Stay Left: Class Politics in China and Hong Kong in the Twenty First Century

"Class" has been one of the important analytical tools in Western social sciences. In the past three decades, the rise of neoliberalism, postmodernism and cultural studies has displaced traditional class analysis from the core of social science to the margin. However, since 2008, the world's economic crisis has aggravated class polarization and social inequality around the globe. China, today's world economic powerhouse, and Hong Kong, today's leading financial city, also cannot escape from this aggravating situation. Approaches such as neoliberalism, postmodernism and cultural studies become increasingly difficult to capture the dynamics of today's capitalist crisis. In light of this, this book aims to call for a return to traditional class analysis to understand the class politics and crisis of capitalism in the twentyfirst century. This book begins with an overview of the state of class analysis in social sciences, and suggests a framework to analyse class politics in China and Hong Kong. Then, the book proceeds to explain the crisis of capitalism in 2008 by using David Harvey's concept of "spatio-temporal fixes". In the afterword, the author reflects on his ten years of exploration in social theories in relation to the social change in the capitalist world in the past decade.