Ching Kwan Lee’s 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.
The book’s theoretical focus on decolonization brings significant contribution to the broader discussions of post-coloniality. Postcolonial theory has been largely built on paradigmatic cases such as British India, French Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa, where decolonization culminated in national liberation, often through bloody armed struggle against racially marked colonial rule. Hong Kong does not fit this template. The colonialism it experienced lacked overt racial oppression or resource extraction, and the colonized population became materially prosperous on a relative scale. Lee’s notion of “decolonization without independence” (p. 58) thus forces a rethinking of what other forms decolonization could take – if not the nation-state, then what does it mean to be decolonized? This is a question that resonates well beyond Hong Kong, relevant to other non-sovereign or semi-sovereign territories and to indigenous peoples pursuing autonomy without statehood.
Still, this framing deserves careful engagement. First, Hong Kongers were not only subjects of the colonial mythologies; many were also beneficiaries and co-producers of them. The pillars of rule of law, free-market, and stability were not simply imposed by London or ratified by Beijing from above. They were central to how many middle-class Hong Kongers understood their own success, professional identities, and moral standing. Lee’s own data speaks to this. John, a banker she interviews, frames the 2019 movement in exactly these terms: “Reclaiming Hong Kong means restoring the ‘Hong Kong values’ prevalent before post-1997 mainlandization… judicial independence, clean government, rule of law, mutual respect, freedom of information and expression” (p. 148). Endorsement of these values was organic, not merely hegemonic and arising from false consciousness. If anything, the 2019 movement drew much of its legitimacy from an appeal to these “myths”. In this sense, the protest movements we saw were not fundamental rejections of the colonial order, but grievances directed at post-handover administrations for failing to defend these “myths” from perversion. In other words, one could say that Hong Kongers were merely fighting for the restoration of a history from which they had benefited and which the post-handover order had eroded.
Second, from today’s vantage point, the pillars have proved more resilient than a decolonization framing might predict. Despite the growth of solidarity with small businesses that Lee documents vividly in chapter four, many Hong Kongers today remain staunch believers in capitalism. The recent public affection for Li Ka-shing – a walking symbol of “real estate hegemony” – is hard to square with a narrative of liberation from the free-market myth. The resilience of these “myths” is also visible in everyday life. Since the border with the mainland reopened after COVID-19, large numbers of Hong Kongers cross to Shenzhen and Zhuhai every weekend to shop and eat, a pattern that stands in ironic contrast to the “anywhere but China” principle in the yellow economy imagination. Is this simply the work of the National Security Law suppressing dissent? Is it only because the most militant segment of the population has emigrated? Or is it because the narratives of decolonization remained elitist and were not that firmly and consistently established among ordinary citizens?
A minor point concerns “China as destiny.” Lee persuasively shows that the late-colonial British retreat and the PRC’s patient takeover jointly manufactured an inevitability thesis. Yet the pan-Chineseness that pervaded mid-20th century Hong Kong is hard to reduce to a British-Chinese joint production. It was rooted in the city’s demographic structure – a majority descended from mainland immigrants and refugees, as acknowledged by Lee – and nourished by a broader cultural ecosystem that included South-bound intellectuals, American sponsorship, South-East Asian film companies, and Kuomintang-affiliated publishers and schools, which together produced highly popular and influential cultural products like Jin Yong’s martial arts novels and Mandarin cinema portraying China’s historical glamour. These cultural flows were bottom-up and predated the British-CCP political settlement. Acknowledging them helps explain why earlier generations of Hong Kong activists – like the 1967 Leftists and organizers of the 1970s student movement and Protect Diaoyutai Movement – understood Chinese identity itself as a form of resistance against British rule.
These points should be read as constructive reflections. None of these detracts from what Lee has achieved in this masterful book. Forever Hong Kong is an outstanding and thought-provoking work – written with clarity, empathy, intellectual ambition and deep empirical engagement. Her book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand Hong Kong’s past, present and uncertain future.
