TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW THE WORLD: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere

TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW THE WORLD: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere
MARK L. CLIFFORD
St. Martin's Press
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world.

For 150 years as a British colony, Hong Kong was a beacon of prosperity where people, money, and technology flowed freely, and residents enjoyed many civil liberties. In preparation for handing the territory over to China in 1997, Deng Xiaoping promised that it would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. An international treaty established a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with a far freer political system than that of Communist China—one with its own currency and government administration, a common-law legal system, and freedoms of press, speech, and religion.

But as the halfway mark of the SAR’s lifespan approaches in 2022, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted, harassment and brutality have become normalized, and activists are being jailed en masse. To make matters worse, a national security law that further crimps Hong Kong’s freedoms has recently been decreed in Beijing. This tragic backslide has dire worldwide implications—as China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower’s control.

Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World tells the complete story of how a city once famed for protests so peaceful that toddlers joined grandparents in millions-strong rallies became a place where police have fired more than 10,000 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets and even live ammunition at their neighbors, while pro-government hooligans attack demonstrators in the streets. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, author Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation firsthand. As a celebrated publisher and journalist, he has unrivaled access to the full range of the city’s society, from student protestors and political prisoners to aristocrats and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, this book is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is, in light of China's Xi and Russia's Putin inking a deal for "world domination", beyond urgent that we listen to Author Clifford's personal experience on China's until-now slow, patient, and carefully deniable march towards world domination.

After almost thirty years as a foreign resident in Hong Kong, Author Clifford...able, at any time, to leave this city he loves for a solid and certain welcome "home"...was a more than modestly invested resident of what was to be a Special Autonomous Region of China with rights and freedoms guaranteed by treaty in 1984, to take effect in 1997's handover of Hong Kong and be in place until 2047. (I can't help but wonder if the symmetry of that date with the centennial of India and Pakistan's partition and independence was deliberate.) I am sure that his pain, as he's watched the world shrug its shoulders when viewing (at a profitable distance) China's steady, concerted, implacable abrogation of the treaty, is intense. It comes from a genuine love for this unique and vibrant world that is the port on the Pearl River into the South China Sea.

If this year's Beijing Winter Olympics had not focused some attention on the Uyghur Genocide (alleged, in case some troll farm decides I'm good as a target, alleged genocide) and the de-Uyghurization of children in boarding schools, a policy shamelessly, shamefully modeled on US and Canadian Native populations' systematic abuse of the too-recent past, and darn near compelled the regime to require a Uyghur skier to act as torchbearer at the opening ceremonies, no doubt we would all be listening to Author Clifford in a near-comatose indifference.

It is the besetting sin of the capitalist, "democratic" society to look on apathetically when things occur that do not earn or cost them money.

But that said, are we just helpless as the autocratic 2.4 billion-strong Asian/Russian Neues Herrenvolk flex their economic and resource-controlling might? What, then, would be the point of picking up the book? Author Clifford's not Cassandra, nor even Tiresias. He is, though, a keen observer, a skilled craftsman of ideas, and an effective communicator of what he has observed as well as what he has seen work or not work in countering the actions taken by the Chinese authorities. He makes a very plain, inescapable fact crystal clear: China is on a tight time schedule to achieve its goals.

Like the US now, like the Soviet Union in 1989, the population-shrinking bomb's going off in China within the next two decades. The growth, economic and technological, that China has experienced, came at the price of fewer births among Han Chinese (the infamous one-child policy is already scrapped), the real people in China's HIGHLY racist culture. So they need to get their control of Tibet (source of water for over 2 billion people!), of Taiwan (control of the South China Sea, busiest shipping lanes on Earth!), and Xinjiang (mineral wealth beyond belief!) fully consolidated yesterday at the latest.

So it needs maximum Red Army head count. And that's set to decline. Hence the sudden-seeming, multi-pronged, and many-faceted repressions, aggressions, and pacifications we're seeing. Author Clifford, in his wordsmithing, does a more deft and delectable job than I have, but he is not one whit less urgent in his bid for your attention. The world faces a large number of concurrent crises...nothing new there...but one does rather need to step away from the genuine anguish of watching the labor of decades, a century, being dismantled on so many fronts at once. Author Clifford, while his love for Hong Kong doesn't inspire me with similar love, does inspire me to look at the events in Hong Kong and think..."uh oh."

But on an entirely different plane. One of, "wait a minute, that's what the CCP did in Hong Kong!" One of seeing past the mendacious excuses offered for authoritarian groundwork-laying. One of "it can happen here if we let it." There is a level on which reading this book will, and should, cause anyone born in times that called themselves democratic to look long and hard at the political landscape in the US and think "it's not a single second too soon to take decisive action against the home-grown authoritarian movement."

Please.