The Economist April 16th 2022 71
CultureTurmoilinHongKongIndelible or invisible?
I
n retrospect, somecalamities quickly
assume the inevitability of tragedy. Of
course Vladimir Putin could never accept
an independent, Westernaligned Ukraine.
Of course the Taliban would triumph in Af
ghanistan; just glance at the history of for
eign involvement there. And, more certain
still, of course China’s Communist rulers
would never tolerate a free, open, demo
cratising city in a southern corner of their
country. “One country, two systems”—the
simple SinoBritish formula under which
Hong Kong would remain politically dis
tinct from the rest of China for 50 years
from 1997, when Beijing resumed the exer
cise of sovereignty—was always doomed.
But nobody told Hong Kong. After all, it
was supposed not to care. Many outsiders
swallowed China’s habitual line that Hong
Kong was an “economic” city, a place of
business that was not concerned with poli
tics. Yet the generation that has grown up
since 1997 has always posed and faced an
awkward question that Karen Cheung for
mulates at the beginning of “The ImpossibleCity”,herfinenewbook:“Whyarewe
not the ambivalent, apolitical generation
that our leaders want us to be?” Every few
years since 2003, the territory has seen
huge protests, building up to the occupa
tion of parts of the city centre in the “um
brella” movement of 2014, and what
amounted to an abortive insurrection in- Whether to take part was a decision
that Hong Kong’s people could not dodge.
Ms Cheung and Louisa Lim, author of
the equally good (and similarly titled)
“Indelible City”, both grew up in Hong
Kong. Both occupy what Ms Cheung calls
the “liminal space of being local enough to
write stories that white writers can’t and
‘international’ enough to write about Hong
Kong for overseas readers”. And both offer
illuminating accounts of how the city de
scended into the mass street unrest of
2019, as demonstrators agitated for a more
representative political system, and of the
pandemicabetted repression that has
crushed protest since. Teargas, water can
nons and police batons eventually cleared
the streets. Covid19 kept them empty.
Their perspectives are very different.
Ms Lim is a journalistturnedacademic,
who long covered China and Hong Kong
for thebbcand National Public Radio; her
previous book told of the Chinese Commu
nist Party’s efforts to erase the memory of
the protest movement that roiled China in
1989 and its bloody suppression. She writes
mostly as a coolly objective observer, but
opens with an account of crossing the line
into activism, on September 30th 2019, the
eve of a big protest to mark China’s Nation
al Day. On the roof of a skyscraper, she
finds herself “painting expletiveladen
Chinese characters onto a protest banner
eight storeys high, and wondering if I had
just killed my career in journalism”.
Two accounts of Hong Kong’s recent history offer little hope for its future→Alsointhissection
72 FinancingAmerica’scivilwar
73 A pathbreakingOmaniartist
74 Thejoyofgardening
74 Speculativefiction
75 Back Story: The genius of “Atlanta”The Impossible City. By Karen Cheung.
Random House; 319 pages; $28 and £23
Indelible City. By Louisa Lim. Riverhead
Books; 293 pages; $28