The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Ching Kwan Lee – professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of “Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle” (Harvard 2025) – is the 476th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Identify the key characteristics of Hong Kong’s decolonization evolution.
First, the timing of Hong Kong’s decolonization struggle was unusual. It was not part of the United Nations-endorsed global wave of post-WWII decolonization, but a singular incident at the beginning of the 21st century. This means, among other things, that Hong Kong’s struggle was not the product of external provocation or an opportunistic ride on an international bandwagon but a home-grown popular movement.
Second, whereas the histories of European colonialism were often marked by unmitigated physical violence – slavery, dehumanizing racism, land dispossession, massacres, and concentration camps – and elicited equally bloody and deadly anti-colonial movements and warfares, colonialism in Hong Kong, inflicted by both Britain and China, targeted institutions, ideologies and identities rather than bodies of color.
Third, the site of Hong Kong’s decolonial struggle, rather than the typical underdeveloped and impoverished colony, is a global financial center long known for its wealth and glamor and uniquely positioned at the interface between Western capitalism and Chinese state capitalism. It’s a totally different political economic context for a different kind of decolonization to unfold.
Finally, the most puzzling aspect of Hong Kong’s decolonization struggle was that it strengthened and intensified not under alien British rule but under purportedly “national” Chinese rule. This is the puzzle my book seeks to unravel.
Analyze the impact of “double colonization” and “colonial hegemony” on Hong Kong’s identity.
I used the term “double colonization” to refer to Hong Kong’s pre-1997 colonial situation where Britain, as the internationally recognized colonial master, formally ruled but with China as a secondary but perennial phantom colonizer. The collusion and competition between the two big powers, often mediated by elite Chinese as self-interested brokers, consolidated a colonial hegemony since the early 1970s founded on four tenets: “stability and prosperity,” “rule of law,” “free market utopia,” and “China as destiny.”
Even though these four foundational myths flied in the face of Hong Kong’s historical realities, they were orchestrated by two colonial masters as self-evident facts, and embraced by the people, out of pragmatism and a sense of powerlessness, as their “core values.” This colonial hegemony set the boundaries of legitimate politics by purportedly describing what Hong Kong was and prescribing what Hong Kong people wanted – in short, Hong Kong’s identity. Before 1997, no political activists or parties dared to challenge these ideological and behavioral principles.
Explain how Britain and China were complicit in denying Hong Kongers the right to self-determination.
The right to self-determination has been enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the 1960 United Nations’ Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Hong Kong and Macau were on the United Nations’ list of non-self-governing territories controlled by member states and were recognized to have the right to self-determination.
In those days in Hong Kong, progressive reformers, mostly liberal-minded expatriates and Chinese elites, formed various clubs and parties to demand constitutional changes, from increased electoral representation in the legislature, to Hong Kong as a self-governing dominion within the Commonwealth. Yet, fearful of China’s discontent about democratizing the colony, the colonial government stalled all meaningful political reform until a few years before the handover.
But the most consequential blow to Hong Kong’s chance for self-determination was inflicted by the PRC when it joined the United Nations in 1972. China was appointed as a member of a special committee overseeing the process of decolonization on the ground of its long and outstanding history of anticolonial struggle. Seizing this opportunity, Chinese representatives engineered the removal of Hong Kong and Macau from the category of colonial territories, which was approved on November 2, 1972 by the General Assembly as Resolution 2908. Thereafter, Hong Kong and Macau were excluded from the list of Territories to which the Declaration of the Granting of Independence was applicable.
Britain’s position on this issue has remained a mystery to this day. It cast one of the five “no” votes, against 99 “yes” votes, in the General Assembly, but did not put up any fight against China.
Examine how popular protests, including the Star Ferry and Queen’s Pier Preservation Campaign (2007-9), Anti-West Rail Campaign (2010), Anti-National Education Campaign (2012), Umbrella Movement (2014), Fish Ball Revolution (2016), and others, galvanized the post-colonial generation of Hong Kongers and contributed to the decolonization process.
As Franz Fanon has long noted, decolonization is a historical process that cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement. It’s a process of collective discovery and striving. Through these protest movements, the postcolonial generation, as a passionate minority among the local population, articulated and amplified a broad array of demands and aspirations that slowly but surely swayed the pragmatic majority who would join them in 2019.
If you looked at the totality of two decades of mobilizations in Hong Kong, democracy and universal suffrage were not the only demands, and the Chinese Communist regime was not the only source of discontent. Popular aspirations were broader in scope – the rights to preserve local culture and memories, democratic planning, history and alternative lifestyle, liberal and critical education, competitive rather than oligopolistic economy, distributive justice prioritizing locals, civic nationalism, autonomy, self-determination, even independence.
It was through and during these two decades of mobilizations that Hong Kongers ignited a process of engaging and contesting colonial truth claims, turning them into rights claims. They questioned: was “stability and prosperity” the only and most important essence of a good society? Why was it slipping away? Was the Hong Kong economy truly a “free market” if a few developers and mainland investors were in control? Did “rule of law” mean justice and an antidote to violence? Was China Hong Kong’s inevitable destiny?
In short, remaking Hong Kong, not just its electoral system but its coloniality, became a political project. In my book, I call this a struggle for decolonization.
Assess the geopolitical dimensions of China-U.S. strategic competition in Hong Kong’s decolonization struggle.
I emphasize in my book that there is nothing automatic or inevitable about the rise of the postcolonial generation as a historical agent taking Hong Kong’s destiny into its own hands. We must see the material conditions that made such decolonial subjectivity possible and potent but also caused it to falter when these circumstances changed. Geopolitics is only one, albeit important, element in this constellation of forces.
Looking back, it was a series of political economic ruptures that compelled Hong Kongers to begin reassessing their colonial mentality and entrenched common sense. These crises had roots in both neoliberal capitalism and Chinese state capitalism – the Asian financial crisis and anti-WTO, global social justice movement, the Tiananmen Massacre, China’s authoritarian nationalistic impulse leading to a national security bill, national and patriotic education, illiberal election rules, and criminalizing political dissent.
Beijing did not crack down on these early mobilizations because at that time it still needed a liberal-looking, world-facing Hong Kong for its own global agenda. So indeed, 20 years of geopolitical harmony and economic symbiosis between the U.S. and China from 1997 to 2017 had allowed the Hong Kong’s decolonization movement to grow. When tensions between U.S. and China emerged and intensified in recent years, China’s interests in keeping Hong Kong globally appealing – and thus the restraint on Beijing’s actions – dissipated. The 2020 National Security Law and a full throttled demolition of liberal institutions in Hong Kong were the results.
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