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“言有尽而意无穷” [Words and meanings are endless].
In the run up to the book launch scheduled for 13 July 2021 (registration required but free HERE), the folks at Little Sir Press have organized a series of short conversations about my new book, "Hong Kong Between 'One Country' and 'Two Systems'."
About the Book:Hong Kong Between “One Country” and “Two Systems” examines the battle of ideas that started with the June 2019 anti-extradition law protests and ended with the enactment of the National Security and National Anthem Laws a year later. At the center of these battles was the “One Country, Two Systems” principle. By June 2020, the meaning of that principle was highly contested, with Chinese authorities taking decisive steps to implement their own understanding of the principle and its normative foundations , and the international community taking countermeasures. All of this occurred well before the 2047 end of the 1985 Sino-British Joint Declaration (中英联合声明) that had been the blueprint for the return of Hong Kong to China. Between these events, global actors battled for control of the narrative and of the meaning of the governing principles that were meant to frame the scope and character of Hong Kong’s autonomy within China. The book critically examines the conflict of words between Hong Kong protesters, the Chinese central and local authorities, and important elements of the international community. This decisive discursive contest paralleled the fighting for control of the streets and that pitted protesters and the international community that supported them against the central authorities of China and Hong Kong local authorities. In the end the Chinese central authorities largely prevailed in the discursive realm as well as on the streets. Their victory was aided, in part by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. But their triumph also produced the seeds of a new and potentially stronger international constitutional discourse that may reduce the magnitude and scope of that success. These essays were written as the events unfolded. Together the essays analytically chronicle the discursive battles that were fought, won and lost, between June 2019 and June 2020. Without an underlying political or polemical agenda, the essays retain the freshness of the moment, reflecting the uncertainties of the time as events unfolded. What was won on the streets of Hong Kong from June to December 2019, the public and physical manifestation of a principled internationalist and liberal democratic narrative of self-determination, and of civil and political rights, was lost by June 2020 within a cage of authoritative legality legitimated through the resurgence of the normative authority of the state and the application of a strong and coherent expression of the principled narrative of its Marxist-Leninist constitutional order. Ironically enough, both political ideologies emerged stronger and more coherent from the conflict, each now better prepared for the next.
I am delighted, then, to make available the next in the series of video recordings of conversations about the book with my former research assistant Matthew McQuilla (Penn State International Affairs MIA 2021). Today we discuss Chapter 9 (Friday 9 August 2019) Thoughts on Violent Popular (Mob?) Action Against the Solid Virtues of Prosperity and Stability; Considering Albert Chen Hung-yee 陳弘毅 Essay on the Situation in Hong Kong Part 2: 一國兩制的博弈 ["The Game of One Country Two Systems"].
Chapter
9 ( is particularly interesting for the way in which it considers for the first time the way in which well intentioned and quite brilliant elite academics sought to mediate what was by now a worsening situation in Hong Kong, at least in the sense that the parties appeared to be hardening their positions and increasing talking past each other. The Chapter is also particularly interesting for its first engagement with what becomes a great theme of the central authorities--the need t use whatever methods were necessary to restore stability and prosperity to Hong Kong. That discursive trope--stability and prosperity--would play a significant role later. But here, picked up first by the academic elite, "stability and prosperity was attempted to be used as a means of establishing something like common ground. That it failed would be obvious only in retrospect. The assumption that both the street discourse of the protest movements and the conceptual discourse of the central authorities invested the principle of stability and prosperity with the same meaning was proved to be quite mistaken. And in the process that mistake revealed the widening gulf between the protesters and the central authorities.
The video of the conversation about Chapter 9 may be accessed HERE.
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