Zap saang: skills reassemblage and improvised survival among Hong Kong independent publishers under precarious conditions

This article examines how independent publishers in Hong Kong sustain their work amid structural precarity, market monopolisation, and political repression. Drawing on thirty-two interviews and an inductive thematic analysis, it reconceptualises publishing as a form of creative labour defined less by industrial boundaries than by the continuous reconfiguration of skills, relationships, and infrastructures. The study identifies three logics of adaptation – translation, embedding, and extension – through which publishers reorganise their expertise under constraint. Translation involves the lateral movement of editorial and curatorial skills into adjacent sectors such as consultancy and communication. Embedding anchors publishing within pedagogical and artistic ecologies, transforming it into a socially engaged and community-oriented practice. Extension reclaims control over circulation through self-managed retail and distribution networks that assert autonomy while exposing new vulnerabilities. Together, these logics illuminate skills reassemblage – captured in the Cantonese term zap saang (執生), ‘to pick up life’ – as an ongoing process of recombining what one knows and can do amid uncertainty. Far from romanticising resilience, the article argues that zap saang articulates a situated ethics of adaptability that emerges when infrastructures of stability collapse, offering a vocabulary for understanding how cultural workers persist within – and through – precarity.