Kwai Hang Ng has written an excellent book on Hong Kong's social and political development, one of the best to date. It is rock-solid in the empirical data it presents, and significant and innovative in its theoretical contribution. Ng presents a simple but powerful story – a mere switch of language in courtrooms from English to Cantonese has the potential to bring about revolutionary changes to the way the legal system operates in Hong Kong.

It all starts with a simple observation that English trial in Hong Kong is solemn, ritualistic, and formalistic and commands deference from all the parties involved. The use of Cantonese in trial – a direct consequence of the political transition in 1997 – was initially thought to be merely symbolic in the sense that a change in law's language without changing the substance of the law would ensure the continuity of common law in Hong Kong, as guaranteed in Hong Kong's mini-Constitution, the Basic Law. However, there are significant consequences arising from the use of Cantonese.

At a technical level, there is doubt as to whether bilingualism is feasible at all. There are many words and phrases which simply do not have proper equivalents in Cantonese and there are embarrassing moments when a translation is artificially imposed such as when “My Lord” and “learned friend” are literally translated into Cantonese. Much of the Englishness in English trials is lost during the translation and many of the translation turned out to be “pragmatically unbearable” (p. 91). In general bilingualism creates difficulties in the daily work for legal professionals who seriously doubt the possibility of using Cantonese to inherent common law.

A much more visible change is the form and manner of law. With Cantonese comes chaos in courtrooms in many aspects. There are “visceral encounters,” “disorderly shouts” and “volcanic emotions” that are displayed throughout a trial when Cantonese is used. In particular, the traditional deference to the judges is disappearing when litigants started to challenge lawyers and their judges in defiance. Replacing it is the “performance of culturally recognizable speech acts” through which “litigants at times disrupt and undermine the efficacy of judicial formalism (p. 172). In sum, as Ng puts it, “the new voice of Cantonese embodies the beliefs and prejudices of the local society” (p. 25).

Ng is careful not be falling into the trap of linguistic determinism. The rise of Cantonese in trials is more than the use of a new language. It empowers the people who use it; it demystifies the powers which hide behind legal formalism and rituals; and it ends political alienation which prevents meaningful political participation and the growth of civil society. After all, English is a language that the vast majority of the Cantonese-speaking people in Hong Kong are not comfortable with. When using mother tongues, litigants become more resourceful and are able to unleash social feelings instantaneously, and more importantly, the distance created by the use of English and the associated aloofness and authority diminishes drastically. Litigants now can speak the truth, directly, with power and to power.

For lawyers, the implications are fundamental: if common law is embedded in the English language, then the use of Cantonese, or any other language for that matter, would have the destructive effect of uprooting law from its social context. Given the inevitable increase in judges and lawyers whose mother tongue is Cantonese, the increase in the use of Cantonese as a legal language is also bound to increase. The manner and style of law as preserved by the old common law as we know it will be gradually replaced by a more localized and vibrant justice in which empowered litigants and their lawyers challenge the law and the political system behind it.

All that may not be necessarily a bad thing, given the fact that Hong Kong is searching for a new identity in its new political and economic positioning in China. But the introduction of bilingualism, and a different version of rule of law, as Ng vividly presented in his book, does create tremendous stress and uncertainty in the legal system and the rest of the society in Hong Kong.