标题: 2022.06.17最能解释香港历史的七本书 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-6 21:35 标题: 2022.06.17最能解释香港历史的七本书 Economist Reads | Hong Kong
The seven books that best explain Hong Kong’s history
Our Asia digital editor reads up on the city’s colourful tale
Nathan Road is one of the busiest and most important shopping areas in Hong Kong (Photo by In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)
Jun 17th 2022 (Updated Jul 1st 2022)
Share
Give
This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
In the space of three years, Hong Kong has gone from being Asia’s world city to a repressive one. It is a place where opposition figures and journalists are now thrown in jail, along with thousands of locals whose crime was to demand greater democracy. The dizzying speed at which a vibrant and free-spirited city has been brought to China’s heel is depressing. But it is also undeniably fascinating. Here, our Asia digital editor selects seven books that tell Hong Kong’s colourful tale.
A Modern History of Hong Kong. By Steve Tsang. Bloomsbury Academic; 352 pages; $25 and £18.99
This extensive history covers the period from 1841, the year before Hong Kong was ceded to Britain, to 1997, when China retook control. Hanging over the narrative is Britain’s gradual realisation that it had a “Hong Kong problem”. While Hong Kong island and the Kowloon peninsula were awarded to Britain in perpetuity, under “unequal treaties” signed after the opium wars, the far larger New Territories, stretching from Kowloon to the Shenzhen river, were only given on a 99-year lease in 1898. For many years, writes Mr Tsang, politicians in Westminster considered Britain too powerful (and China too backward) to make handing back its crown dependency conceivable. But the Japanese conquering of Hong Kong in 1941 dispelled hubristic ideas of British invincibility. Throughout the book Mr Tsang dispenses history with even-handedness, acknowledging that Britain’s colonial years brought prosperity, an efficient administration and concepts such as due process, while never neglecting the second-class treatment of ethnic Chinese. The book’s misfortune, as its author accepts, is that it ends in 1997, and thus lacks a post-colonial perspective. But as a primer on Hong Kong under British rule, it sets the standard.
The Gate to China. By Michael Sheridan. Oxford University Press; 450 pages; $29.95. HarperCollins; £25
Another history of Hong Kong looks at the territory through its importance to China. Mr Sheridan’s chapters on the years leading up to the handover are particularly impressive. Here, he takes the reader into the smoke filled rooms where tetchy talks and endless muscle-flexing take place. The pages are filled with fascinating sketches of the main protagonists: of Deng Xiaoping comprehensively outmanoeuvring Margaret Thatcher, who thought she could persuade China’s paramount leader to allow Britain to continue its administration of Hong Kong beyond 1997. Of Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last colonial governor, who, to China’s fury, introduced democratic reforms shortly before the handover (of a kind that had been conspicuously lacking before under British rule). And of Sir Percy Cradock, an ambassador to China, who went on to be Thatcher’s chief adviser on the country, and had negotiated the handover deal under which Sir Chris had to operate—which, he would insist, was the best that could be achieved in the circumstances, given the weakness of Britain’s position.
Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World. By Mark L. Clifford. St Martin’s Press; 306 pages; $29.99. The History Press; £20
Here is a contribution from our Banyan columnist, who thinks this book a powerful account of Hong Kong’s slide into autocracy. Mr Clifford is a former journalist notable for having edited both of the territory’s main English-language newspapers. While he joined a stream of Hong Kong exiles, his acquaintance with many of the central characters enriches the story. His account of the persecution of the stubborn democracy campaigner and newspaper owner Jimmy Lai, who faces years in jail on outrageous charges, is especially poignant. Back on the mainland Mr Lai’s kin even excised his name from ancestral records that date back 28 generations. The author is strong on the history of the territory’s largely peaceful protests—support for China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement, mown down in June 1989, was the first cause to bring huge numbers onto Hong Kong’s streets. But Mr Clifford also helpfully reminds readers of earlier aspirations, notably after the second world war under one enlightened governor, for political participation—attempts frustrated not only by Hong Kong’s local elites, but also by the Chinese Communist Party itself.
More Summer reads
• What if the Ottoman Empire had not collapsed?
•Mindfulness is useless in a pandemic, suggests 1843 magazine
• Our Free Exchange columnist considers just how Dickensian China is
•Six guides to biology as seen at different scales
• What’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history, writes Yuval Noah Harari
Indelible City. By Louisa Lim. Riverhead Books; 293 pages; $28
The Impossible City. By Karen Cheung. Random House; 319 pages; $28 and £23
These memoirs, both released in 2022, offer more personal accounts of Hong Kong’s post-handover times. Ms Lim’s book more squarely deals with the protests of the past decade. In 2019 she decided that she could not in good faith both report on the protests and join them. And so she ditched her job at a local TV station. Hers is the story of an ordinary Hong Konger who feels driven to take to the streets. Laced throughout her tale is another: that of the “King of Kowloon”, a street calligrapher over whom Ms Lim obsesses. This troubled man, who believed himself the peninsula’s rightful heir, went on a nightly quest over decades, daubing the city’s walls with his diatribes in scratchy Chinese characters. In time, those graffiti that were not scrubbed off became sought after artworks. Ms Cheung’s book, meanwhile, is the more intimate of the pair. In it she lays out a personal map of a city shaped not only by protest, but also by her own battles with mental illness and with her parents, whose insistence on filial devotion proves stifling. Read our review of both books.
City of Darkness. By Greg Girard and Ian Lambot. Watermark Publications; 216 pages; £58.50
One of the oddities of the treaty that handed Kowloon to the British was that China was allowed to keep a fort on the peninsula, overlooking British positions on Hong Kong island. This dot of Chinese-sovereign land eventually morphed into Kowloon Walled City, a high-rise shantytown outside of British jurisdiction. At its most bulging, 35,000 people lived in an area measuring just 100m x 200m, purportedly making it the most densely populated place on Earth. Despite its reputation for vice and danger, not to mention its lack of basic amenities, a thriving community of people called Kowloon Walled City home. During the 1980s—it was finally razed in 1994—Mr Girard and Mr Lambot documented the city’s maze of dark alleys and haphazard staircases, as well as its colourful inhabitants, and published their work in this mesmerising book of photos and interviews. Original copies of the book are hard to come by, but a “revisited” edition was released in 2014.
The Honourable Schoolboy. By John le Carré. Penguin; 624 pages; $28 and £7.99
Set in the 1970s and part of the Smiley series of spy thrillers, this is surely the most famous novel to be set in Hong Kong. To this writer, it can conjure a mirage of nostalgia for a city he never knew—especially while swigging a Martini in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (fcc), the boozy hack-den that is itself a central character in the book. (Journalism has always been a handy cover for spies.) But the Hong Kong that le Carré paints in “The Honourable Schoolboy” has long-since vanished. British spooks no longer lord it in the city, which was an intelligence centre in a region over which they once held some sway. Also gone is the idea that Hong Kong is a haven of freedom, where journalists might let off steam after tours of duties covering repressive Asian regimes. Now the territory has its own autocratic government, which expels foreign journalists and locks up critical local newspaper editors. Even the fcc—which long ago moved from the harbourview site that le Carré evokes—is now thought to be in the government’s crosshairs.■
_______________
Do you have your own recommendations? Send them to summer@economist.com with the subject line “Hong Kong history” and your name, city and country. We will publish a selection of readers’ suggestions.
经济学家》读后感｜香港
最能解释香港历史的七本书
我们的亚洲数字编辑阅读了这个城市的缤纷故事
弥敦道是香港最繁忙和最重要的购物区之一 (Photo by In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)
2022年6月17日（2022年7月1日更新）。
