Teaching classical sociological theory in Hong Kong SAR, China

‘Metropolitan’ sociology has universal pretensions that cannot be realised. These and other limitations of mainstream sociology are borne out by the experience of teaching a classical sociological theory course in Hong Kong during 2012. Imparting accessible material meaningfully applicable to analysis of Chinese society led students to scrutinise primary texts and to apply to them material that supplemented, corrected and provided an alternative framework to the received wisdom of western social theory