Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink

“Vigil was my effort to write a very short book in a series of very short books called Columbia Global Reports. These are in between really extended magazine pieces and fully-fledged books and are either by journalists who have a scholarly bent or scholars who have a journalistic bent.

I was a fan of the series as a reader before I got to write for it. I wanted to include reportage and some of my experiences spending time in Hong Kong, meeting some of the activists, including Joshua Wong. I combined that with a brief history of the city and an effort to connect the events in Hong Kong to the history of protest in China as well, because I really got fascinated by the Hong Kong protests because they felt in part like a continuation, in a new setting and register, of the tradition I had been studying on the mainland. That tradition had been suppressed on the mainland but had taken on this new and different life in Hong Kong, ironically at the very moment when Hong Kong people were becoming more and more concerned with having an identity separate from China. The protesters were also drawing on international currents of youth activism.

In the book, I bring in comparisons with protests in China’s past and comparisons with other places as well, such as the Eastern European protests against Soviet rule. I think of Hong Kong now as being, in some ways, like countries that were part of the Soviet empire, but not in the Soviet Union, before 1989. I see parallels between the Hong Kong protests and the Prague spring and the Solidarity movement in the late 1970s, early 80s in Poland—protests that were suppressed the way the Hong Kong ones were.

I thought I would end Vigil with the 30th anniversary of the June 4th massacre. I knew I would be in Hong Kong for that and thought I would end up wondering how much longer that kind of event—which is so different from what can happen on the mainland—could continue happening in Hong Kong. But then, when the protests exploded right after that, the book became as much about the 2019 protests that I saw the beginning of, but watched from afar. I wrote the book over the summer of 2019 and it became very much a first draft of history.”

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, in an interview on the best China books of 2020