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Ho-fung Hung, City on the Edge: Hong Kong under China Rule, Cambridge University Press, 2022. 316 pgs.
“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will.”
Ho-fung Hung’s latest monograph, City on the Edge, starts with the above quote from Romain Rolland, which became renowned after it was adopted by Antonio Gramsci in 1920 (Gramsci 1977, 188; Gramsci 1994, 1:300 n.1). The motto encapsulates the optimistic take of Hung’s prognostication of Hong Kong’s future, even after the enactment of the National Security Law (Hong Kong) (NSL(HK)). On 30 June 2020, the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the 1997 handover of the city’s sovereignty from the UK to China, Beijing directly imposed and enforced the law, bypassing Hong Kong’s legislative process. This unprecedented legal encroachment into Hong Kong has “provoked a serious international backlash” (Hung 2022, 205) and “brought an end to ‘One Country, Two Systems’” (ibid, 201). The new “lawscape” (Parker 2015) restricts the dynamic flow in every sector of the city: from the political, economic, social, and cultural to the educational realms; from the audible to the inaudible. Since then, over ten thousand Hongkongers have left their hometown and a number of international businesses have vacated the city.
Hung’s book thoroughly studies the processes and events through which social and political fault lines that originated during Hong Kong’s colonial era have transformed and intensified since the city’s handover (Hung 2022, 15). The writer highlights a somewhat positive view of Hong Kong’s endgame with a short sentence at the end of the introduction—“Hong Kong’s fate is far from sealed” (ibid., 21)—and he leaves an open ending, writing: “the struggle for the future of Hong Kong did not end in the 2019 unrest and the crackdown afterward. It has just begun” (ibid., 217).
Is Hong Kong a “borrowed place, borrowed time” (Hughes 1968, 13, 16) that has expired after the NSL(HK)? Hung’s final chapter suggests that this is not the case, a response that takes into account the city’s unique economic and geopolitical relations with mainland China and other major international powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom. In City on the Edge, Hung examines Hong Kong’s distinctive global role in China in three parts: Firstly, “Capital” expatiates on how Hong Kong has become China’s offshore financial centre since the Mao era, the early stage of market reform in the 1980s (Hung 2022, 47), and how Chinese businesses have “mainlandised” the city’s economy, monopolising capital (ibid., 72). Secondly, “Empire” discusses how China caused Hong Kong to lose its voice before and after the handover, from reapplying in post-1997-Hong Kong the idea of “One Country, Two Systems” modelled on 1950s Tibet to the drafting of the Basic Law (the city’s de facto constitution), to the recent “forced assimilation and direct Beijing rule” (ibid., 139). Lastly, “Resistance” traces the origins of democratic movements in Hong Kong from the 1970s and describes how a localist political consciousness grew from these movements to foster the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and the anti-extradition protests in 2019 and 2020 (ibid., 153). The tripartite monograph explains why Hong Kong has retained its economic and geopolitical significance in the eyes of superpowers, particularly the Chinese regime, and how Beijing has geared up to utilise this “wild bull” even if it resists. Hong Kong’s fate hinges on intricate relationships with power holders that have developed from the colonial era to the current post-handover period.
The city’s internationally recognised free market and legal system have become the main gateway through which China’s state-controlled enterprises export while global capital enters. The US Congress passed the United States–Hong Kong Policy Act in 1992, which became a template for other national policies toward the city, granting Hong Kong the special status of “separate customs territory” (ibid., 51). As the main venue through which Chinese capital obtains loans and expands in foreign currencies (mainly the US dollar, since an exchange mechanism with the U.S. dollar stabilises the Hong Kong dollar), Hong Kong has enabled Chinese elites to accumulate wealth, through foreign initial public offerings (IPOs), and convert their money into other currencies to move it freely in the global market. In the post-handover era, Chinese capital increasingly dominates the city’s financial market. Via this route, Beijing makes use of Hong Kong as a “global wholesale centre” to internationalise Renminbi (RMB), the Chinese Yuen, without “fully liberalising its capital account” to maintain its “tight foreign-exchange control” in the financial system of mainland China (ibid., 65-67). Beijing’s long-term plan, elevating Hong Kong to the status of an “offshore financial centre facilitating RMB internationalisation” (ibid., 70) has gradually resulted in a “mainlandisation” of the city’s economy. Following the practices of their former British colonial counterparts (such as the HSBC bank and Jardines, mainland investors have deputised local Chinese elites) to help them monopolise the business sector (72-79). Since 2019, the local IPO market has been dominated by Chinese enterprises, and, by 2020, 60% of financiers in the city were mainland Chinese financiers. This displacement of local elites is directly related to local politics and central to the question of “who rules Hong Kong” (ibid., 83). In the rising monopolised business environment, some local business elites worried mainland companies would bring forth a “complete control of Hong Kong’s daily life” and thus “threaten the viability of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ arrangement” (ibid.). Every five years since the handover, approximately one thousand members of the city’s elites form an Election Committee to select the city’s next chief executive, a process from which millions of Hong Kong citizens are excluded. The committee is dominated by pro-Beijing politicians and local and mainland tycoons. Since the 2012 election, Beijing’s preferred candidates has won every election, attesting to the influence of mainland elites in the poll. In turn, the candidates have established policies that open doors for mainland enterprises and elites. For example, Chun-ying Leung, whom local tycoons did not particularly favour during the election, launched the “Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect” after he became the chief executive. This scheme created a new path for the interconnectivity of China, global capital, and RMB internationalisation. The city’s economy and its international status are unquestionably a powerful implement in the hands of the power-holder.
Hong Kong’s unique geopolitical and economic position has been the key to maintaining the status quo before and after the handover. The city was viewed externally as different from mainland China and was also treated differently, for instance, with specific trade agreements enacted by countries worldwide to facilitate global commerce. When political over-control imposes a monopoly on businesses and offends the political sensibilities of other stakeholders, a city might be driven from the game. Beijing’s ambition in geopolitical circles may discourage other power-holders from cooperating with Hong Kong, despite the city’s special status. For instance, in 1998, a Hong Kong-based company founded by a Chinese military-affiliated business elite bought two retired Soviet-era aircraft carriers and sold one of them to the Chinese army, who later turned it into the first aircraft carrier Liaoning (ibid, 96). Using Hong Kong to bypass international sanctions and export controls, Chinese entities smuggled to the mainland sensitive technologies, such as military-grade U.S. drones (ibid., 98). The U.S. government reviewed the issue, and in 2018, the White House imposed a new aluminium tariff on China without exempting Hong Kong or differentiating between Hong Kong and China. The same year, the Australian government blocked a bid for the country’s gas pipeline and infrastructure by a Hong Kong company controlled by local tycoon Ka-shing Li’s statement that it was “no longer feasible to distinguish a Hong Kong company from a mainland Chinese one” (ibid., 100). In 2020, the NSL(HK) provoked an international dispute and a series of sanctions from the U.S. which stopped recognizing Hong Kong as a “separate entity from China” (ibid., 102). These incidents point to a critical issue—the city’s constitutional principle “One Country, Two Systems”. The international interpretation of this doctrine and recognition of the city’s uniqueness is key to mainland global trade between China and the globe via Hong Kong. Beijing, however, asserted that “One Country” was “the ‘precondition and foundation’ for the ‘Two Systems’ and not “vice versa” (ibid., 135).
This interpretation of “One Country, Two Systems”, the constitutional sovereignty principle promised by the Chinese leadership in the international treaty, the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed between London and Beijing in 1984, actually follows the model implemented in Tibet in the 1950s. In Tibet’s brief “One Country, Two Systems” period from 1950 to 1959, before the Chinese Communist government took over the theocratic government headed by the Dalai Lama, there was increased tension between the Tibetans who sought local autonomy and Beijing’s central control (ibid., 111). In 1959, Beijing took direct and complete control of Tibet as the central government sent Han Chinese cadres to replace the Communist cadres of the Tibetan government, purging the country with allegations of “local nationalism” (ibid., 116). After 1959, Beijing sent Han immigrants to the area for cultural assimilation, or “settler colonisation” (which has also happened in China’s northwestern region, Xinjiang), in an attempt to dilute the local population (ibid., 106).
The Tibetan situation in some ways resembles what happened in Hong Kong after the anti-extradition protests in 2019 and 2020. The difference is that, in Hong Kong, Beijing primarily maintains control via the legal system rather than using heavy-handed military repression as has occurred in Tibet (with the caveat that there were widespread public complaints about excessive use of police force during the 2019 Hong Kong protests). One reason for the difference in tactics might be that the city is an important global financial centre that often draws international attention, and the Chinese government may have been taking care that nothing similar to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown appeared on the global news. Perhaps Hong Kong’s unique financial role still carried weight and influenced the Chinese response during the protests.
Since the enforcement of the NSL(HK), resistance to increased repression and cultural assimilation has faded. At the height of opposition campaign radicalisation, the anti-extradition movement in 2019 and 2020 nonetheless reflected a strong local consciousness—Hong Kong identity as “a new political consciousness” (ibid., 201). Perhaps, the tension between local and foreign, old and the new, will transform in time. A sense of belonging grew from engagement in everyday living. Despite the “mainlandisation” (ibid., 72) of the city’s hardware, such as legal infrastructure, socioeconomic distribution, and education, how the newcomers will self-realise in Hong Kong remains an open question. At the end of the writing, Hung insists on the possibility of future resistance. This possibility, together with the Hong Kong government’s new immigration strategy of recruiting Chinese elites through the recently launched “Top Talent Pass Scheme”, and the Bay Area development around the Guangdong region, further complicates the city’s future. Will the newcomers be absorbed by the once-free land or “assimilate” the locals? One individual has broken through the binary thinking of local and foreign—Edward Leung, born in Wuhan, China, later migrating to Hong Kong with his mother. Later, he became the leader of a localist group, Hong Kong Indigenous, and led several pro-independence movements before being jailed for rioting in 2016.
Whether Hong Kong is expired is an unanswerable question. History is a process made by the people. It is possible to imagine that Hong Kong’s future might evolve beyond mere resistance; this is what citizens crave through the fluid dynamics of their everyday lives in the spaces they call home. Hung’s monograph, which reveals a thorough understanding of the city as a socioeconomic and political backdrop, encourages readers to wonder how Hong Kong’s future will, through transforming the past, unfold.
References
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections From Political Writings (1910-1920), with additional texts by Bordiga and Tasca, selected and edited by Quintin Hoare, translated by John Mathews. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.
———Letters From Prison. 2 vols., edited by Frank Rosengarten, translated by Ray Rosenthal. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Hughes, Richard. Borrowed Place. Borrowed Time: Hong Kong and Its Many Faces. London: André Deutsch, 1968.
Hung, Ho-fung. City On the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Parker, James E. K. Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
How to cite: Lai, Winnie W.C. “Is Hong Kong Expired after the National Security Law?—A Review of Ho-fung Hung’s City on the Edge: Hong Kong under China Rule.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 26 Nov. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/11/26/city-on-the-edge.
Winnie W. C. Lai (she/her) is a PhD candidate in music at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), specialising in ethnomusicology and sound studies. She avidly ruminates on the theoretical entanglements of (un)sounding matters, listening bodies, power, and the political. Working across sound studies, political theories, and matters of Hong Kong, she experiments with intermedial methods and field materials to craft spaces for sensory experience. She is completing a hybrid-mode dissertation entitled “Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces” with her adviser, Professor Jairo Moreno. She is also interested in studying performed vocalities in singing and everyday living. Winnie has received recognition from institutions worldwide, including, for instance, the Price Lab Andrew W. Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities (2022-2023) from Penn, the 21st Century Fellowship (2023), and a Charles Seeger Prize (2021), honourable mention, from the Society of Ethnomusicology (SEM). Her first published article, “‘Happy Birthday to You’: Music as Nonviolent Weapon in the Umbrella Movement” (2018), was shortlisted for the IBP Best Article on Global Hong Kong Studies in Humanities (2021) by the International Institute for Asian Studies and the Society for Hong Kong Studies, organisations based in the Netherlands and Hong Kong, respectively. Before her academic journey, Winnie won the Best Music Video Award from Sony Music Entertainment (Hong Kong) in December 2013 and later worked as a singer-songwriter, who is now named Michiru W. Visit Winnie’s website for more information.