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

For the 150 years that Hong Kong was a British colony, people, money and technology flowed freely, while Hong Kong residents enjoyed freedoms that simply did not exist in mainland China. When the territory was handed over to China in 1997, the Communist Party promised that Hong Kong would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. Now, at the halfway mark, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted and activists have been jailed en masse following the decree of a sweeping national security law by Beijing. 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.

A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation first-hand and has unrivalled access to the full range of the city's society, from student protestors to billionaire businessmen and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.

About the Author
Mark L. Clifford is executive director of the Asia Business Council, editorial chair of the Asian Review of Books and a board member at Next Digital. He served as editor-in-chief of both English-language papers in Hong Kong, The Standard and the South China Morning Post. An honours history graduate of UC Berkeley and a fellow at Columbia University, he holds a University of Hong Kong PhD in Hong Kong history.

Reviews

Powerful, comprehensive and poignant, this book offers a truthful and balanced overview of events in Hong Kong over the past three decades or more. As someone who has lived and breathed much of what Mark Clifford writes, I identify with it and endorse it totally. If you want to understand Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party and the threat to freedom itself, you must make it a top priority to read this book

-- Benedict Rogers, co-founder and Chief Executive of Hong Kong Watch

Gripping and powerfully written ... Tells us much about the growing threat China's top leaders pose to global freedoms ... Clifford pulls in the reader through a vivid account of Hong Kong's history and on-the-ground reporting on the students, business tycoons and politicians central to this disturbing drama ... He taps into his deep experience running Hong Kong's top English language newspaper, directing the business association representing the region's most powerful companies, his close contacts with senior Hong Kong officials, and his crucial role as a director for Hong Kong's once most independent media company, whose destruction is central to this modern tragedy. Clifford, who has spent most of his adult life in Hong Kong, is uniquely suited to tell this sad story ... A must-read account on the ongoing destruction of Hong Kong and why it matters to the world

-- Dexter Roberts, author of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism

Mark Clifford has written a riveting and passionate account of China's attack on Hong Kong and its broader implications. Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World parts the curtains on what every informed citizen should know and be thinking about

-- Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean Emeritus, Yale School of Management

The world has usually viewed Hong Kong as either a last gasp of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonialism or, more recently, as a buzzing beehive of modern capitalism. Neither image captures the surprising phenomenon that Mark Clifford details in this masterly study. Hong Kong has now become a front line in the worldwide quest for human freedom. Pursuit of it has spouted like a geyser from Hong Kong wellsprings that are located neither in national pride nor in appetite for lucre but in human nature itself - in the desire to be master of one's own life. The Communist Party of China's repression of Hong Kong is both fierce and unscrupulous, and the world ignores this stand-off at its peril. As Vaclav Havel has taught us, an assault on human dignity anywhere is an assault on it everywhere

-- Perry Link, author of An Anatomy of Chinese



Book Information
ISBN 9780750999465
Author Mark L. Clifford
Format Hardback
Imprint The History Press Ltd
Publisher The History Press Ltd