Forever Hong Kong

"Forever Hong Kong is a deep dive into one particular place where this intolerance for variation has been strikingly clear. The focus is on 2019 and protests Ching Kwan Lee presents as a last-ditch effort to defend a Hong Kong that could operate very differently from mainland cities — a test of the idea of ‘One Country, Two Systems’. Lee is one of the most talented sociologists working on China, and a gifted and bold ethnographer. She had done impressive books before on labour in China, and on Chinese mines in Africa, all written with a theoretical sophistication and rooted in a lot of time hanging out with people, trying to figure out what mattered to them. This new book turned that ethnographic eye on her own city. Events like the 2014 Umbrella Movement reinforced her sense of caring about Hong Kong deeply, and she spent a lot of time with very young activists who were on the front lines there five years later. A more clearly scholarly work than many I recommend to Five Books , it’s written with passion and is accessible, so that even when she’s making sophisticated points she’s enlivening them with a lot of detail from her interviews. Her argument has to do with Hong Kong never having had a period free from having to deal with problems of colonial control. She sees a continuity of sorts between the period of British colonial rule and what followed, which has had many of the characteristics of colonial control, with Beijing, in this case, being the metropole. She has a special way of thinking about colonialism and decolonisation. It’s a book that could be very valuable for people who are interested in other colonial and post-colonial and decolonised settings to read. She’s very attentive to the way that global capitalism operates via different strategies and alliances between businesses and governments, moving from one form of colonialism to another. She emphasises that Hong Kongers as a group were left out of the discussion of the future of Hong Kong when there was a transition. That is quite different from the classic image we have of what happens when a territory stops being part of an empire and the voices of the people of the territory that was controlled, though they may be competing with one another, are the main voices involved in figuring out what comes next. Given that the voices of Hong Kong’s people have never been at the centre of the official debates on its future, she argues that it became natural for the young people whose perspective she highlights to feel justified in calling for and fighting for a chance at self-determination, however long the odds of success were in 2019."