Periscope

This issue of Varsity looks at books and reading in Hong Kong. The city is often described as a cultural and literary desert whose...

When Taiwan's leading bookstore opened its first Hong Kong branch this summer, it became the place to see and be seen. The hype surrounding the bookshop led people to ask whether it could be a boost to Hong Kong's flagging reading culture.

In recent years, Hong Kong has become a shopping paradise for people from the mainland. They are eager to snap up genuine brands of everything from milk powder to toiletries and cosmetics. But there is another thing visitors are keen to buy - books that have been censored and banned back home.

Today's young people have grown up in a digital age and are just as likely to read online articles as books. They're often accused of not reading enough or at all. Is this accusation fair? Varsity explores and conducts a reading habits survey of our own.

Varsity surveyed more than 260 secondary school and university students to find out about their reading habits. Read the full results here.

Hong Kong has one of the better public health systems in the world but the system is groaning under the challenge of an aging...

Many of the patients who use public healthcare services are elderly. To try to relieve the pressure on the public system the government recently extended the elderly healthcare voucher scheme and doubled the amount offered. But as Varsity discovers, many elderly people still find the vouchers inadequate and hard to use.

Plans to allow overseas-qualified doctors to work in Hong Kong's public hospitals under a limited registration system have come under fire from local doctors' groups who say the scheme could affect the quality of medical care provided. The critics are unhappy doctors under the scheme will be exempted from taking a licensing exam.

Overworked and underpaid - that's how many nurses in Hong Kong's public hospitals feel and they are leaving the public sector and even the profession in high numbers. So far, Hospital Authority efforts to stem the exodus don't seem to be working. Varsity looks at the underlying reasons behind Hong Kong's nursing shortage.

Under the Hong Kong government's policy of  trilingualism and biliteracy, Cantonese, English and Putonghua are meant to be of equal importance. But in reality,...