What are the political implications for Hong Kong and Canada of the transnational lives and social fields of the large numbers of Canadian nationals living in Hong Kong? What are the political implications of the fact that most Canadians have very pragmatic, instrumental career and economic reasons for living in Hong Kong, whether they are Hong Kong-born so-called return or circulating migrants, or so-called Canadian “expats”?

As a modest contribution towards answers to these questions, the paper provides a preliminary analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 50 Canadians living in Hong Kong, undertaken during the Umbrella Movement protests in autumn 2014. The interviews point to several distinct clusters, or tendencies, in the self-understandings of the participants concerning political identity, values, and actions and concerning citizenship.

The paper will explore the ways and extent that these self-understandings challenge the portrayals of Hong Kong ethnic Chinese trans-Pacific migrants as hyper-instrumental practitioners of “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999); it will also assess how these self-understandings challenge understandings of “skilled migrants” in global cities as disembedded (Scott 2006; Beaverstock 2002). The paper will also discuss the significance of contingent events in the constitution of the political subjectivities and understandings of citizenship of transnational migrants, drawing from the experiences of Canadians living in Hong Kong in the era of the Umbrella Movement protests.