Thammasat University students interested in history, political science, economics, sociology, law, Hong Kong, China studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 9 May Zoom webinar Roundtable – After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019.

The event, on Tuesday, 9 May 2023 at 3pm Bangkok time, is organized by the School of Humanities, Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of Hong Kong.

The event webpage explains:

“After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s First Handover, 1997-2019” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) offers a critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, including prior events like Occupy Central and the Mongkok Fishball Revolution, as well as their aftermaths in light of the re-assertion of mainland sovereignty over the SAR and the onset of what has been locally dubbed as the ‘second handover.’ Vukovich reads the conflict against the grain of those who would romanticize it as a spontaneous outburst of the desire for freedom from mainland oppression and for a self-explanatory democracy, on the one hand, and on the other hand of those who would dismiss the protests in nationalistic or conspiratorial anti-imperialist fashion. Instead the book attempts to go beyond mediatized discourse to disentangle 2019’s and the SAR’s roots in the Basic Law system as well as in the colonial and insufficiently post-colonial contexts and dynamics of Hong Kong. Vukovich examines the question of localist identity and its discontents (particularly the rise of xenophobia), the problems of nativism, violence, and liberalism, the impossibility of autonomy, and what forms a genuine de-colonization can and might yet take in the city. A concluding chapter examines Hong Kong’s need for state capacity and proper, livelihood development, in the light of the Omicron wave of the Covid pandemic, as the SAR goes forward into a second handover.

The speakers will include Professor Dan Vukovich, who teaches comparative literature at Southeast University in Nanjing; and Professors Daniel A. Bell and Simon Young, who teach at the Faculty of Law, HKU.

The TU Library collection includes a number of books by Professor Bell.

Books by the other speakers are available to students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

Students are invited to register for the event at this link.

With any questions or for further information, please visit:

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As TU students know, the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China was at midnight on 1 July 1997. This event ended 156 years of British rule in the former colony. Hong Kong was established as a special administrative region of China (SAR) for 50 years, maintaining its own economic and governing systems from those of mainland China during this time, although influence from the central government in Beijing increased after the passing of the Hong Kong national security law in 2020.

Hong Kong had been a colony of the British Empire since 1841, except for four years of Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945. After the First Opium War, its territory was expanded on two occasions; in 1860 with the addition of Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island, and again in 1898, when Britain obtained a 99-year lease for the New Territories. The date of the handover in 1997 marked the end of this lease. The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration had set the conditions under which Hong Kong was to be transferred, with China agreeing to maintain existing structures of government and economy under a principle of “one country, two systems” for a period of 50 years. Hong Kong became China’s first special administrative region; it was followed by Macau after its transfer from Portugal in 1999 under similar arrangements.

With a 1997 population of about 6.5 million, Hong Kong constituted 97 percent of the total population of all British Dependent Territories at the time and was one of the United Kingdom’s last significant colonial territories. Its handover marked the end of British colonial prestige in the Asia-Pacific region where it had never recovered from the Second World War, which included events such as the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse and the Fall of Singapore, as well as the subsequent Suez Crisis after the war. The transfer, which was marked by a handover ceremony attended by King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) and broadcast around the world, is often considered to mark the definitive end of the British Empire.

Last year, the Associated Press reported:

Before the handover, many in Hong Kong worried that life would change when Beijing took over. Thousands rushed to obtain residency elsewhere and some moved abroad. For the first decade or so, such measures looked overly dramatic – this bustling bastion of capitalism on China’s southern coast appeared to keep its freedoms, and the economy was booming.

In recent years, Beijing has been expanding its influence and control. Those moves appeared to be hastened by mass pro-democracy protests in 2014 and 2019. Now, schools must provide lessons on patriotism and national security, and some new textbooks deny Hong Kong was ever a British colony.

Electoral reforms have ensured that no opposition lawmakers, only those deemed to be “patriots” by Beijing, are in the city’s legislature, muting once lively debates over how to run the city. China has installed John Lee, a career security official, as the successor to Chief Executive Carrie Lam.

Freedom of the press has come under attack and pro-democracy newspapers openly critical of the government, such as Apple Daily, have been forced to close. Its publisher Jimmy Lai has been jailed.

Hong Kong also has banned annual protests marking China’s June 4, 1989, crackdown on the pro-democracy movement centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with authorities citing pandemic precautions. The city’s tourism and businesses are reeling from its adherence to stringent COVID-zero policies enforced on the mainland. […]

Chan Po-ying, 66, whose longtime partner and fellow pro-democracy activist Leung Kwok-hung — better known by his nickname “Long Hair,” is serving a nearly 2-year prison sentence and awaiting a hearing on national security related charges, says she is pressing on.

“I have persevered for a long period of time, I believe that I should not give up so easily, especially during this difficult time,” Chan said “The government and the law have granted these rights to us (under the Basic Law).”

In May, during an election for Hong Kong’s new chief executive, Chan and several others held a small protest to demand universal suffrage. On June 4 this year, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Chan together with two others, stood on a street in silent protest, dressed in black and wearing white face masks with black “x’s” taped across them.

However, with security tight ahead of Friday’s ceremonies marking the 25th anniversary of the handover, Chan put out a message to Hong Kong media saying she and her group would not stage a protest.

After being summoned for a “chat” by state security police, they decided “on that day, we cannot conduct any sort of protest activity,” she said.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)