Issue 12    ■    January 2025        
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Research
Strategic Research Clusters

Policy Research @ HKIAPS has identified five closely linked interdisciplinary research clusters to promote academic excellence and social contribution.

In the initial phase, we are focusing on research strengths within the Chinese University and on aligning them with the government’s policy priorities and regional development strategies, particularly with the Belt and Road Initiative and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area development plan. We will further identify global strategies that are relevant to Hong Kong. ■
Research Projects                * Policy Research @ HKIAPS member
On Economic

Regulating Outbound Data Flows in China

Investigators: Chao Xi (PI)*
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

The aim of this project is to empirically examine the important question: What shapes China’s emerging legal and regulatory regime on outbound data flows? The increasing digitization of the modern economy has led to a surge in data flows across borders, raising concerns over issues ranging from privacy to national security. In response, national and regional authorities have begun to develop regulatory systems that govern the way in which data flow in and out of their borders. Of particular significance is the recent proliferation of national regulatory regimes placing various types of restrictions on outbound data transfers. While the comparative literature on national and regional approaches to regulating outbound data flows is growing fast, the fledgling Chinese regulatory regime has hitherto remained under-studied and under-theorized.

The proposed study will endeavour to fill this research gap. The focus will be on investigating China’s fast-evolving regime governing security assessments of outbound data transfers. The project will draw primarily on qualitative data on the dynamics between Chinese data regulators and the regulated entities, to be obtained with the support of a network of PRC collaborators. An attempt will also be made to construct a unique, hand-collected dataset containing the outcomes of security assessments that are publicly accessible.

The project will present new insights into, among other things, the impact that the nascent assessment regime has had on domestic and international businesses; the strategies and tactics that these businesses have mobilized to react to the regime; and the influence that these businesses have exerted on shaping the evolutionary trajectory of the regime.

The study’s findings will significantly enhance our understanding of the complex dynamics influencing data governance in China, and will provide a more grounded understanding of China’s unique approach to regulating outbound data transfers. Theoretically, they will pioneer the study of a hitherto-understudied, albeit increasingly important, area of Chinese law and policy. Practically, they will be of considerable interest to policymakers, regulators, and businesses operating in China, as China’s approach to data governance can have a significant bearing on the conduct of cross-border economic transactions. More generally, they will also make a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate over the future of data governance at the international and regional levels.  


Joint Initial Stocking and Transshipment of Multi-location Systems: Optimality Analysis and Low-regret Heuristics

Investigator: Sean X. Zhou (PI)*
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

Matching customer demand and supply efficiently and effectively is often the goal of supply chain management. However, doing so is challenging due to demand uncertainties. Meanwhile, given the prevalence of outsourcing/offshoring, many firms have production facilities or suppliers located in places far from their markets, resulting in long supply lead times or high fixed ordering costs. When the lead time is long, firms that sell products with a relatively short selling season (e.g., fashion products) may stock their stores just once before the start of the season. Where fixed ordering costs are high or the product is slow moving, firms may infrequently replenish inventories at their stores. In these circumstances, transhipping inventory between stores or distribution centres (DCs) in a region during the season or in a cycle of replenishment often becomes the only way to reduce the mismatch between supply and demand.

In this project, we will study the initial stocking and in-season transshipment decisions of a firm that sells its product through multiple stores/DCs. We consider a firm that, at the beginning of a selling season, needs to decide how much inventory to stock in a set of stores that, in turn, supply random customer demands. Over the selling season, the demand at each store is determined by the number of arrivals, according to independent compound Poisson processes. If a store experiences stock-outs, transhipping inventory from other stores can be conducted at a cost.

For such situations, we will first apply stochastic dynamic programming (DP) to derive structural properties and characterize optimal policies for a three-location problem. Expecting the challenge of solving optimal policies for more general multi-location systems due to the high dimensional state space and the combinatorial nature of the decisions, we will derive lower and upper bounds for the optimal value function and design simple algorithms/heuristics with provably near-optimal performance.

In particular, we will show that the revenue loss of the algorithm/heuristic relative to the optimal one is upper bounded by a constant with respect to the length of the selling season. A numerical study based on a real data set from a company that stores and distributes high-value medical supplies will be conducted to test the performance of the algorithm and compare it with some other heuristics. We will further examine a situation where the firm does not have access to the exact demand distributions and develop data-driven methods for the firm to make initial stocking and in-season transshipment decisions.

 

On Education

Evaluating Secondary School Curriculum Reform: Effects on Higher Education and Labour Market Outcomes

Investigators: Dongshu Ou (PI)*, & David M. Post
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

A highly skilled workforce is a vital asset for industrialized nations, with mathematics and science proficiency driving technological advancements and scientific discoveries. In 2009, Hong Kong implemented the New Senior Secondary (NSS) curriculum reform to offer students a more flexible, broader-based education by eliminating arts and science streaming. However, concerns exist about whether this reform provided adequate resources to enrich the learning experiences of students. It may also have had a negative impact on their math and science skills, reducing their readiness to take on science-related college majors.

Yet, there have been few systematic examinations of the impact of the NSS reform on higher education outcomes, including on college enrolment and choices of majors. Moreover, a quality education in mathematics and science is linked to economic growth, and the effects of the NSS reform on the participation of students in STEM fields after graduation remain unexplored. Although the expansion of universities in 1989 reduced male dominance in the student body, Hong Kong still experiences gender disparities in STEM fields. Female students continue to lag behind their male counterparts in science, engineering, and technology. It is imperative that policymakers understand whether the NSS curriculum reform influenced those disparities. Additionally, the increasing number of Mainland immigrants with proficiency in subjects unaffected by language barriers raises questions about their impact on tertiary STEM admissions and STEM employment in the labour market.

Using Census and By-Census data from 2016 and 2021, and employing a regression discontinuity design based on the 2009 curriculum reform, this proposal seeks to provide a causal estimate of the link between curriculum reform and student outcomes beyond secondary school.

Our study makes several notable contributions. It is the first to investigate the causal impact and consequences of the 2009 NSS reform on the educational outcomes of students. Furthermore, it offers a comprehensive overview of higher education participation in Hong Kong following the 1989 higher education expansion policy. By utilizing various sources of data, including Census and UGC data, we document differences in gender and origin in college enrolment, the selection of majors, and career choices, and shed light on the gender imbalance in STEM fields. Additionally, the study highlights the significance of Mainland immigration in STEM employment in Hong Kong. Finally, while existing research on the wage effects of a narrower versus broader curriculum remains inconclusive, our study provides empirical evidence from an Asian perspective.


Three Decades of Educational Mobility

Investigators: Dongshu Ou (PI)*, & David M. Post
Funding source: The Hong Kong Association of the Heads of Secondary Schools Limited

The persisting associations between parents’ educational attainment and children’s educational outcomes have been well documented in the developed world, although until recently the literature was primarily focused on such persistence form fathers to children. The role played by mothers in their children’s education has been increasingly recognized in the study of intergenerational social mobility studies. However, there is still too little research on intergenerational education mobility in Hong Kong, and thus, we also have limited knowledge about the prospects for girls to raise their socio-economic status through education.

In addition, existing studies did not provide consistent evidence that educational expansion policies have reduced the association between parents’ and children’s schooling, nor have studies examined the impact of Hong Kong’s education expansion reforms on intergenerational educational mobility. Further, of special importance for mobility researcher in Hong Kong are second-generation Mainlander immigrants constitute a large proportion of Hong Kong’s population, little is known on their intergenerational social mobility and the impact of educational expansion reforms on their mobility.

Using Census data from 1991 to 2021, this proposal would allow the investigators to provide a comprehensive analysis of intergenerational education mobility in Hong Kong over a period of three decades, investigate the heterogeneity in intergenerational transmission of human capital in gender and immigration background, and assess the impact of educational reforms on intergenerational mobility. Our study builds on existing literature and makes several novel contributions.

First, our findings will be the first to provide a comprehensive profile of intergenerational transmission of education of Hong Kong over three decades. Secondly, we intend to study the intergenerational education persistence between fathers (mothers) and daughters, a subject that has not been widely discussed in previous literature in Hong Kong (Lam & Liu, 2019) as well as international literature on intergenerational transmission for women (Azam, 2016). This information should be especially helpful to policy makers in societies with strong gender roles. More importantly, taking advantage of Census data for three decades, we will analyze the potential policy decisions that might have driven differences in the evolution of intergenerational education mobility in Hong Kong. Lastly, because low intergenerational educational mobility can lead to greater inequality and low economic efficiency in the long term, understanding of the intergenerational mobility of second-generation immigrants can shed light on the long-term integration of immigrant families.


Hong Kong Secondary School Student Interest and Identity Development in Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education: A Self-determination Theory Perspective

Investigator: Thomas K. F. Chiu (PI)*
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

To meet our social and economic challenges with a STEM workforce, we need to improve the recruitment and retention of students with a STEM major in the university and job market. Current international research in school STEM education advocates integrated STEM (iSTEM) – i.e. inter- and trans-disciplinary, rather than multi-disciplinary approaches – for quality learning.

These challenges have been reflected in student entries for Hong Kong public examinations. Secondary school students prefer to study business and economics rather than science, advanced mathematics and technology, and there are no trends showing an increase in the number of students opting for STEM subjects. A strong and positive STEM interest and identity is a predictor of future study and career choice in a STEM field.

A possible solution to the challenges is iSTEM programmes. However, existing studies of STEM education that address multiple disciplines seem insufficient, with mixed findings and inadequate direction for iSTEM advancement. Those studies in the development of STEM interest and identity have:

(i) ignored the integrated nature of STEM, and focused on multiple disciplines;
(ii) focused on equity, particularly underrepresentation by gender, race and language; and
(iii) examined the effect of role models and mentors in the informal setting.

As a result, we still understand little about how students develop their interest and identity in iSTEM classrooms.

Literature suggests that Self-Determination Theory (SDT) provides an understanding of motivational processes that influence the development. Hence, this study employs the three psychological needs – autonomy, relatedness and competency – in SDT and the development of STEM interest and identity to propose an SDT approach to an iSTEM programme, by redesigning a non-SDT-based iSTEM programme: Hong Kong Sustainable City. It aims to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed 10-week programme on development, and understand how the three psychological needs support development.

The study will employ a sequential explanatory mixed-method design study – an experiment with semi-structured interviews. Participants will comprise 300 Secondary Three students and 9 STEM teachers from three Hong Kong schools with different levels of academic achievement. Quantitative and qualitative analyses will be used to assess the study goals.

Essentially, this study will significantly impact, in the short term, teachers and policymakers by enhancing their knowledge of STEM interest and identity, in the medium term, academia by contributing to the related theory and studies, and in the long term, the economy and society as a whole by improving student social mobility.
On Environment



Everyone Goes Green: A Structure-technology Nexus Analysis of China’s Municipal Green Bond Issuance

Investigators: Calvin K. L. Chung (PI)*, Fenghua Pan, & Jiang Xu
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

Prof. Chung and his team investigated the politics of municipal green bond issuance (MGBI) in three Chinese cities: Guangzhou, Zhengzhou, and Guiyang. Despite their different levels of fiscal health and urgency in environmental improvement, the governments of these cities have all ‘gone green’ financially, i.e., issued municipal green bonds (MGBs) for local environmental projects. Some may simplistically view these MGBI attempts as part of China’s ongoing frenzy for green finance. Instead, Prof. Chung and his team hypothesize that each city’s MGBI is a bitterly contested process, in which actors battle to enact particular institutional structures regulating MGBI-related powers with the aid of government technologies.

To verify our hypothesis, Prof. Chung and his team will critically examine relevant documents (e.g., policy documents and bond prospectuses) and conduct interviews with key actors in the three cities, whose different contexts may give rise to varying forms of structural and technological conflicts.

China’s expanding environmental commitments, e.g., the dual carbon goals, have created a trillion-yuan financing gap in its environmental projects. For decades, Chinese local governments have viewed such projects as a budgetary burden. However, since 2016, many local governments have issued MGBs to attract private finance for environmental projects, now reframed as lucrative investments. Research on the political implications of this financial paradigm shift, marked by China’s rapid development into one of the world’s largest MGB markets, remains in its early stages.

Prof. Chung and his team’s research on the politics of MGBI is timely for unravelling these overlooked implications, particularly the emerging forms of conflict among actors that cut across financial and environmental concerns. The findings are significant for furthering scholarly debates on the political nuances of China’s urban financing and environmental governance in the new age of green finance, and for helping policymakers and investors diagnose political barriers to expanding MGBI for greater environmental and economic benefits. Existing studies tend to offer one-sided explanations of the mechanisms of the politics of MGBI. One strand of studies focuses on the struggles among the actors to consolidate or challenge existing institutional structures (e.g., the division of MGBI-related powers across levels of governance or the state-market divide), but overlooks the issue of the technical means by which this is to be achieved. Another strand focuses on the struggles among actors to shape each other’s conduct in MGBI by employing various technologies (e.g., performance indicators), but overlooks the institutional context that may limit their use. Synthesizing these two strands, this project conceptualizes the politics of MGBI as a ‘structure-technology nexus’, i.e., a process of concurrent struggles over institutional structures and the technologies deployed to enact them.

On Health

On the Way to Zero Waste? A Spatialized Sociotechnical Analysis of Waste Management Transition in Chinese Cities

Investigators: Calvin K. L. Chung (PI)*, Jie Shen, & Jiang Xu
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

China’s dream of building an ecological civilization is at a growing risk of being shattered by a tsunami of waste, as the country tops the world in waste generation for 19 years in a row. ‘Waste surrounding the cities’ has become a shared nightmare, if not already a reality, for Chinese cities. Although many studies have examined the various efforts made by Chinese cities to handle their waste, we still know very little about the processes that enable or hinder changes in a city’s sociotechnical arrangement of waste management. This is because these studies often overlook the multiplicity of technologies that compete with and complement each other to shape a city’s waste management, and reduce the differences that space makes to the sociotechnical configuration of this regime to a matter of interscalar conflicts.

To address these shortcomings, Prof. Chung’s theoretical antidote is a novel, spatialized framework for a sociotechnical analysis. Building upon Frank Geels’ widely cited Multilevel Perspective, our framework explains the sociotechnical transition of a city’s waste management practices as an ongoing competition between a relatively stable sociotechnical ‘regime’ and various emerging ‘niche-innovations’ in waste management, under pressure from exogenous ‘landscape’ developments for regime change. This process is spatially mediated by actors operating at multiple scales, in different territories, and through different urban spatial forms. Prof. Chung and his team will apply this framework to explain why the sociotechnical arrangements of waste management in three Chinese cities with different levels of waste management pressures have evolved into their current forms, and will examine the sociospatial impacts of their transition. A whole-system analysis of the complex and power-laden processes of coordinating and reconfiguring the technical, social, and spatial dimensions of a city’s waste management regime is in its early stages in China.

As the Chinese state is now proactively mobilizing all Chinese cities to achieve the goal of zero waste, Prof. Chung’s project is perfectly timed to reveal the barriers to reconfiguring local waste management regimes and the strategies adopted by different actors to effectively overcome these barriers. Moreover, through our Chinese cases, Prof. Chung and his team will launch a spatially-attuned version of the Multilevel Perspective. The original version provides valuable insights into the temporal aspects of sociotechnical transitions, but sheds limited light on the spatial processes that have shaped them. This project will extend the application of this perspective from research on sustainability-oriented sociotechnical reconfigurations in such domains as agri-food, energy, and transport to the field of waste management.



Effects of a Decision Support Intervention on End-of-life Care Planning in Patients with Advanced Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Their Family Members: A Mixed Method Approach

Investigators: Helen Y. L. Chan (PI)*, Carmen W. H. Chan Yip, Vivian W. Lou, Pete Wegier, Jean Woo*, & Jacqueline K. Y. Yuen
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a highly prevalent progressive lifelimiting condition contributing to morbidity and mortality. Despite the anticipated changes along the disease trajectory, patients with advanced COPD and their family members generally are unprepared for end-of-life (EOL) situations due to unreceptive decisional stage, inadequate knowledge and understanding about treatment options, unrealistic expectations, unclear values, uncertainty and insufficient family or social support. While patients generally believe that their family members would be able to make the “right” decisions for them, evidence showed that, without prior open discussion, family members could hardly predict their sick relatives’ care wishes and they tended to make the decisions based on their own values.

Advance care planning (ACP) has been widely acknowledged as an empowerment process for enabling patients to make informed and value-based decisions for EOL care and communicating their care decisions with family and healthcare providers. However, evidence suggested that the narrative conversational approach has limited effects on EOL decision-making and family communication. Decision support interventions have emerged to support clinicians to provide information in a complete and balanced format and facilitate deliberation in a non-judgemental and impartial manner. However, such development for advanced COPD is under-researched.

Therefore, this study seeks to support EOL decision-making in patients with advanced COPD and their family members. We adopt the Ottawa Decision Support Framework model to address their decisional needs for the difficult decisions in EOL care. We adopt an explanatory sequential mixed method approach to examine the study process and outcomes. A parallel two-arm single-blinded randomised controlled trial will be conducted to evaluate the effects of a specific ACP decision support intervention. A total of 226 dyads of patients with advanced COPD and their designated family members will be recruited from two hospital outpatient clinics. They will be randomly allocated to either the intervention group to receive the decision support intervention or the control group to receive general health coaching. Outcomes will be measured at baseline and 1- and 6-month post-allocation. Subsequently, a descriptive qualitative study will be conducted with a subsample of 30 dyads to explore how the intervention influenced the study outcomes.

This study is timely to devise effective strategy to empower patients with advanced COPD and their family members in ACP. Findings of this study will provide insights into decisional needs for EOL decision-making among Chinese patients, family communication for ACP, and relevant service and policy development.


Assessing the Reciprocal Interplay between Social Relationships and Health-related Outcomes across the Life Course in China

Investigators: Lei Jin (PI)*, & Xiaohang Zhao
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

Social relationships are seen as playing especially significant roles in shaping life outcomes in Chinese society. However, rigorous examinations of the effects of social relationships on health have been relatively sparse. In particular, although recent research has increasingly shown the importance of taking into consideration the reciprocal interplay between social relationships and health, this dynamic has received little attention in studies on social relationships and health in China.

This project proposes to fill this gap. Prof. Jin and her team will focus on relationship types and features and health-related outcomes that are important at different stages of life, and will ask three substantive research questions: 1) How do peer networks and health behaviours influence each other during adolescence? 2) How do online friendships and psychological wellbeing shape each other during late adolescence and early adulthood? And 3) how do relational resources and burdens contribute to health and psychological wellbeing and vice versa during middle and early old age? For each substantive topic, Prof. Jin and her team also plan to determine the socioeconomic antecedents to the reciprocal interplay between social relationships and health.

Prof. Jin and her team will leverage data from three nationally representative and longitudinal surveys in China. We plan to use the China Education Panel Survey (2013–14, 2014–15 and 2015–16) to examine the interplay between adolescent peer networks and health behaviours, the China Family Panel Study (2012–18) to assess the mutual associations between online friendships and psychological wellbeing, and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011–18) to investigate the reciprocal influence of relational resources and burdens and health. Cross-lagged panel models will be applied to discern the reciprocal interplay.

This project promises to contribute to research on social relationships and health in China. First, by accounting for the reciprocal interplay, it will provide a rigorous and systematic assessment of the mutual influence of social relationships and health-related outcomes at different life stages in China. Moreover, the project may reveal vicious cycles in which negative social relationships and health-related outcomes reinforce each other and become exacerbated over time. Furthermore, examining the socioeconomic antecedents to this reciprocal interplay may lead to the identification of social groups that are particularly vulnerable to these vicious cycles, and demonstrate how social inequalities in relationships or health get mediated and possibly amplified through the reciprocal interplay. Finally, the findings may provide insights for designing interventions to promote health or healthful behaviours and for identifying target groups for interventions.



Using Social Media Data to Monitor Satisfaction with Transit Services and Evaluate the Effectiveness of the Service Quality Improvement Programmes of Metro Systems

Investigators: Sylvia Y. He (PI)*, Sisi Jian, Shuli Luo, & Linqi Song
Funding source: General Research Fund, University Grants Commitee

To reduce car dependence and achieve low-carbon transport in cities, it is critical to ensure the quality of public transport services. Traditionally, two monitoring and evaluation methods are used for public transport projects: statistics (e.g., headway/frequency, punctuality) and customer surveys. The former offers an objective way of monitoring the system, but does not reflect the experiences of users. The latter captures the subjective experiences of users, but it only provides a snapshot of their experiences rather than shedding light on their experiences over an extended monitoring period. Although repeated panel surveys – and even single, cross-sectional surveys – can inquire about repeated occurrences or those occurring over more extended time spans, the conventional survey approach remains costly and fails to reflect user satisfaction levels in a timely manner.

This research proposes an analytical strategy for monitoring user satisfaction with transit services and evaluating the effectiveness of transport service improvements within the urban service system. This strategy can inform urban policy, with the aim of ensuring the efficient use of resources. Prof. He and her team will argue for involving public users in the monitoring and evaluating of intervention plans via a social sensing approach. The social-media–driven proliferation of voluntary user information collection has made it possible to capture the subjective opinions of users.

Prof. He and her team aim to apply social media analysis methods to monitor the spatial and temporal variations in transit user satisfaction across different dimensions of service quality in relation to selected programmes. As a preliminary step, we have identified relevant recent (2019–2022) service quality improvement programmes for urban rail (or metro) systems in the three largest cities of the Greater Bay Area: Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.

This proposed project aims to achieve four tasks. First, we will compile a social media dataset to examine passenger perceptions of the metro system. Prof. He and her team will apply the latest machine learning techniques to remove fake and duplicate reviews. Second, to address concerns about population bias in the social media data, we will make an estimation of this bias and conduct a questionnaire survey using our ‘ground truth’ approach to offset any potential biases. Third, Prof. He and her team will develop a transport-domain-oriented BERT model, which we call TransBERT, to perform an analysis of the sentiments of passengers towards the metro system. Finally, Prof. He and her team will analyse variations in these sentiments and transit ridership before and after the implementation of selected service quality improvement programmes as a new tool for evaluating the effectiveness of such programmes.

On Youth



Both Sides Now: Expressed and Perceived Gender (Non)Conformity and Psychosocial Wellbeing in Chinese Community Children

Investigators: Ivy W. Wong (PI)*, Gu Li, Anna I. R. van der Miesen, & Doug VanderLaan
Funding source: Policy Research @ HKIAPS

Gender is a central organizing property of human life. Recently, there has been a surge in interest in childhood gender nonconformity (GN), an umbrella term that encompasses identities and behaviours that defy culturally defined gender norms. GN also refers to the adjective ‘gender-nonconforming’. Some children with GN may be transgender or experience gender dysphoria. Studying GN in children is crucial because it expands our understanding of gender development and because GN children experience elevated psychosocial challenges. Studies on the wellbeing of GN children are limited, and most have focused on children referred by clinics. Recent community-based studies have highlighted the need to study GN beyond clinical settings because some children in the community experience GN. In addition, normal variations in GN are associated with heightened psychosocial risks. Studies on childhood GN in non-Western countries, such as China, are even rarer, despite the huge youth population in China and socio-cultural elements that make GN an important topic.

Apart from this gap in sampling, there are several theoretical gaps. For instance, while peer relationships correlate strongly with psychosocial wellbeing in GN individuals, their potential role in protecting children from psychosocial risks by moderating/reducing the relationship between GN and wellbeing in children living in the community has rarely been examined. Also, prior studies have focused on the psychosocial correlates of expressed GN and not on the extent to which individuals perceive their own GN (e.g., feeling similar to one gender or another). Felt similarity to gender groups has recently been shown to correlate with psychosocial adjustment, with children who feel similar to no gender experiencing the greatest challenges. However, in general, little is known about the felt gender similarity of GN children and how this affects their sense of wellbeing. Finally, although people generally associate GN children with poorer psychosocial outcomes, they appear to be unaware of certain challenges that these children sometimes face. This perception of negative outcomes may be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, concerns about negative psychosocial outcomes may contribute to discouragement of GN, while on the other, awareness of them could contribute to greater support and understanding. Research on perceptions of psychosocial outcomes associated with GN is limited, and there have been no studies that investigated both wellbeing outcomes and people’s perceptions of them.

Filling these research gaps will shed light on the gender cognitions and psychosocial outcomes of children across the GN continuum, in turn informing evidence-based public education and clinical plans that are better tailored to the needs of GN children and their parents. This study will also provide data on the application of tools for measuring GN and create the first large transgender/GN Chinese child database, thus enabling future follow-up studies in this area. This endeavour will also facilitate clinical work on childhood gender dysphoria in China, which has only just begun.

In Study 1, 10,000 parents of children aged 6 to 12 years from across China will complete online structured assessments of their children’s GN and psychosocial wellbeing. Analyses will focus on patterns of GN, its associations with psychosocial outcomes, and poor peer relations as a risk factor that exemplifies the association between GN and negative psychosocial outcomes.

From the large and diverse sample in Study 1,300 children will be selected for Study 2, divided into three groups of 100 each: Transgender/nonconforming (GN), gender-conforming (GC), and neutral. The felt gender similarity of the children and both the children’s and parents’ perceptions of the psychosocial outcomes of GC and GN children will be experimentally assessed. Analyses will focus on how children’s expressed GN and inwardly felt GN contribute independently and interactively to psychosocial wellbeing, as well as on what perceptions participants hold about the psychosocial outcomes of children described as GC or GN.

This research will add significantly to theory and practice. It will be a timely contribution to the burgeoning international interest in GN and will address a critical gap in knowledge in the Chinese context.



In the Name of Romance: Sexual Abuse in Online Dating Perpetrated by Young Adult Men in Urban China

Investigators: Nicole W. T. Cheung (PI)*, Jessica C. M. Li, & Hua Zhong
Funding source: Policy Research @ HKIAPS

In the last decade, the high uptake of online dating via dating websites/apps and social networking/media sites has revolutionized modern courtship. Online dating as a risk factor for sexual abuse has been increasingly documented internationally, with male online daters more likely to sexually abuse their female peers than vice versa. However, these studies have almost exclusively focused on women as victims; much is unknown about the perspective of male perpetrators across the globe, including China.

To bridge this gap, the proposed study will focus on young adult men in urban China who sexually abuse women in the context of online dating. In China, as in other countries, many young adults use online dating. While the victimization of female online daters through sexual harassment has been reported in China, there is limited understanding of the Chinese male perpetrators. However, the Chinese government heavily regulates digital media, including those used for dating. Against this backdrop, a compelling question is why Chinese men might venture to perpetrate sexual abuse when dating online, given the high risk of state surveillance of online behaviours.

The goals of this study are threefold. First, the extent and patterns of male perpetration of sexual abuse in online dating in urban China will be examined. Second, the perspective of perpetrators will be elucidated by connecting mainstream criminological theories in sociology with theories of dating violence to explain online dating-related sexual abuse among men. How the sexist culture, social learning, social strain, and cost-benefit decision making of male online daters contribute to sexual abuse in online dating will be investigated. Third, the Chinese contextual factors of culture and state surveillance will be examined to find evidence for the proposition that technology-facilitated dating violence can vary across cultures.

The research design will feature a cross-sectional survey of Chinese young adult men aged 18-35 who have engaged in online dating via digital platforms (e.g., dating apps/websites and social networking media sites) in China. Eight cities will be selected as the field sites from all levels of the three-tier system of urban administration in China. Tier 1 includes centrally administered municipalities. Tier 2 comprises sub-provincial cities (with a status below that of municipalities and enjoying province-level authority). Tier 3 covers other provincial capital cities. We will recruit 2,000 young adult male online daters by respondent-driven sampling from the eight cities. In addition to its theoretical contributions, the proposed study will inform approaches to technology-based sex education in China.

 
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