Forever Hong Kong offers a bold reinterpretation of the city's contentious political trajectory from the handover era to the present.The book is masterfully written and meticulously researched.It is a unique and valuable contribution to Hong Kong studies and beyond.Lee's core question is how Hong Kongers transformed from "colonized subjects" complacent with the status quo into "decolonizing subjects" willing to take action and chart their own history.Her answer is that Hong Kong's successive waves of contention -from the 2003 Article 23 protests through the 2014 Umbrella Movement to the 2019 Anti-Extradition movement -are best understood as a decolonization struggle, rather than a conventional fight for democratization.The colonialism to be unravelled, she argues, was not purely British.It was a "double coloniality" co-produced by London and Beijing, held together by four interlocking "colonial myths" that constrained Hong Kongers' political agency and imagination: stability and prosperity, free-market capitalism, rule of law, and China as destiny.The first chapter reconstructs how each pillar was manufactured and hardened into common sense; the rest of the book traces how various political and economic ruptures pushed activists and ordinary citizens to challenge each pillar in turn, culminating in the 2019 uprising that Lee calls both "the peak of the city's ongoing decolonization struggle decades in the making and the opening salvo of a new era of confrontation between Western neoliberal capitalism and Chinese state capitalism" (p.2).The book's empirical depth is impressive.Lee draws on ethnographic fieldwork from 2019 through 2023, in-depth interviews with a wide cross-section of participants -from frontline militants and student leaders to bankers, medics, accountants and diaspora organizers -as well as archival materials and intellectual writings.Chapters four and five provide particularly illuminating details about militant frontline protesters and the international front, which had remained obscure to outsiders.By recasting Hong Kong's political history as a quest for decolonization, Lee offers a refreshing perspective.Most scholarship on Hong Kong's politics -including much of my own -works within contentious politics or democratization theory, privileging topics such as hybrid regimes, electoral authoritarianism, opportunity structures and repertoire shifts.These works focus on both structure and dynamics: what explains protest participation, how movements escalate and how political opportunities open and close.Lee poses a different question: how did people come to understand what they were doing, and why?The payoff is most visible in her analysis of protest violence.While contentious politics scholars tend to explain radicalization through state repression and organizational dynamics, Lee reconstructs how "brave warriors" themselves theorized and negotiated the use of violence.These accounts capture emotional, ethical and calculative dimensions that analyses on structure and dynamics tend to flatten.
Samson Yuen (Mon,) studied this question.