Legal Production of Land (In)justice

• Funding:
  • University Grant Studentship, Hong Kong Baptist University
  • Top-up Travel Grant, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University
  • DTC Fund, Institute of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne
• Starting Year: 2017

To engage in the scholarship of legal geography, I am interested in understanding how cities are spatially governed by the law in the historical-geographical context of power relations.

Focusing on the leasehold land system in Hong Kong, I asked how land (in)justice is (re)produced by the legal mechanism. One of the many ways by which the objectives can be achieved is to translate the concepts in legal geography into the Asian context for a better comprehension of the urban process. Hong Kong, a unique jurisdiction where has reserved the colonial relic of the common law system and, at the same time, been influenced by the Chinese law system, is an ideal research laboratory.

Key publications from this project appear in Journal of Urban History (2020) and Social Transformations in Chinese Societies (2020).

In the Department of Geography at Hong Kong Baptist University, I completed an MPhil thesis entitled ‘Legal Production of Land (In)justice in Hong Kong’ in 2018 and defended it in 2019.

• Supervisors:
  • Prof Wing-Shing Tang (Professor of Geography)
  • Dr Lachlan Barber (Assistant Professor of Geography)
• Board of examiners:
  • Chair
    • Prof Adrian J. Bailey (Dean of Social Sciences and Chair Professor of Geography)
  • External member
    • Prof Anne Haila (Finnish Academy Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland)
  • Internal members
    • Prof Chun Yang (Professor of Geography)
    • Prof Wing-Shing Tang (Professor of Geography)

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