Purpose This paper explores how the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSARG) securitizes internal security, cultural identity and welfare system through refugee policy instruments. It also aims to explore the roles of members of the Legislative Council (Legco) and Chinese newspapers in the securitization process. Design/methodology/approach The author analyzed 6 landmark verdicts, 342 related documents of the Legco, 2,386 news coverages and 408 editorials/ column articles from 6 selected Chinese newspapers from 2005 to mid-2019. While documents of the Legco were collected from the Legco archives, news reports, editorials and column articles were gathered on Wisenews with the keywords, namely, refugees, asylum seekers, torture claims and non-refoulement claims. Findings The author argues that the advanced comprehensive security approach helps to comprehend the securitization process in Hong Kong. The HKSARG, Legco members of the pro-government camp and pro-government Chinese newspapers perform as securitizing actors who regard refugees as an existential threat to the referent objects, i.e. internal security, cultural identity and welfare system. Research limitations/implications There are two significant limitations, namely, the coverage of newspapers and the absence of poll data. This paper merely selected six Chinese newspapers, which do not cover English newspapers and some other Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong. It may neglect some important data. Additionally, owing to the absence of longitudinal poll data, the author chose not to examine the related materials. Originality/value This paper intends to be the first study to provide a longitudinal examination of the transformations of current refugee policies in Hong Kong.

Purpose This study aims to find out why some students from Hong Kong (HK) consider higher education in Taiwan, rather than in China or elsewhere. It also attempts to build a decision-making model to advance the conventional push-pull logic associated with this particular issue. Design/methodology/approach The authors interviewed 11 undergraduate students from HK via an in-depth interview. Interviewees were recruited by snowball sampling. To protect the privacy of the interviewees, all names of the informants in this paper are pseudonyms. Findings A dynamic decision-making mechanism, which includes three major layers, namely, the macro, meso and micro levels, has been developed to demonstrate that HK students made their decision based on a recursive fashion with bounded rationality, rather than on a linear fashion with complete rationality. Research limitations/implications Although the relatively small number of interviewees has limited the representativeness of the research, the authors suggest that rather than claiming representativeness, the study attempts to tease out the diversity of the decision-making process and mechanisms. Originality/value The drastic increase in the number of HK students in Taiwan proves the current research study, which is the first qualitative research on the phenomenon, as a timely one. In addition, the present study is one of the few examples of studying students’ international mobility from a more economically advanced region (HK) to a less economically advanced one (Taiwan).

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