Paper short abstract:

When and how does an environmental issue come to matter in people's everyday life? This article depicts the entanglement of local politics and environmental issues in post-handover Hong Kong and argues for a more holistic approach to research about the environments.

Paper long abstract:

When and how does an environmental issue come to matter in people's everyday life? Why is fireworks display a necessity for new year celebration but a source of air pollution on the National Day of China? In this article, I explain this conundrum by showing that the kind of 'pollution' that is most visceral to the people of Hong Kong is not environmental pollution in its most conventional sense, but the fear of being 'polluted by red China' (cek faa), also known to some as 'mainlandisation' (daai luk faa). Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article depicts the entanglement of local politics and environmental issues, especially the ways certain political issues are being reframed with certain environmental analogies. In particular, I discuss how 'pollution' and the 'soil' are being deployed as both an analytic and an analogy to address the fear of being polluted by communist China and the hope of revitalising Hong Kong's local values through the Agricultural Revitalisation Movement. In contrasting these two very different uses of environmental analogies—one imbued with fear (locust infestation) while another filled with hope (e.g., revitalise the local soil)—this article wishes to shed light on a variety of localism and environmentalism that are built on the politics of hope rather than xenophobia and fear in post-handover Hong Kong.