In 2019, Hong Kong protestors seized the world’s attention. What began as a mass demonstration against a proposed extradition bill with the PRC transformed into a mass movement engineered for virality: seas of marchers flooding the streets between high-rise buildings for months, producing aerial images that saturated global newsfeeds. Amidst the breathless coverage, the desires and anxieties of global audiences seeped into the commentary. Some viewers praised the movement as a stand against a China whose rise and influence they feared. Others celebrated it as a bulwark against a global authoritarian tide. Those moved by images of peaceful marches and clever memes saw proof of the political power of peaceful protest, while those fed footage of masked protestors throwing Molotov cocktails at armored vehicles saw the dangers of anarchy. The protests, in other words, became a mirror that reflected viewers’ worldview back at them while obscuring local meaning.

According to sociologist Ching Kwan Lee, not all of these understandings are necessarily incorrect. They are, however, incomplete—able to only capture the “moment, not the movement” (3). Her new book, Forever Hong Kong, offers a new framing: the movement as Hong Kong’s first decolonization struggle. In Lee’s telling, the legitimacy of British colonial rule in Hong Kong rested on four “myths”— the promise of prosperity and stability, the guarantee of the rule of law, the utopia of a free-market, and an inevitable return to China. While these myths were always built on fiction, they held persuasive power for decades until, in the early 2000s, each began to crack, leak, and break. By 2019 they had collapsed entirely, giving way to a fundamentally different kind of grassroots movement that took as its basis the utter bankruptcy of these promises and a determination to build a new foundation for the city premised on self-determination.

By tracing the deterioration of colonial legitimacy, Lee’s work is as much a work of history as ethnography. This historical argument is built upon five distinct sub-arguments—advanced, respectively, in each chapter—that explain one core transformation that ultimately led to the 2019 movement. The first chapter asks why earlier waves of activism never mounted a clear challenge to British colonialism despite early signs that its promises were hollow. The second chapter examines how calls for modest reforms of Hong Kong’s electoral system transformed into much more sweeping demands for autonomy. Lee’s third chapter asks how the 2019 anti-extradition bill became a tipping point that brought “citizens from different social strata, generations, and political orientations” into one, singular, movement for collective action. The fourth chapter—perhaps the most controversial but, to me, the most impressive in its nuance and care—probes the tactical transformation of Hong Kong protest culture from one of restraint and a rigid adherence to the rule of law to one tolerant of disruption and destruction. The book’s final chapter turns global, asking how international lobbying went from a taboo tactic to an open strategy.

Lee’s decolonization argument explains some of these shifts more successfully than others. It convincingly ties the gradual disillusionment with Beijing’s promises under “one country two systems” to the disintegration of colonial-era promises. The causal chain appears a bit more tenuous in explaining protestors’ turn towards vandalism and violence. Yet the fact that not every chapter fits seamlessly into her framing is less a flaw in the book’s argument than a reflection of the movement’s historical complexity. Empirical reality often does not accord neatly to an airtight narrative or a catch-all theoretical framework, and Lee—wisely in my opinion—does not force it to. Instead, she leans into the complexity, drawing on a wide range of personal interviews, careful analysis of evolving media discourses, and robust historical reconstruction to describe the intertwined ideological, tactical, economic, and cultural transformations that have built on one another to produce Hong Kong’s current political landscape.

Lee’s work is also strengthened by how she handles her positionality. Her political position on the 2019 movement is plain: she describes herself as both an observer and a participant. But she does not overly romanticize the movement or sanitize its contradictions. She frankly describes realities that some supporters might want to avoid or deny, from the mainstream strategic embrace of vandalism and the unwillingness to draw solidarity with Black Lives Matter for fear of angering the Trump administration to the blatant misogynistic culture of youth activist circles (a quote on page 85 about young female protestors serving as masturbatory fodder is particularly striking). This, to me, is a model of responsible scholarship—not detachment from our subjects of study and their stakes, but rather a transparent acknowledgment of positionality, a willingness to reckon with empirical realities that are uncomfortable, and an argument grounded in evidence rather than claims of neutrality.

Any book this rich and ambitious is, of course, bound to generate debate. For my part, three claims stuck out as worthy of discussion. The first is the assertion that Hong Kong lacked prior anti-colonial movements. While it is undoubtedly true that something changed in 2019, Lee may tend to overstate this rupture. She includes memorable quotes describing how rare and sparsely attended colonial-era protests were, often from interviewees who see these movements as genuinely distinct from the movements of the last decade (56–57). But this evidence does not necessarily denote a full absence of earlier anti-colonial challenges, nor does it indicate that these smaller, more targeted forms of critique seeded no legacies. A second claim regards her definition of violence: it is extremely broad, including not only vandalism but also other forms of disruption such as mass boycotts, which she calls “market violence.” On the one hand, this framing is useful in demonstrating a shift in protest culture away from strategic restraint and towards disruption. On the other hand, it stretches the meaning of violence so far beyond common understandings of it that the framing risks introducing confusion or distortion.

A final argument that warrants discussion regards her discussion of Hong Kong independence. While a small minority of Hong Kongers historically favored independence, Lee argues that this once unthinkable goal expanded its appeal after Umbrella in 2014 and the “Fishball Revolution” of 2016, even entering formal politics through elected representatives that directly called for it. Yet her claim about the mainstreaming of the Hong Kong independence movement also relies upon her contention that radical parties speak coyly of alternatives to one country two systems so they can talk about independence without clearly stating it—a reality that, to Lee, implies that independence is in fact more popular than might be immediately apparent. While certainly plausible, this analysis also risks blurring the line between a rejection of “one country two systems” and outright embrace of independence. Perhaps more fundamentally, I also think that, while Lee’s evidence points to more tolerance of Hong Kong independence, it also reveals experimentation with multiple visions of what self-determination could look like. A thoughtful quote by Jeffrey Ngo (253) outlines how “self-determination” is more expansive than simply independence—it means the power to determine the future, a future that could include, theoretically, a wide array of political systems. This quote suggests a thought-provoking vision, one that I would have liked to see woven more thoroughly throughout the book.

Lest the foregoing discussion be read as an overall criticism of Forever Hong Kong, let me say clearly that that is not the case. I raise these questions as genuine engagement with a work that I found uniquely insightful and profoundly thought-provoking. Even when I was not in unconditional agreement with the book’s arguments, it was truly an intellectual joy to follow Lee’s argument as she built her claims. For this reason and others, although Forever Hong Kong is one of many excellent books on the 2019 movement, it is among the most memorable.Footnote ¹ I have no doubt that it is a book that I will think about, assign, and revisit for a long time to come.