City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule

✍ Scribed by Ho-fung Hung

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 326
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

For decades, Hong Kong has maintained precarious freedom at the edge of competing world powers. In City on the Edge, Ho-fung Hung offers a timely and engaging account of Hong Kong's development from precolonial times to the present, with particular focus on the post 1997 handover period. Through careful analysis of vast economic data, a myriad of political events, and intricate networks of actors and ideas, Hung offers readers insight into the fraught economic, political, and social forces that led to the 2019 uprising, while situating the protests in the context of global finance and the geopolitics of the US-China rivalry. A provocative contribution to the discussion on Hong Kong's position in today's world, City on the Edge demonstrates that the resistance and repression of 2019-2020 does not spell the end of Hong Kong but the beginning of a long conflict with global repercussions.

✦ Table of Contents

List of Figures page x
List of Tables xii
Preface xv
List of Abbreviations xx
1 Introduction 1
The Puzzling Broad Social Base of a Radical
Uprising 4
Perspectives on a City That Refuses to Die 8
Cities and States in World Capitalism 12
Method and Outline: Capital, Empire, and Resistance 15
2 At Empires’ Edge, 1197–1997 22
Fishers and Empires 24
Agrarian Conflicts from Manchu to British Rule 27
Urban Industrial Class Formation 33
Hong Kong in the Longue Durée 39
Part I Capital
3 The Making of China’s Offshore Financial Center 45
The Hong Kong Gateway from Mao’s Autarky
to the China Boom 47
International Foundations of Hong Kong’s Financial
Centrality after 1997 51
The Rise of Mainland Chinese Capital 59
The Nexus of RMB Internationalization 63
4 The Mainlandization of Business Monopolies 72
The CCP–Local Business Elite Ruling Coalition 72
The Displacement of Local Capital by Mainland
Capital 76
The Political Ascendancy of the Mainland Business
Elite 83
Hong Kong in the US–China Rivalry 96
Part II Empire
5 “One Country, Two Systems” before Hong Kong 105
The Frontier Questions from the Qing Empire to the
Chinese Nation 107
From Autonomy to Bloodbath in 1950s Tibet 112
The Taiwan and Hong Kong Questions in the
Mao Era 117
6 From Autonomy to Coercive Assimilation 122
Forging a United Front in Support of Sovereignty
Handover 122
Racialist Nationalism and National Security 129
Seeing Hong Kong Like an Empire 136
The Making of the CCP’s Direct Rule 140
Part III Resistance
7 The Class Politics of Democratic Movements 151
The Genesis of the Hong Kong Democratic
Movement 153
The Advance of the Middle-Class Democrats 155
New Social Movements and Radicalization 161
8 Hong Kong as a Political Consciousness 172
Latent Localism in Social and Democratic Movements 173
On the Hong Kong City State 177
The Dawn of Localist Politics 183
The Occupy Movement 187
The Militants, the Separatists, and Hong Kong
Self-Determination 193
9 Conclusion: Endgame or New Beginning? 198
The Early Arrival of 2047 201
Financial Centrality on the Line 206
Hong Kong’s Future in Comparative and Global
Perspective 209
Glossary 218
Notes 224
References 251
Index 277