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City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule Ho-fung Hung. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 316 pp. £20.00 (hbk). ISBN 9781108840330
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...