After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kongs first Handover, 19972019 [Paperback]

This book offers a sharp, critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 anti-extradition 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 post-colonial 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 de-colonization can and might yet take in the city. A concluding chapter examines Hong Kongs need for state capacity and proper, livelihood  development, in the light of theOmicron wave of the Covid pandemic, as the SAR  goes forward into a second handover era.   

Chapter 1: In the Event: the Politics and Contexts of the 2019 Anti-ELAB Protests.- Chapter 2: Basic Law, Basic Problems: Autonomy & Identity.- Chapter 3: Re-colonization or De-colonization in the Enclave?.- Chapter 4: CODA: The Search for State Capacity After Covid & Colonialism.

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 Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. was published by Palgrave in 2019. His first book was China and Orl³X