Hong Kong’s gendered economic discourse: How neoliberal framing obscures systemic exploitation of women’s labor and marriage markets
Original framing: “CUHK economist apologises over talk that examined women ‘marrying for money’” — South China Morning Post
The voices of women in precarious economic positions—such as migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong or single mothers—are entirely absent from the discussion. These women often enter marriages not by choice but by necessity, navigating systems where economic survival is tied to patriarchal structures. Feminist economists like Nancy Folbre have long argued that unpaid care work (including marriage as a survival strategy) should be central to economic analysis, yet Chong’s talk treats it as an anomaly rather than a systemic issue.
Chong’s talk is not an isolated incident of poor academic judgment but a symptom of how neoliberal economics reduces human relationships to financial metrics, erasing the gendered power structures that make such framings possible.
The backlash reveals the tension between academic freedom and the need to interrogate how economic theories perpetuate inequality, particularly in a city like Hong Kong where colonial legacies and hyper-capitalism collide. Indigenous and feminist critiques—from Māori *whakapapa* to Silvia Federici’s analysis of reproductive labor—offer alternative frameworks that treat relationships as communal and reciprocal rather than transactional. The solution lies not in individual apologies but in systemic reforms: integrating feminist economics into education, addressing economic precarity through UBI and labor protections, and supporting community-led alternatives that challenge the commodification of intimacy. The trickster’s role here is to expose the hypocrisy of treating marriage as a neutral economic choice while ignoring the systemic forces that make such choices unequal. Without addressing these structures, even well-intentioned reforms will remain superficial.