Ho-fung Hung is Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins University and author of City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule, published by Cambridge University Press and winner of the 2024 AAS Joseph Levenson Prize (Post-1900).
To begin with, please tell us what your book is about.
The unrest and crackdown in Hong Kong in 2019-20 captured the world’s attention. City on the Edge takes a long historical and global perspective to revisit Hong Kong’s development along the fault line between geopolitical and geoeconomic tectonic plates, from pre-British times to the present. Communities in Hong Kong have evolved over centuries in the vibrant, pluralistic, yet unstable interstice between an authoritarian land power and an open maritime world of outcasts, Western colonizers, trade, and novel ideas. Beijing has utilized this space to connect its still-closed financial system to the global financial circuit, yet it remains concerned that offshore wealth in the city could threaten the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. Beijing’s handling of Hong Kong since 1949 has been shaped by the Party’s precarious approach to the restless frontiers it inherited from the multiethnic Qing Empire. The recent turmoil is a product of these historical contradictions. To understand the earthquakes that happen in seconds, we must examine the very slow movement of the underlying tectonic plates. This book is as much about the tectonic plates as it is about the earthquakes. It seeks to put recent events into perspective, hoping to facilitate a more informed assessment of the future of Hong Kong and China in the long run.
What inspired you to research this topic?
I have been researching the history, politics, and social development of Hong Kong intermittently over the years, while also engaging in various other projects. Over time, I have collected vast amounts of material—historical documents from British colonial archives, news clippings, a large, forgotten body of niche local histories of Hong Kong, and much more. I’ve carried these materials with me in numerous boxes every time I relocated over the last quarter century, always hoping that one day I could use them to write a book on Hong Kong’s long-term development from a global perspective.
Hong Kong is a fast-paced city with a lot happening all the time. Scholarly discussions about the city often get caught up in this pace, focusing primarily on recent news headlines. However, many elite networks, grassroots communities, and conflicts in Hong Kong have deep historical roots and are connected to larger histories in China, Asia, and the world—such as the 1197 Lantau Island uprising against the Song Empire, which I discuss at the beginning of this book. Understanding the present requires keeping sight of these broader and deeper connections. You can’t fully grasp significant events from the last few years without looking beyond a narrow timeframe. This holds true not just for the study of Hong Kong but for any place. The turmoil in Hong Kong in 2019-2020 provided me with the opportunity to finally compile all the materials I’ve gathered over the years and write this book.
What obstacles did you face in this project? What turned out better and/or easier than you expected it would?
Though I rely mostly on the materials I have gathered over the years, I still needed to make a trip to the Hong Kong Special Collections at the University of Hong Kong library to fill in some gaps before starting the writing process. I made that trip in December 2019. At that time, the anti-extradition and pro-democracy uprising was still ongoing. It was just a month after the campuses of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong had literally become battlegrounds, battered by fires, teargas, and Molotov cocktails. As a result, all university administrations had imposed many new restrictions on non-affiliated persons entering their campuses, let alone accessing the library and its special collections.
When I arrived, I found that access to the materials was no longer as easy as it used to be. However, with the assistance of local academics, I eventually obtained the necessary permission to enter and use the materials I needed. The book also cites many news sources available online. But after the crackdown under the National Security Law in 2020, many news organizations were shut down, and their servers, along with all archived news and commentaries, disappeared overnight. By the time the book was published in 2022, many of the weblinks in the bibliography had already become dead links. Fortunately, some libraries and research organizations outside Hong Kong have placed backup versions of those materials on overseas web servers. Readers can still search the titles listed in the bibliography to identify and access these backup copies online—safely archived outside Hong Kong.
What is most interesting story or scrap of research you encountered in the course of working on this book?
I was incredibly fortunate while finishing the book. I decided to take on the project, gathering all the materials I had accumulated over the years, in the summer of 2019. I completed my final research trip to Hong Kong in December and began writing the book in the spring of 2020. Then the pandemic hit, and the entire world went into lockdown. With classes and everything else moving online, I found myself at home with my family—including our cat Penny, whom we had adopted from the shelter literally the day before the lockdown.
As a result, I had the luxury of warm company, tranquility, and many hours saved from my usual daily commute, allowing me to focus on writing the book. We were fortunate to stay healthy during the pandemic, which was truly a blessing. I am grateful that I could finish the book efficiently and pleasantly, despite the terrible losses the world was experiencing at that time. When I look back on that year, the whole situation still feels surreal to me.
What are the works that inspired you as you worked on this book, and/or what are some other titles that you recommend be read in tandem with your own?
Since my restless youthful days, the book that has fascinated me the most is Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In it, Marx analyzes the dynamic, shifting alignments and conflicts between classes and class factions in France, from the birth of the Second Republic during the 1848 Revolution to the 1851 coup by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who restored the monarchy under the guise of nationalist pride. Marx grounds his analysis of the fast-paced political events during those years in his study of the centuries-long social and economic development of French and world capitalism. It is a brilliant analysis that addresses both structure and action, inevitability and contingency, political economy and ideology in a sophisticated manner.
For years, political sociologists have used this text as a foundation for developing theories of authoritarian capitalism, fascism, and political action. To me, the book represents the gold standard of political analysis, one I aspire to emulate in my work, particularly in City on the Edge. The backsliding from a half-baked democracy dominated by financial oligarchy to full-scale authoritarian rule in Hong Kong shows some striking parallels, despite key differences, with mid-19th century France. Just before beginning the writing of City on the Edge, I actually reread The Eighteenth Brumaire to refresh my perspective, and I benefited greatly from it. I would recommend anyone aspiring to conduct well-grounded analysis of political events to read the text carefully—beyond the few oft-cited lines that have become cliché.
Finally, what has captured your attention lately—as a reader, writer, scholar, professor, or person living in the world?
Right now, I am finishing two new books on very different topics. One is on the history of Western scholarly studies of China over the past eight centuries, from Catholic monastic writings about the world outside Christianity to contemporary university research. The other is on the military foundations of dollar hegemony since the 1950s and the prospects for the Chinese yuan (or RMB) to challenge that hegemony. These books stem from projects I have been working on for the past 25 and 15 years, respectively. As I wrap up these two projects, I am struck by the overlooked centrality of Hong Kong in both stories. This realization underscores the significant cost that the recent crackdown on Hong Kong is imposing on China and China Studies.
First, since the Cold War and continuing into the present, Hong Kong has offered a unique, free academic space where Western and Chinese scholars studying Chinese history, politics, and society could engage in open exchanges. This has greatly contributed, often inadvertently, to overcoming distortions in Sinology, or what I call the de-orientalization of China Studies since the height of the Cold War. However, this space has been shrinking since 2020, exemplified by the closure of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies—not its collection, but its once-vibrant exchange programs, visiting scholars, and conferences.
Second, since the early 2000s, Beijing has been developing Hong Kong as an offshore RMB center. While China maintains strict capital controls and keeps the RMB inconvertible, it allows its citizens to move their wealth to Hong Kong, where a freely convertible offshore pool of RMB is maintained. This has been a significant push towards RMB internationalization, allowing the CCP to safely maintain a financial firewall with the world. Hong Kong’s RMB market resembles London’s unregulated Eurodollar market, which facilitated the rise of dollar hegemony in the 1950s. One of the origins and consequences of Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, which triggered the 2019-20 turmoil, is its growing unease about Chinese offshore wealth being parked there. With the intensified crackdown and control, much of this Chinese wealth is now moving further offshore to places like Singapore and Dubai. This stifles Hong Kong’s development as an offshore RMB financial center, hampering the RMB’s potential as an international currency capable of challenging global dollar hegemony. The recent implosion of Hong Kong’s IPO market for Chinese enterprises is a sign of this trouble. Now, Hong Kong is increasingly becoming a gateway for sanction evasion by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, to name a few widely reported examples. Many see Beijing’s geostrategy lurking behind these developments, which risks further turning Hong Kong into a sanction target and an epicenter of geopolitical rivalry.
A common mistake made by many who analyze China’s development and its relations with the world is the assumption that Hong Kong is merely a “sideshow.” But if you look closely at the data and the unfolding events—data and events that authorities in both Beijing and Washington might prefer you not to scrutinize—you will see how central Hong Kong remains. The future of Hong Kong is crucial for the development of China and the world, with so much at stake.