Hong Kong’s Summer of Discontent - Foreign Policy Research Institute

This is a condensed version of an article that be published in the Fall 2019 issue of Orbis, titled “Hong Kong’s Summer of Discontent: Another Battle in the Long War over Autonomy, Democracy, and the Rule of Law.” In the summer of 2019, Hong Kong once again plunged into political crisis over a legal issue.  Veteran observers across a wide political spectrum characterized it as the worst such episode in Hong Kong in many decades.[1]  It was the latest battle in a long-running war over interrelated issues of autonomy, democracy, and the rule of law.  As on other occasions following Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule in 1997, and with antecedents in earlier times, the struggle was between two sides holding fundamentally different notions of law and governance that underlay, and transcended, the disputes of the moment. This time, the focus was proposed legislation that would authorize Hong Kong’s government to hand over to Mainland Chinese authorities those whom the latter identified as cr

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• Alex Jiang