The Final Blow to Hong Kong

Few places have inspired more tropes and clichés than Hong Kong. A bridge between East and West. A gateway to China—or China’s to the world. “They strike a gong and fire off a mid-day gun,” one 1960s travel promo for the city declared.

Buried under the often appalling Orientalism with which these qualities were frequently presented were some truths. A Chinese city influenced by more than 150 years of British rule, Hong Kong had deftly, if not perfectly, served as a conduit for money, goods, and people moving between mainland China and the rest of the world. If the crackdown on the city in recent years dimmed the hopes of those who wanted to see this continue, these hopes have now all but been extinguished. The damage inflicted on Hong Kong by Beijing and its loyalists, and the consequences they have wrought, has made it clear that the city’s balancing act won’t be