After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019

This book began first as a follow-up to Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C., with a desire to further think through the ‘core value’ of autonomy within classical liberalism and modernity as well as within Hong Kong’s own mainstream, post-colonial, intellectual and political culture, and more specifically within its “democracy” and opposition movements for suffrage but—it is true—even more strongly against the mainland and/or Hong Kong’s integration since 1997.

The 2019 anti-extradition law amendment bill (anti-ELAB) movement, the most live streamed and broadcasted protest in history, was a watershed moment within Hong Kong’s, China’s, and global political history. The movement was characterized by its scale, “be water” guerrilla style, violence, and shut-downs of traffic flows and urban spaces; but also by its nihilistic ‘burnism’ strategy and an intense, dyadic, nativistic or xenophobic reaction against perceived mainland intrusion and local police brutality. Crucially, the movement sought, and to an extent received, foreign governmental support, notably from China’s geo-political rival the United States. While the chaos and street fighting was brought under control, and the extradition bill formally withdrawn, the principal result of the movement was the introduction of a national security bill for Hong Kong in June 2020, and moreover the firm re-assertion of mainland sovereignty over the SAR.

This chapter seeks to answer how and why the 2019 protests (and the opposition movement since 1997) took the form they did. This means we must delve into the city’s governing—or non-governing—framework known as the Basic Law. A contradictory and deceptively simple diplomatic document born out of compromise between the outgoing British colonial regime and the incoming, previously distant mainland one, it promises ‘democracy’ and ‘autonomy’ and to keep Chinese socialism away from Hong Kong capitalism, whilst also clearly stipulating Chinese sovereignty, selective elections, and the need for security legislation (as well as economic integration and migration). The result was a stagnant, political quagmire that eventually imploded. Another key condition of possibility was the rise of a certain type of identity politics within the city, as “being a Hong Konger” morphed from a place-based, local and cultural identity initiated in large part by the British colonial regime, into an increasingly nativist, xenophobic one that could only see the mainland as an enemy and threat. While the Basic Law will remain on the books (now to be interpreted only in a mainland oriented way), and while Hong Kong identities will go on in various forms, the months of protests brought these previous years of political stagnation and identity dynamics to a close.

This chapter more fully engages that which is inescapable for understanding 2019 as well as the SAR’s future: the problematic of colonialism and de-colonization. While the Basic Law and much knowledge produced about the city and 2019 have little to say about the matter, Hong Kong’s own intellectual political culture was inevitably indebted to colonial liberalism; the mainland too, as the sovereign power, has been blithely unaware of the need to de-colonize. Arguably the main arena should be an economic decolonization, which in the interim would take the form of a ‘people’s livelihood’ and ‘common prosperity’ mandate for the city from the north, which is to say a more social and even democratic mode of development. Announced mega-projects such as the Northern Metropolis, Lantau Reclamation, and Greater Bay Area, as well as a much more explicitly recognized (and media-stated) problem of housing and income inequalities in the city, are hopeful straws in the wind. Political de-colonization, which may already be underway with certain legislative and electoral changes removing older tycoon blocks as well as ‘autonomist’ pan-democrats, is a compelling problem as well. This would also entail a de-colonial politics of knowledge in the city, which would take the mainland far more seriously in its own terms, as well as developing meaningful opportunities for political and community participation beyond the procedural issue of voting for officials.

Having examined the politics and the colonial/de-colonial aspects of 2019 and its aftermaths (still very much in process), we conclude by trying to bring together both concerns in an effort to think through what may be the main issue plaguing Hong Kong. But it is also the main, potential vehicle for its future progress in terms of development and livelihood, and for de-colonizing its political past. This is the question of the state or specifically the need for greater state capacity in the SAR, after the eras of colonialism and would-be autonomy before 2020. It is the pandemic, specifically the impact of the fifth, Omicron wave that has powerfully demonstrated this. Hong Kong’s failures to contain that fifth wave, even more so than its mixed results in previously micro-managing the virus, illustrate the inability of its liberal (laissez-faire or neo-liberal) small state governance. The issue is infrastructure and labor shortages but also one of institutional state capacity as well as a skilled and knowledgeable political class. Failures to vaccinate and test-and-trace for this virus until it was too late (and then only via mainland help), as well as the decision to make school children pay the price, illustrate this lack of state capacity as well as its connection to the colonial past.