The future of Hong Kong is uncertain and unpredictable, says ‘global historian’ Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Sinologist Jeffrey Wasserstrom shares his experience of last year’s Hong Kong protests, their anger and utopia, and why he is unlikely to visit China again

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom at the University of California Irvine. Photo: Audrey Fong / UC Irvine Communications

Published: 11:15am, 7 Nov 2020Updated: 12:25pm, 7 Nov 2020

All in all, it has been a very Jeffrey Wasserstrom kind of year. Hardly a week has gone by in which global headlines have not seemed like an extension of his own interests as a historian, scholar and one of the West’s leading sinologists. Wasserstrom’s profile page at the University of California, Irvine (where he is Chancellor’s Professor of History) lists those interests as “China, Protest, Globalization, Gender, Urban”. Very 2020.

How have decades of research into youth protest movements helped him understand the year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations, agitprop statue toppling, and rallies both for and against lockdowns? What did Wasserstrom, the “global historian” who has written extensively about China’s relationship with the world, make of the pandemic, the “trade wars” with the United States and Canada, the outrage around the Uygurs in Xinjiang or fears of Beijing surveillance built into Huawei 5G?

And then there’s Hong Kong, the subject of Vigil , the book Wasserstrom released at the start of the year, which will be high on the list of topics he will be discussing on November 14, in his online talk as part of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival (HKILF).

But perhaps more than any single news story, it is the sheer unpredictability of 2020 that feels closest to Wasserstrom’s heart. It is a central motif in Vigil, which combines a concise, incisive history of Hong Kong with personal reportage of the Occupy Central “umbrella movement”. As Wasserstrom regularly reminds us, here is a place that for centuries has made mincemeat of prophecies.

Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom. Photo: Handout

“Perhaps the furthest back in time we can go to find a noteworthy underestimation and memorably mistaken prediction about Hong Kong is to a letter dated April 21, 1841,” he writes, referring to Lord Palmerston’s disappointed description of Hong Kong as a “barren island with hardly a House upon it”.

As if to prove the point, only a few months after Vigil’s up-to-the-second reportage, its portrait of Hong Kong as a city of protest already seems a thing of the past.