After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019

“In asking the question, “what were we/they trying to ‘free’ Hong Kong into?” Vukovich invites readers to reject the doxa of negative freedom “from” that lies at the heart of contemporary financialized societies, and to start asking questions about the social practices and political economy that sustains it. This gesture makes it possible to discern the ideological effects of the vaunted opposition between freedom and autocracy ostensibly assumed to lie at the root of today’s global political struggles, of which Hong Kong would be the avatar.” —Jon Solomon, Professor of Chinese Studies, Université Jean Moulin "Daniel Vukovich’s After Autonomy is a blistering critique of Hong Kong’s troubled decolonization since 1997, but especially after Occupy Central in 2014 and even more so with the anti-extradition bill protests in 2019 and the enactment of the National Security Law in 2020. Rejecting the “death of Hong Kong” myth, Vukovich explores both the promise and the disappointment of the first twenty-five years of “one country, two systems”. It is a powerful reminder that, although far from dead, Hong Kong is also far from healthy." —John M. Carroll, author of The Hong Kong-China Nexus: A Brief History This book offers a sharp, critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 antiextradition 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. Reading the conflict against the grain of those who would romanticize it or simply condemn it in nationalistic fashion, Vukovich goes beyond mediatized discourse to disentangle its roots in the Basic Law system as well as in the colonial and insufficiently postcolonial contexts and dynamics of Hong Kong. He examines the question of localist identity and its discontents, the problems of nativism, violence, and liberalism, the impossibility of autonomy, and what forms a genuine decolonization 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 era. Daniel F. Vukovich is tenured at Hong Kong University, a Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University, and an Advisory Research Fellow at South East University, Institute for the Development of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. His book Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. was published by Palgrave in 2019. His first book was China and Orientalism (Routledge, 2012), and he publishes widely in inter-disciplinary post-colonial and global studies of China and the West.