hong kong

Through the long, hot summer of 2019, Hong Kong burned. Anti-government protests, sparked by a government proposal to introduce a controversial extradition law, grew into a pro-democracy movement that engulfed the city for months. Protesters fought street battles with police, and the unrest brought the People's Liberation Army to the very doorstep of Hong Kong. Driven primarily by students and youth protesters with their 'Be Water!' philosophy, borrowed from hometown hero Bruce Lee, this leaderless, technology-driven protest movement defied a global superpower and changed Hong Kong, perhaps forever. But it also changed China, and challenged China's global standing. In City on Fire, Antony Dapiran provides the first detailed account of the protests, reveals the protesters' unique tactics, explains how the movement fits into the city's long history of dissent, and looks at what the protests will mean for the future of Hong Kong, China, and China's place in the world.

"An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased. Lim's deeply researched-and deeply personal-account casts often startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations leading to its "return" to China in 1997, the current protests, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Throughout, it is populated by contemporary figures who, like her, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story: guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and wending through it all, the King of Kowloon, a mentally ill trash collector, descended from royalty, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the unique identity Lim unforgettably conveys-Hong Kong as a place of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation, silence and voice"--.