Rebel City: Hong Kong's Year Of Water And Fire

by . South China Morning Post Team, Zuraidah Ibrahim (Editor), Jeffie Lam (Editor)

Overview

SCMP's reporting team looks back at Hong Kong's most wrenching political crisis since its return to Chinese rule in 1997. Anti-extradition bill protests that morphed rapidly into a wider anti-government movement in 2019 left no aspect of the city untouched, from its social compact to its body politic to its open economy. The demonstrations which continued well into 2020 have tested every institution of the city, from the civil service to the police to the courts and even its rail transport operator, and from offices and businesses to universities and schools, and from churches to families and even friends.This book is for anyone seeking to understand not just what Hong Kong has gone through but also the global phenomenon of increasingly leaderless protest movements. Fueled by profound angst about the place of millennial youth in society, widening income inequality, and the speed of digital communications, Hong Kong was in retrospect ripe to be the laboratory for a new-age protest movement, nearly a decade after the Middle East's Arab spring.The essays in the book collectively compose a picture of a society in trauma, bent and broken, but showing signs of an uncanny ability to bounce back. What shape it will be in a few years from now, however, is much harder to predict.Related Link(s)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789811218606
Publisher:	Co-published With World Scientific
Publication date:	07/27/2020
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	1,042,349
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.80(d)

Table of Contents

Foreword x

Acknowledgments xii

Introduction xiv

Path to a Firestorm 1

Top girl Carrie Lam takes a city to the brink 3

The murder behind Hong Kong's worst political crisis 18

Kill bill: The law that tore a city apart 26

Chaos in Legco: The pan-democrats' campaign 34

A strained alliance 41

Water and Fire 51

On one mat, no matter how perilous 53

The storming of Legco 69

A night of terror in Yuen Long 76

The takeover of Hong Kong's airport 85

October 1: Celebrations in the capital, clashes in the city 94

Campus battlegrounds: Five days that changed Chinese University 100

The siege of Polytechnic University 112

The Mobilized and the Marginalized 121

Everyone could be a leader 123

Teenage tear gas soldiers 136

Epilogue: Tear gas soldier reviews university ambitions 146

#ProtestToo: Women on the front lines 150

Unions on the march 157

We are all Hongkongers … even ethnic minorities? 164

Migrant workers in the danger zone 171

Suffering on the margins 177

A song, slogans and Lennon Walls 183

Unpacking 'Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times' 191

In the Crossfire 197

The dynamics of demonization 199

The unwelcome mat for mainlanders 209

'Renovation' and 'decoration': Mainland-linked firms under attack 216

Dark clouds over Cathay 225

Trainwreck 233

Tycoons caught in a political tempest 241

Superman and melon-picking 250

Not the Michelin Guide: When restaurants are labeled 'yellow' or 'blue' 261

Message from the ballot box 268

The Beijing connection 276

Law and Disorder 287

Asia's finest in the dock 289

Frustration and anger on the front lines 304

The doxxing and the duelling 313

New police commissioner, new strategy 320

Tear gas: Legitimate crowd-control measure, or menace? 328

Who's watching over the police? 336

Courts on trial 345

Beyond Borders 353

The pawn in US-China rivalry 355

Hong Kong's division sows unity in Washington 368

Courting controversy 375

Being water flows overseas 381

View from Singapore 387

Reflections 395

What's to stop Hong Kong's 'well water' mixing with Beijing's 'river water'? 396

Where the next revolution may take place in Hong Kong 400

No silent majority, only a terrified minority 404

The furthest distance between 'one country' and 'two systems' 407

Mask ban an ineffective stick. Where's the carrot for moderate protesters? 410

Forget Lam's extradition U-turn, Xi's channeling of Mao shows he's about to get tough on Hong Kong 415

Is it safe to be in Hong Kong? Against all odds, the answer is still a strange 'yes' 419

Hong Kong risks being condemned to its own circle of hell 422

A new chain of command 425

Scanning the Horizon 429

A pause for breath 431

Recommended Videos 451

Glossary 454

Index 456