. Despite
the ambivalence of these colored economies, food localism keeps
evolving along the blurred lines between the local, the translocal, and
the global, and is part and parcel of the ongoing contestations of HK’s
transborder politics.

This commentary discusses the scope of institutionalization by providing a regional dimension of migration studies. A pivotal weakness of the article is its lack of understanding of Asian migration scholarship which has thrived in the past two decades and has been a great impetus for the development of migration studies.

Originating in China, the coronavirus is now taking its toll on most countries of the world, with more than five million confirmed cases and over 331,600 deaths as of May 23. What does this pandemic teach us about global governance of a health crisis? While the human world has championed globalization since the last century, are we now witnessing a more detrimental side of globalization? While the crisis is surely one of public health, it also alerts us to the different and intersecting areas of government, society, and culture. The intersectionality of coronavirus, in turn, takes a toll not only on human life, but on cultural perceptions, medical discourses, racial relations, regional and international health governance, and global politics. Globalization and its Discontents Arjun Appadurai has assessed global cultural flows in terms of five scapes-ethnoscape, mediascape, financescape, ideoscape, and technoscape-and stresses that such scapes overlap and do not flow in a single direction. The coronavirus outbreak suggests we need to be heedful of one more scape, a diseasescape that intertwines with other scapes and likewise flows in multiple directions. In the age of hyper globalization, everything moves faster: people, ideas, money, media information, images, and diseases too. Viruses spread faster with faster human movements. Governments that used to welcome foreign 1 2

This chapter examines the politics of death space in Hong Kong. It explains the shrinkage of death time and space over the past few decades, and highlights the newest debates on the shortage of urn spaces for the interment of human cremains. In order to reduce the pressure on land resources for accommodating the dead, the government since the late 2000s has put in great efforts to promote sea burial, which requires no land space. Yet, Hong Kong Chinese, who still practice ancestral worship and carry on with the tradition of grave-sweeping, are yet to consider this as an appropriate way to handle ancestors' ashes. The chapter will provide a description of the major change in Hong Kong's death management since the mid-1950s and show how death space politics has been part of the overall land politics which evolves together with the uncertainty of Hong Kong's political future.

Asia is now the most essential and dynamic region receiving and sending both long-term and short-term migrants, undertaking migration in all routes and in various forms. Books in the series broaden the discussions of the relationship between migration and globalization, transnationalism, development, inter-cultural studies, and identity and diaspora. They address specific social and cultural dynamics-such as gender relations, population, family and marriage patterns, new class formation, and the transformation of cultural values-that have been brought by Asian migration. This series highlights Asia as a region with the most active migration movements, which should be one of the most essential areas bringing critical social changes within and across national boundaries. The series welcomes submissions from prominent scholars in Asian Migration studies as well as emerging scholars with empirically rich and updated research.

Asia is a region of diverse cultures and peoples. Through processes of colonization and imperialism, many Asian places have redeened their national boundaries and cultural make-up. The reshuues of power regimes and the transformation of social and economic structures since the second half of the last century have brought about new cultural faces in Asia and uneven development. While colonialism is a common experience amongst Asian countries, decolonization brings extremely diierent social, economic and political processes and meanings to the Asians. Since the late 20 th century, culture has intrinsically intertwined with economic development as many countries used culture as development strategies. At the same time, culture, traditions, heritage are often part of the ingredients for the cooking of place identity, and the upholding of national pride. The maintenance, management, and creation of cultural resources requires creative and responsive policies. Cultural governance has been a catchphrase since the 2000s. It entails myriad strategies for the (re)making of cultures as well as national and sub-regional identity, which often faces challenges from within and beyond national boundaries. Policies related to creating cultural patchwork and the infrastructure for cultural management can be both cohesive and divisive forces. Post-Cold War Asia has witnessed the reopening of borders and the escalation of cross-border connections and exchanges. Instead of using the encompassing concept of globalization, we situate the cultural development in Asia in the contexts of the transformation of the regional political economy and cross-border relations. With the rise of China as a regional and global power, such changes have been particularly salient in terms of China's growing soft power, often backed by economic power and forceful diplomacy. This conference aims to examine the diierent aspects of cultural changes and cultural governance since the late 20 th century. It will begin with such simple questions as what are those cultures that are fading and arising and who are responsible for the changes. It will continue with discussions of more complex connectivity and divides. It seeks to interrogate the colonial legacies, momentum and powers that have been shaping Asia's cultural tapestry. We believe cities, nations and people alike aspire to build their unique identity and deene their own civility (the spirit and ethos of a place in relation to others). But such processes inevitably encounter challenges both from within and without. The conference will address these questions: • What are the major strategies of cultural preservation and development in Asia? • How diierent cities and states search for their cultural positioning amidst the rapidly evolving political economies in Asia and the pivotal shifts of cross border relations? • What kinds of cultural governance models have been produced by Asian countries and how are they linked to local and regional sectors and the well-being of the people? • How does culture and art and its governance contribute to city-branding, face-lifting, and city-gentriication in diierent Asian places? • What are the relationships between cultural changes and economic development? • What kinds of soft power have been produced in Asia and how they have impacted on each other? • What are the dynamics in Asia with regard to cultural diiusion, postcolonialism and the rise of new powers? Interested researchers, scholars, practitioners and policy-makers are invited to send a 200-300 word abstract and 50-100 word bio for the following panel sections, or suggest new panels that are related to the overall themes of the conference: • Heritage management, curatorship, and cultural tourism • Place making and city branding • Media, creative arts and popular culture • Soft power, nationalism, and transnational ties • Pluralism, multiculturalism and postcolonial identities • Border crossing, governance, and civil spaces Please send abstract and bio (with email address) to this

Hong Kong, a part of China, yet separated from it by a borderline and a different social system, relies mostly on China for its fresh food. With a high incidence of food contamination, many Hong Kong people have turned to a new food alternative – locally grown organic vegetables. The number of organic growers has risen significantly over the past decade. This paper examines the emergence of local organic food production in Hong Kong since the turn of the century. Not only is this revival of an interest in agricultural production (manifested in the increase in organic farms and organic food consumers that is related to the global movement of eco-agriculture), it is also intertwined with a public discourse relating to land preservation, the balance between an agricultural economy and urban development and food localism. Continuous food news revealing the scale of substandard and poisonous food produced in China have escalated the scare surrounding unsafe food and has helped turn consumers to local produce and to build the discourses on food localism. The paper argues that such a local food consciousness has been fed by the local politics of resistance against negative influences from China in the evolving cross-border relations between China and Hong Kong.

Prompted by changing domestic political climate and relocation incentives offered by foreign governments, Hong Kong, while celebrating its 25 th anniversary of return to mainland China, is experiencing the rapidiest human outflow in six decades. Latest Hong Kong government data showed that 113,200 Hong Kong residents left the city during the 12 months ended on 30 June 2021. The UK Home Office revealed that over 113,000 Hong Kong people have been granted visas to the UK through the British Nationals (Overseas) scheme since 31 January 2021. As many as 322,000 Hong Kong people are projected to move to the UK via the special immigration pathway between 2021 and 2026.