In contrast to the infrastructural properties of Western media platforms aiming at market power expansion, the digital platform model in China is designed and developed with a techno-nationalist media agenda. In the case of Hong Kong, we look into how exactly the platformisation process restructures and interacts with its surrounding cultural, economic, political and social activities. This article contributes to the Creative Labour Studies by analysing the intricate linkages between the city’s unique socio-historical, technological and political trajectories and the lived dynamics of television work. Through in-depth interviews with Hong Kong TV workers, we reinstitute the techno-political to the analytical lens of Creative Labour Studies. We posit that the ebb and flow of Hong Kong’s TV industry and its creative labour process are not just guided by economic considerations under global media platformisation, but also uniquely entangled with its historical legacies, socio-technical contexts, and political and ideological framework. Our empirics show how the conflicting strategies directed by both the platformised business models and an unprecedented techno-nationalist media agenda generate ambiguity and inconsistency in daily TV operations. The elevated self-censorship and loss of editorial autonomy alongside the rapid media platformisation reinforce a normative ‘moralist regime’ creating specific forms of precarity and dissatisfaction among Hong Kong TV workers, undermining the development of the creative industry and a creative career. But the changing techno-political conditions also alter TV workers’ perceived nature, functionality and value of creative work, enacting a self-governed ‘ethical regime’ in their professional practices, and open up new creative opportunities.

Recent scholarship has sought to emphasise boundaries and borders as being complex social institutions that play a vital role in mediating national and global flows. This article examines transactions occurring along the boundary between Hong Kong and Mainland China, which experienced a sudden ‘hardening’ owing to travel restrictions imposed following the outbreak of COVID-19. When individuals found themselves unable to physically cross the boundary as per usual, they instead turned to mobile media to enact everyday transactions – both financial and social – between the two regions. Calling upon the notion of ‘digital passages’, we argue that the appropriation of digital money infrastructures for managing such transactions should act as a reminder for scholars to productively engage with the various forms of boundaries and borders emerging within online spaces.

In the Hong Kong Chief Executive’s 2020 Policy Address, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government implemented strategies to integrate arts and technology as a new trend in cultural development. With the co-existence of a governmental initiative in ‘arts and technology’ (‘arts tech’) development and the rapid advancement of new technologies, it is frequently seen that new technologies (e.g., virtual reality [VR] and augmented reality) have been widely adopted in interactive media art productions in Hong Kong. Drawing on ethnographic research on a commercial virtual event, and a VR theatre performance produced by a Hong Kong cross-media creative studio, this study unveils discrepancies existing between government officials, commercial marketers, and art creators, ranging from objectives to practices in applying technologies to virtual art production. The juxtaposition of a market-driven commercial virtual campaign and the Chinese nationalist agenda embodied in the government-funded arts tech project reflects how the socio-historical background and changing political situation in Hong Kong extends its postcolonial neoliberal nationalism (PNN) to the arts tech arena. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: first, by adopting ‘China as method’ as epistemological analysis, the mediation of PNN by arts tech explains a ‘southbound imaginary’ in Hong Kong’s arts and cultural practices through a changing relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. Second, in contrast to the current scholarship focusing on human governance in the formation of neoliberal nationalism, this paper underscores the ‘power’ of techno-cultural material in mediating the neoliberal nationalism of Hong Kong, after its reversion to China, through arts tech development.