Desmond Sham

Yours truly's publication in the Developing Economies has been selected as the "Editor's Choice":
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...

You may access my article, "Gentrification Everywhere? Delinking Culture-Led Regeneration From Gentrification", here:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

GitHub - Hong-Kong-Emergency-Coordination-Hub/Hong-Kong-Fire-Documentary: Hong Kong Fire (Tai Po, 11/26): A major blaze swept through Wang Fuk Court Hong Kong Fire (Tai Po, 11/26): A major blaze swept through Wang Fuk Court - Hong-Kong-Emergency-Coordination-Hub/Hong-Kong-Fire-Documentary

This repository aims to collect, organize, and preserve publicly available information related to the #hongkong #hongkongfire on 26 November 2025; Contributions are welcome from residents, researchers, and professionals:

github.com/Hong-Kong-Em...

Yes, this is about the power of knowledge production. And yes, the reason will go beyond your thought of exoticism. 3/

When people from Hong Kong / who are familiar with Hong Kong tell you it is not the bamboo but the corrupted system is responsible, listen. Don't shut your ear because "it is difficult to understand" or it is different from your reasoning. 2/

I hope the Western media uses the same standard of investigation and reasoning of the Grenfell Tower fire when they explain the catastrophic residential blocks fire in Tai Po, Hong Kong. 1/

International media, you can do better than this.

"Bamboo" is maybe exotic and a compelling hook but it is too easy. The real story here is the growing culture of corruption, including a lack of accountability and oversight, that enabled a chain of human errors that led to this disaster.

Gentrification Everywhere? Delinking Culture‐Led Regeneration From Gentrification This paper challenges the prevalent use of “gentrification” (shishen hua [士紳化/仕紳化] or jinshen hua [縉紳化]) as a catch-all critique of culture-led regeneration and neighborhood transformations, includin....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

By examining the influx of unregulated street vendors and arcade merchandisers, this paper illustrates how gentrification fails to address the problems regenerated neighborhoods face. 4/

These cases demonstrate that new aesthetic-oriented, creativity-related businesses, rather than existing traditional businesses and residents, are often less resilient toward rent increases. Rather than “gentrification,” rent increases affect the future of heritage remaking and community building.3/

To maintain the critical dimension of gentrification, defined by the displacement of existing poorer people by late-coming wealthier people, this paper argues for a conceptual delinking culture-led regeneration from gentrification by presenting two case studies from Taiwan. 2/

My latest publication in the Developing Economies. The article challenges the prevalent use of "gentrification" as a catch-all critique of culture-led regeneration and neighbourhood transformations in Sinophone Asia. 1/

Writing about PRC military threats against Taiwan is difficult, because it’s bad to overstate (invasion isn’t happening, they’re drills) but it’s worse to understate (conflict could genuinely happen, these drills are serious).

Accurate wording has never been more important.

When some KMT MPs use all sorts of weird excuse to cut/freeze budgets of TaiwanPlus, I am not sure how many productions they have watched. I really doubt, given the fact that they don't even get the brand name correctly. Hey, "TaiwanPlus" is one word not two words!

3. As a UK-based academic, I use TaiwanPlus documentaries in my teaching. I used one on Taiwanese potehi (glove puppetry) in the last semester. They are in plain English, introducing Taiwanese culture from a TW perspective, and effective to introduce TW-related topics to students internationally.

2. TaiwanPlus reports are effective ways to let non-Chinese readers to understand what's going on in Taiwan.

TaiwanPlus is important in at least three ways:
1. While I read both Chinese and English, I still have difficulty to follow Taiwan media in Chinese, due to loads of irrelevant "news", from car cam, neighbour quarrels, to some random ads. In Eng, TaiwanPlus picks the more important news.

We were told that the lecture hall at the University of Florence was previously a church. Thus, @evacyli.bsky.social and I did present our paper under the Heavenly One.

That junction is of course super dangerous. They are telling the pedestrians to cross two roads at once without any place to stop, not to mention the (lack of) sidewalk

Heritage sector diversity: report suggests workforce is 90% White - Museums + Heritage

News | The first report of its kind, conducted for Historic England, also reveals low social mobility in the sector

museumsandheritage.com/advisor/post...

Here!

as said many times before, campism is incredibly West-centric bc it's never concerned in the slightest with the agency of non-western peoples, reducing struggles elsewhere and everywhere to a fake anti-imperialist analysis centering US foreign policy

Conference program Conference program Day 1 – Friday, December 13, 2024 @ La Colombaria 09:00 Welcome & Intro 09:30 – 11:00 Panel 1: Literature I Hong Kong Writings in Cold War Paris: Cross-Racial Ide…

Dr Eva Li (Lancaster) and I will be presenting a paper at the Sinophone Europe conference at the University of Florence on 13/14 Dec.

Programme: sinophoneeurope.com/conference-p...

I will be presenting at the Symposium: 'Law, Economy and Society in NSL-era Hong Kong: 40 Years After the Sino-British Joint Declaration' at SOAS on 5 Dec.

Registration: www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/...