The chapter outlines the colorful history of power and resistance in pre-British Hong Kong. Many communities involved in this part of Hong Kong’s history continued to play a part in the colonial and post-colonial struggles. The chapter also discusses how the rise of Hong Kong as an industrial and financial center fomented different social groups that were mobilized in the struggle for Hong Kong’s future by competing political forces at the height of the Cold War. Most significant is the rise of a new middle class in tandem with the transformation of Hong Kong’s economy into a finance and service-centered one in the 1970s and the 1980s. This new middle class, combined with the plurality of grassroots social movements, charted a course for the locally rooted democratic movement that continued to grow after the sovereignty handover, constituting the backbone of the resistance in its quest of greater autonomy of Hong Kong under Beijing’s rule.

Chapter Three addresses Hong Kong’s economic function for China after 1997. Beijing’s challenge has been to perpetuate Hong Kong’s role as China’s offshore financial and trading center after the sovereignty handover. After 1997, the US-HK Policy Act allowed the US and the international community to continue treating Hong Kong as an independent trading entity separate from mainland China. Hong Kong maintained its separate membership in international organizations like the WTO, even after China joined those organizations. This continuous special status, conditional upon Hong Kong’s autonomy from Beijing under the One Country, Two Systems, made Hong Kong a conduit and stepping stone for Chinese capital and the elite who sought access to global capital or relocation to other parts of the world. It is also a key to Beijing’s plan to internationalize the Chinese currency Renminbi (RMB) without making RMB fully convertible in mainland China. Hong Kong’s unique offshore financial role for China led to increasing Chinese capital domination in Hong Kong.

Chapter Eight discusses how the rise of the radical wings of the democratic movement in tandem with the rise of localist, or even separatist, consciousness among the younger generation. For a long time, the ambiguous Hong Kong local identity had been no more than a cultural identity. Most social and opposition movements had been imbued with the Chinese nationalist discourse. But as a reaction to rising inter-class and inter-generational inequality driven by Chinese capital and Beijing’s tightening direct rule over Hong Kong, the consciousness that Hong Kong constitutes a political community separate from China’s emerged, and after about 2010, became mainstream among the younger generation of activists. Corresponding to this politicization of the Hong Kong identity was the germination of the demand for self-determination or even for Hong Kong independence within the democratic movement. The localist turn of political demands and increasingly militant protest underlined the escalating conflicts, starting from the anti-National Education curriculum mobilization in 2012, to the Umbrella Movement in 2014, and to the 2019 uprising.

We have seen in the previous chapters that Hong Kong has never been a tranquil place. Its settlers have never been submissive communities since the major settlements developed in the region centuries ago. Empires or nation-states attempting to absorb the territory, subjugate its communities, and assimilate its population always faced a dilemma between establishing full political control at the expense of its economic function and maintaining its utility by tolerating its autonomy.

Chapter Four looks at how Hong Kong’s local business elite and foreign businesses were gradually squeezed out from center stage of the financial market in Hong Kong by Chinese companies and the business elite. While local tycoons worked closely with the CCP to defend the city’s undemocratic status quo and advance their business interests on the mainland, they valued the legal and institutional autonomy of Hong Kong as safeguards of their wealth. Chinese tycoons with Hong Kong residency, some of whom are publicly known as CCP members, also value such autonomy and legal protection of their private wealth, though many see themselves as caretakers of Beijing’s interests in Hong Kong. The business elites’ contradictory character manifests itself amidst the fight over the extradition bill, when many local and mainland Chinese tycoons explicitly or implicitly acted against the bill. The US-China trade war that began in 2017 superimposed on the elite conflict in Hong Kong and cast a shadow on the offshore financial role of Hong Kong.

One cannot fully understand Beijing’s long strategy over Hong Kong without considering China’s imperial legacy of stepwise absorption and assimilation of its ethnic frontiers and the history of the CCP’s struggle to control these frontiers in the early years of the PRC. Chapter Five outlines the development of the ideas and experiments of “One Country, Two Systems” before Hong Kong, analyzing the CCP’s attempt to absorb and assimilate its ethnic frontiers such as Tibet since the 1950s. Beijing’s leaders explicitly referenced these histories, in particular the history of Tibet in 1951-59, when they first devised and promoted the “One Country, Two Systems” formula in the early 1980s as a solution to the Hong Kong question.

Chapter Seven discusses the evolution of the opposition movements seeking Hong Kong’s democracy and autonomy before and after the handover. The mainstream democratic opposition in Hong Kong grew out of the anti-colonial and Chinese nationalist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Their moderate, non-confrontational approach to gradual democratic reform made some gains in the first 15 years of China’s rule. Simultaneously, the increasing aggressiveness of Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom, coupled with the rising social polarization caused by the influx of Chinese capital, fueled the growth of more radical, confrontational social and opposition movements.