Hong Kong is unyielding: a city that cannot be erased

"Who" has the right to tell the history of Hong Kong? "Who" can decide the future of Hong Kong?

British Hong Kong Government? The Chinese Communist regime? Or everyone who "really loves Hong Kong"?

What scares China is the power of memory,

We must find ways to keep remembering,

What is happening in our city right now...

★"The New York Times" 2022 Book Selection

★The latest masterpiece by Lin Mulian, the author of "Return to Tiananmen"

★ New preface by the author of the world’s exclusive and only Chinese version

"When I started writing this book, what I cared about was actually not the present, but the past. I wanted to reshape Hong Kong's history and let Hong Kong people tell their own stories, rather than continue to have the colonial rulers narrate it for them. . At that time, I did not expect that the Chinese Communist Party would try to rewrite the present so quickly. It not only forcibly changed the perspective, but even distorted the focus. These actions of the Chinese Communist Party are disorienting. Every moment I recorded in this book, Turning against guests has become a top priority."──Lin Mulian, preface to the Chinese edition

To the British government, Hong Kong is a blank slate with no history or past. Former British Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston said it was a "barren rock" and former British Governor Sir Pauling said it was a "source of chaos." "The hotbed", Mrs. Thatcher believed that Hong Kong was just a bargaining chip on the card table. For the Chinese government, Hong Kong has been an inalienable part of China since ancient times and the source of national humiliation in the past century. The return to the motherland in 1997 is a historical moment with no room for discussion and no possibility of change. In this, Hong Kong people have no room for comment. As Deng Xiaoping said: "The Sino-British negotiations will be resolved by China and the United Kingdom... In the past, the so-called three-legged stool (Sino-British Hong Kong) did not have three legs, but only two legs (Chinese-British Hong Kong). )."

When the anti-extradition movement was raging in Hong Kong in 2019 and the repression continued to escalate, the author of this book, Lin Mulian, who has reported and written about China issues for many years, began to conduct in-depth research on Hong Kong historical documents, only to find that Hong Kong people were under the rule of the British Hong Kong government and the Chinese Communist regime. , so lacking in self-identity, and the historical memory is so incomplete and tampered with, "Who are we? What are we defending? Then we started to discuss what are the core values ​​of Hong Kong." In the end, Mulan Lam tried to break away. The official definition, whether it is the British or the Chinese historical framework, she wants to write a history for Hong Kong, a history that is interpreted by the Hong Kong people themselves.

And the beginning of all this will be told by Tsang Tso Choi, the "Emperor of Kowloon" who some say is a street artist, some say he is a calligrapher, and some even say he is a lunatic. Tsang Tso-choi declared himself the master of the land and the king of Hong Kong. He used the pen and ink in his hands to "declare sovereignty" tirelessly for fifty years. The Emperor of Kowloon is like a symbol. The Hong Kong people who occupied the streets with their bodies, the Hong Kong people who tried to take back their own history and memory, and the Hong Kong people who continue to challenge the control of the Chinese Communist Party overseas will need more decisive perseverance and the will to resist.