| Whilst most academic studies focus principally on changes brought by ecological crises, a theoretical discussion in explaining the reluctance to change is yet to be. This project set out to remedy this theoretical gap by investigating the environmental development in 1970s and 1980s Hong Kong, a place notorious for its rejection of radical ecological engagement. Drawing on Ulrich Beck's theory of risk society, this project set out to study the genealogy of pollution by investigating how pollution (risk) was discursively constructed in 1970s and 1980s Hong Kong, and how this specific construction of pollution (risk) sheds light to the relationship between risk and modernity. The project has found that pollution (risk) is a social construct whose manifestations are not one but many: instead of being monolithic, pollution (risk), as exemplified in the case of Hong Kong, could be legitimated, displaced, concealed, downplayed, undermined or even omitted in its social construction and expressions. The pollution (risk) of the two decades under discussion neither challenged the central premises of modernity, nor democratized science and the meaning-production process; in the quest for modernization, pollution (risk) could be self-contained. The importance of this project lies in its pilot attempt to complete and complicate the discussions of risk, environmental reform, and modernity on the one hand, and to provide a substantial discursive analysis of 1970s and 1980s environmental development in Hong Kong, a missing piece of the puzzle making up Hong Kong's modern history.;Keywords: Risk theory, pollution, reflexive modernization, modernity, ecological modernization, environmental history, Hong Kong. |
