Jonathan Chung

Lap-yin Jonathan Chung is a student in the American Studies PhD program at Yale University. He is interested in historicizing the emergence of liberal-democratic politics in Eighties and Nineties Hong Kong as arising from an experience of neoliberal social life, as well as tracing the trajectories of “Hong Kong liberalism” from that founding late-twentieth-century moment through to the present one characterized by US-China tension. Exploring the intrinsic, co-constitutive relation between ideological, psychic, and subjective forms and global political-economic developments is central to his project.

Jonathan received a B.A. in History with Honors from the University of Chicago in 2022, where he was introduced to critical theory and wrote his undergraduate thesis on the history of celibacy in the Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. In 2024, he received an M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies from Columbia University, writing his Master’s thesis on an “indigenous manosphere” that had proliferated in recent years on Hong Kong’s LIHKG internet forum. He is currently working on an article that traces what he calls Hong Kong liberalism’s “reactionary turn” over the course of three decades: from 1990 to 2019.