The freedom fighters who dared to take on a communist superpower

In May 2020, as the planet grappled with the pandemic, China’s state media declared that there were ‘obvious deficiencies’ in Hong Kong law enforcement needing to be addressed. Any delusions this might have referred to intensifying police brutality in response to massive pro-democracy protests, let alone the unleashing of Triad thugs to attack participants, were dashed rapidly. Details emerged days later of a draconian new security law that criminalised any form of dissent, whether at home or abroad, with threat of life imprisonment. ‘When the world is not watching, they are killing Hong Kong,’ said Dennis Kwok, a lawyer and pro-democracy legislator.

He was right. This was the moment that a brutal dictatorship, rattled by the size of protests and infuriated by the failure of its stooges in the territory’s legal, political and security systems to stifle them, took matters into its own hands. In a carefully choreographed move, Beijing strangled the freedoms and spirit that made Hong Kong such a special place, a historic bridge between China and the West. The National People’s Congress announced that the new measure would be in place by 1 July – the 23rd anniversary of that rain-sodden day when Britain handed sovereignty to China under a ‘one country, two nations’ deal supposed to preserve its unique status for half a century.

The impact was instant as people wiped photographs from phones and shut down social media. Less than a year later, another legislator who fled the crackdown told me that 100 of his friends were behind bars, including a prominent media tycoon, journalists and youthful leaders of the protests. This excellent book by Shibani Mahtani, a Washington Post journalist, and Timothy McLaughlin, a writer at the Atlantic, details these sad events through the lives of four activists, weaving their tales into a narrative about the city and those freedom fighters who dared take on a communist superpower with almost inevitable consequences.