The Fall of Hong Kong: A Tragedy in Five Acts

This talk will drew on material in the speaker's recent book, Vigil:Hong Kong on the Brink, while also dealing with events that have happened since he finished making the last corrections to the proofs of it almost exactly a year before the day this presentation has been made. The quintet of key moments in Hong Kong history addressed (the five "acts" in the title) was the period around the time of the following events: the 1997 Handover, the 2014 Umbrella Movement, series of lesser known but important events in late 2015 and 2016, the 2019 protest surge, and the 2020 actions associated with imposing of the new National Security Law.  

 

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he also holds courtesy appointments in Law and Literary Journalism. His most recent books are Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) and, as co-author with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, third edition, 2018). He often contributes to newspapers (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc.), literary reviews (such as the TLS, Mekong Review, and LARB), and magazines (e.g., The Nation and Dissent). He served as Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies from 2008 until 2019; he was an adviser to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival; he has consulted on documentary films about the Tiananmen protests and the Umbrella Movement; and he has edited or co-edited books on topics ranging from gender in China's past and present to human rights and revolutions.

 

Sebastian Veg is a Professor of intellectual history of modern and contemporary China at EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris and an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His most recent books are Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals (Columbia UP, 2019) and Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong (co-edited with Thomas Gold, 2020).