Hong Kong's protest movement of 2019 was a landmark event. It involved the demise of liberalism without democracy at China's offshore, the playbook of contemporary social movements, and geopolitical tensions in Asia-Pacific. Many articles and books have been written on the event, and more will come. Ho-fung Hung's City on the Edge provides a solid framework and vivid analysis that uncovers the upheaval across time and space. Yet Hung's book goes beyond merely explaining how the protests occurred and unfolded. It situates Hong Kong's momentous changes through the lens of the longue durée and the evolving phenomenon of Global China.
Citing Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Hung adopts a perspective from which structural and eventful analysis of social protests are regarded as not isolated, but congruent. He contends that “the ebbs and flows of autonomy and fortunes of the [autonomous] regions are not determined by local forces alone, but also by global economic and geopolitical shifts” (p. 15). The changes within and beyond the “city on the edge” are analysed from three aspects, forming the major pillars of his book: capital, empire and resistance.
In the section “Capital,” Hung examines the economic structure under which Hong Kong, Chinese and foreign capital interact. Although Hong Kong's special status has brought fortunes to various state powers and capitalist classes for decades, the win-win playing field began to shift following the 2008 global financial crisis, China's perception of the West's decline, and intensifying US–China rivalry. When Chinese capital flooded in, the partnership between the party-state and local capitalist class, which had succeeded in keeping democracy at bay in the post-1997 era, became strained.
For Hung, the diminishing role of Hong Kong's mediatory position was not only preordained by the shift in the global political economy. It is also deeply rooted in the modern Chinese regime. In the section “Empire,” Hung suggests that China has an ideational tendency to tighten its grip on its peripheral regions. The parallel developments in Tibet, Macau and Hong Kong confirm this tendency. While internal fragmentation among the central elite and the symbolic and materialistic functions of the autonomous entities often existed, they were circumscribed by this ideational path. Hence, although the party-state maintained self-restraint in the early post-handover years and at times offered tactical concessions in the face of strong pushback from the local business elite and civil society after the mass rallies in 2003 and 2012, its grand strategy of state-building and nation-building has only intensified in the long run.
Yet, the central state's intensified harmonization of the “edge city” has unintended consequences. Hung argues that it aroused “Resistance” – the radicalization of the democratic movement and the surge of identity politics since the 2010s. Unlike the veteran democrats, who had been committed to observing the boundaries of contention and resorted to an electoral playbook, the emerging localists were fatigued about authoritarian advancement, structural inequalities and delayed universal suffrage. While inter-group conflicts had disrupted the coordinated leadership of the opposition, “each protest created a network of activists, many of whom continued their activism and helped fuel the next movements, drawing in more and younger activists along the way” (p. 171). The youth actors’ commitment further generated emotional resonance with the older generations, and among the working and middle classes. The prevalence of affective bonding sustained the protest movements in the 2010s and often translated into electoral gains. Through this account, Hung traces the repeated, spontaneous outbreak of Hong Kong's “uprisings” despite increased state coercion and the organizational weakness of the pro-democracy force.
Save for the path-altering efforts of intellectuals and activists, City on the Edge largely prioritizes the influences of structural forces. While Hung convincingly argues how and why Beijing's cultural-political harmonization of Hong Kong was inevitable, it is less clear what shapes its extent and pace. Chapter four indicates that the mainland and local elite lobbied the Hong Kong government to halt the extradition bill. Does this suggest differences between the Chinese state and private capital and the party-state's cost–benefit calculation of the residual utility of Hong Kong? Fung's analysis of the political economy and regime nature can well incorporate these new developments, yet in less deterministic ways. Similarly, the optimistic forecast regarding Hong Kong's exceptionalism in chapter ten drives one to infer that it was not merely the scale of the protest, but its ability to disrupt the power equilibrium in the special administrative region, that provoked Beijing to revamp the city's socio-political system. Had the Hong Kong government's attrition strategy in 2019 played out as in the 2014 Umbrella Movement, or had the pro-democracy force not doubled down on their efforts to seek control of the legislature, would the Beijing-imposed institutional overhaul be less dramatic?
Overall, City on the Edge presents a solid and powerful analysis of the forces and events behind one of the most defining moments in Hong Kong, China and global history. Engagingly written and theoretically informed, it caters to the needs of the scholarly community and general audience. Its attention to historical facts and methodological diversity also underlines how historians and social scientists can learn from each other in studying social movements.
