Made in Hong Kong: Studies in Popular Music is, at the time of writing, the fifth book in the Routledge Global Popular Music Series to cover the development of popular music in the Asia Pacific region (others include Nusantara, Taiwan, South Korean, and Japan). Made in Hong Kong sheds light on one of the smallest and yet most historically influential music markets in the region. Indeed, Hong Kong (HK) popular music – and particularly Cantonese language pop, known colloquially as ‘Cantopop’ – has long been the object of scholarly analysis, notably through the prisms of its lyrics (Chu, Reference Chu1998), history (Wong, Reference Wong2003), industry (Fung, Reference Fung2004), gender (Erni, Reference Erni2007) and musical dimensions (Yang and Yu, Reference Yang and Yu2013). In light of this abundance, Made in Hong Kong provides new and insightful analyses that reflect and extend our scholarly understanding of popular music in the city. The volume is fittingly (perhaps coincidently) published at a time of growing international interest following a wave of mass demonstrations opposing the introduction of an extradition amendment bill by the Hong Kong government in 2019, and the introduction of a new Hong Kong National Security Law by the Mainland Chinese government in 2020.

The book's case studies focus primarily on the place of ‘Cantonese pop music’ in discourses on and representations of contemporary Hong Kong culture and identity. Several contributions show how Cantopop has functioned as ‘the voice of the city’ (Chu, p. 30) and has done so in multiple ways: from media cross-pollination to expressions of local social issues and identity and political woes. Many chapters cover key artists like Anita Mui, Sam Hui and Teresa Teng, key moments like the origins of Cantopop in the 1970s and its putative ‘golden era’ in the 1980s and 1990s, and key processes like transnationalism. If these have already been the focus of previous analyses, the approach is refreshed here thanks to greater attention to questions of contemporary transnational music industries, gender, politics, as well as through novel comparative approaches. Building on Witzleben's (Reference Witzleben1999) seminal work on Anita Mui, Ho and Ma's chapter charts the evolutions of the popular phrase ‘Daughter of Hong Kong’ via the examination of two musical icons – Anita Mui (the singer initially labelled ‘Daughter of HK’) and Denise Ho (whom some audiences refer to as the new ‘Daughter’ of the city) – through broader sociopolitical and cultural changes in HK and provides a notable contribution to the volume. Ismangil's examination of the shifting characterisation of HK in the lyrics of Cantopop star Sam Hui and contemporary indie groups such as My Little Airport – from optimism and development to alienation and pessimism respectively – is another novel and insightful take on the significance of both originators and modern incarnations of HK pop music. Shiau's chapter on the significance of Leslie Cheung within trans-Asian networks of queerness performativity and Chow, de Kloet and Schmidt's chapter on the links between recent Cantopop performances and the politics of social movements are also valuable original contributions to HK popular music studies. The volume concludes with an insightful coda titled ‘The Globo- Regional and the Local in Hong Kong Popular Music’ by C.J.W.-L. Wee, re-appraising the most common narratives about Cantopop, including the emergence of Cantonese as a marker of HK's identity in popular music in the 1970s, the development of HK's pop music transnational influence in the 1980s and 1990s, and its perceived decline and the effacement of this influence in favour of Mandarin-language and Korean pop in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These narratives, Wee contends, must be reassessed in light of HK's cultural hybridity involving Euro-American and East Asian pop culture influences. This is a fitting conclusion to the collection, as it not only highlights connected concerns analysed (implicitly or explicitly) across several of the volume's chapters, but it also points to the significance of HK popular music for contemporary theorisations of the ‘local’ and of cultural flows.

In their introduction, the editors explicitly establish that the collection is to be seen neither as an exhaustive nor as a chronological account of what might be defined as popular music in HK. Indeed, such an account remains to be written. As with other volumes in the series, Made in HK focuses on the more ‘mainstream’ popular music industries of its chosen locale, despite some chapters shedding light on some of the varied musical activity from the edges of these industries – Cantonese rap (Lin) and various other forms forms of indie music (Cheung; Ismangil). One limit of the volume may therefore be its relatively narrow account of the greater stylistic, ethnic and industrial diversity of what constitutes popular music in HK. Areas worthy of future exploration not covered in this book might include the significant music practices of the non-ethnic Chinese Hong Kong residents (notably of South-East Asian performers), non-Cantonese language-based popular music and their manifestations in the everyday life of the city (such as the numerous Anglo-American pop music groups operating in small-scale venues in the city's entertainment districts), or various manifestations of popular ‘street music’ which have proliferated with the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, among the growing number of efforts to better document, analyse and account for the place of Hong Kong popular music within its local and trans-local settings, Made in Hong Kong is an extensive collection of well-researched and valuable essays that, taken both together and individually, make a vital contribution to English-language scholarship in HK popular music studies as well as to East Asian Studies more broadly.