Jeffrey Wasserstrom - Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink

Praise for Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink

A remarkable, and remarkably succinct, analysis of the ongoing crisis in Hong Kong. This is essential reading for understanding Chinas foreign policy, the legacies of empire, and above all the extraordinary politics, society, and culture of contemporary Hong Kong.

Julia Lovell,

Professor of modern China
at Birkbeck, University of London
and author of Maoism: A Global History

Jeffrey Wasserstrom has long been a master of unearthing shared resonances in the human experience across ages and in different societies. With Vigil, he has not only produced a surefooted guide to the turmoil shaking Hong Kong, but a richly insightful look at how recent events there fit into the broader sweep of history.

Howard W. French,

author of Everything Under
the Heavens: How the Past Helps
Shape Chinas Push for Global Power

This is an essential primer to understand the factors driving the most serious challenge to Beijing since the 1989 protest movement. Written clearly and concisely, it offers a handy background briefing to Hong Kongs political crisis.

Louisa Lim,

author of The Peoples Republic
of Amnesia and Tiananmen Revisited

A concise yet pertinent analysis of why and how Hong Kong exploded into months of escalating protests in 2019. Wasserstrom combines the deep knowledge of a historian and the captivating voice of literary writing. The result is an account that weaves together objective historical parallels and subjective sentiments that have driven Hong Kongs various waves of protest.

Victoria Tin-bor Hui,

Associate Professor, Department of
Political Science, University of Notre Dame

Vigil

Hong Kong
on the Brink

Vigil

Hong Kong
on the Brink

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

With Contributions by Amy Hawkins

COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS
NEW YORK

Published with support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF)

Vigil

Hong Kong on the Brink

Copyright 2020 by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

All rights reserved

Published by Columbia Global Reports

91 Claremont Avenue, Suite 515

New York, NY 10027

globalreports.columbia.edu

facebook.com/columbiaglobalreports
@columbiaGR

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953002

ISBN: 978-1-7336237-4-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-7336237-5-9

Book design by Strick&Williams

Map design by Jeffrey L. Ward

Author photograph by Steve Zylius

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Chapter One
Disappearances

Chapter Two
Negotiations

Chapter Three
Victories

Chapter Four
Punishments

Chapter Five
Battles

Epilogue
Water

Disappearances

Hong Kong and West Berlin stand at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, about as far apart as two cities can be geographically and culturally. And yet for most of the second half of the twentieth century, they were doppelgangers in an important way. Each was a focal point of Cold War tensions, linked by the shared stresses and strains of being battlegrounds between two diametrically opposed ideologies. Hong Kong, like West Berlin, was used as a listening post onto a nearby place. This parallel was not lost on John le Carr. When the author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold decided to set a novel in Asia in the late 1970s, he opened The Honourable Schoolboy with Hong Kong scenes involving information gathererssome spies, some journalistswho were intently interested in the Peoples Republic of China.

During the final dozen years of the last century, the unwinding of the Cold War changed each city in a profound way. For Berlin, Germanys reunification in 1990 made the city whole again. It is now Germanys capital and the countrys most , and the last guard tower near the Wall on the other side, from which East German soldiers sometimes shot at escapees heading for the West, is the focus of a historical preservation effort. When it comes to magazines and newspapers, it makes no difference in twenty-first-century Berlin where exactly you are in the city when you want to buy one. If you prefer digitally digestible forms of information, the web works identically east and west of the old Wall.

The Hong Kong story is different. In 1997, Britain handed over its prized colony to the Peoples Republic of China, making it a Special Administrative Region that was supposed to enjoy a high degree of autonomy for fifty years. Freedoms of speech, assembly, and protest are still protected in Hong Kong under the territorys constitution, called the Basic Law. This was to be a grand experimentthese freedoms are not available anywhere on the Chinese mainland! In Hong Kong, you can buy biographies of and writings by the Dalai Lama. Hong Kong newspapers run articles that criticize and cartoons that mock top leaders of Chinas Communist Party. The Great Firewall makes surfing the web a very different experience on opposite sides of the border. If you are in the mainland, unless you use a VPN to help you scale the digital wall, you get no access to Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, or specialized sites devoted to such varied things as The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a documentary about the Tiananmen protests and June 4 Massacre of 1989, and the Shen and their internet providers reach more extensive.

But in subtle and not so subtle ways, some old differences between how lives used to be lived on opposite sides of the border separating Hong Kong from the mainland began to blur or disappear late in the last century. A new high-speed train that connects Hong Kong to Shenzhen and Guangzhou, called the Express Rail Link, illustrates this. The Handover deal that Whitehall and Beijing struck in 1984 stipulated that Hong Kong would be able to maintain a separate legal system, under a framework known as One Country, Two Systems, until 2047. According to the Basic Law, No department of the Central Peoples Government and no province, autonomous region, or municipality directly under the Central Government may interfere in the affairs which the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region administers on its own. But in part of a new Express Rail Link terminal in Hong Kong that opened in 2018, called the West Kowloon Station, all security is handled by mainland employees, and, for the first time on Hong Kong soil, travelers are subject to mainland Chinese laws instead of Hong Kong laws.

And if you buy a SIM card for your cell phone and you want it to work in Hong Kong as well as in Macau (the former Portuguese colony that in 1999 followed its neighbor in becoming a Special Administrative Region of China), as I did during my most recent visit to the cities, you may find on the packaging , also opened in 2018. The projects vision is of a time when going from one Special Administrative Region to the other and either of them to mainland cities will be as effortless and seem as natural as going from San Francisco to Oakland to Silicon Valley in the Bay Area on the other side of the Pacific.