China’s communist authorities in Beijing and their handpicked leaders in Hong Kong have been busy lately trying to rewrite the recent tumultuous history of this former British colony turned Chinese “special administrative region.”

In the government’s revisionist narrative of the 2019 protests, espoused repeatedly in official pronouncements and the state-run media, no mention is made of the unpopular extradition bill that triggered the unrest or the heavy-handed police response that fueled citizens’ anger. Instead, the near-daily demonstrations were “violent riots” by pro-independence separatists and were orchestrated by anti-China “foreign forces” intent on undermining communist rule. China’s leadership insists that the new national security law has restored peace and stability and that China’s drastic overhaul of the city’s electoral system has improved its democratic development.

Fortunately, a plethora of new books published or in the pipeline is offering a corrective, with journalists and authors providing a contemporaneous record of the sweeping changes that have convulsed Hong Kong since the Occupy Central protests, also called the Umbrella Revolution, in 2014. But most observers writing about Hong Kong use 1997 as their starting point, the time when the city ended a century and a half as a British colony and began an uncertain future under Chinese sovereignty.

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Two recent books cover roughly that same period, from the handover through the Umbrella Revolution and up to the 2019 protests and the imposition of the security law. But the authors come from widely different backgrounds, experiences and sensibilities.

“Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere,” by Mark L. Clifford, is the more polemical of the two. Clifford, an American former journalist, spent almost three decades in Hong Kong, first for the now-defunct Far Eastern Economic Review magazine and later as editor in chief of two of the city’s surviving English-language newspapers, the Standard and the South China Morning Post. His is a journalistic book in the traditional sense, offering readers a rapid-fire recounting of the key events from the Occupy movement to the arrests of prominent politicians and journalists in 2020 and 2021. He also takes time to delve into the history of the handover negotiations between Britain and China, as well as the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, which plunged Hong Kong into crisis and prompted a wave of emigration.

Karen Cheung’s “The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir” is a more personal work, detailing her search for identity, struggles with depression and political awakening, which came about around the time of the most recent protests. The unrest serves primarily as a backdrop to her biography as a young Chinese woman who came of age in the post-colonial years when Hong Kong was under China’s sovereignty; initially little changed, and there was general optimism that the territory would be allowed to maintain its separate, autonomous system unimpeded for 50 years, as China had pledged in the handover.

While Clifford is angry and unsparing in his criticisms of China’s communist leaders and Hong Kong’s local officials, Cheung offers more of a sad lament for a city that she has called home since the age of 1 but that she only recently grew to love.

Clifford lived in Hong Kong long enough to gain status as a permanent resident with voting rights. But he still at times writes about the city as an expatriate outside observer looking in. He sprinkles his chapters with a few characters — his barber, a financial professional, an art gallery owner and his Cantonese teacher, whose goal was to compile the first dictionary of Cantonese. But these characters are rarely fully developed beyond a few pages, and most quickly disappear.

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He also devotes surprisingly scant attention to the protests that erupted in early June 2019 and continued into early 2020. “The 2019 summer of democracy descended into an increasingly bitter and violent autumn of discontent,” he notes in a chapter called “The Endgame.” He talks about how “police violence . . . sparked violence on the protesters’ side.” But he hurries through or skips over major events in the timeline.

Clifford, now back in the United States, is a former board member for Next Digital, the parent company of the popular pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, which was forced to close in 2021 when its top editors were arrested and the paper’s assets frozen. Its publisher, Jimmy Lai, was arrested in 2020. Clifford does not hide his admiration for Lai, who messaged the author “I’m being arrested” just as Clifford was on the way to meet him for breakfast. “The arrest of Jimmy Lai Chee-ying in February 2020 marked the intensification of a more sinister approach by Hong Kong authorities,” Clifford writes.

Lai, who is Catholic, wrote to Clifford from prison, apologizing to the author for causing him trouble because of their association and saying, “May the Lord’s peace and grace be with you and your family.”

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“This is the man China wants to destroy because of what he believes,” Clifford writes angrily. “Why is China afraid of Jimmy Lai? Why is China afraid of the Hong Kong people? Why is China afraid of freedom?” He later answers his own question, saying, “Hong Kong is a key battleground in China’s campaign to extinguish free thought,” which, he argues, has global consequences.

“China wants to decide what can be said, what slogans can be shouted, even what songs can be sung. China wants to decide whom presidents and prime ministers and parliamentarians can meet,” Clifford writes. He argues for the West to totally decouple its “economic, cultural, and personal links” to China — without explaining how such a separation could feasibly occur given the world’s interlinked economies. And in a bit of hyperbole, he adds, “Anything less may amount to an American death wish.”

Cheung spends little time on political analysis or colonial history. She even offers what sounds like an apology, writing, “I did not want to write a book ‘about Hong Kong’” and adding, “Maybe this isn’t the book you expected to read.” But through her graceful writing, especially about her early years, we learn about Hong Kong’s many different worlds and social strata, and her struggles to find her place.

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She went to an expensive international primary school run by Singaporeans — not because her father could afford it but out of his “wounded pride,” suggesting she was not accepted to the elite public schools because she was born in mainland China. In the primary school, she barely understood English, and her native language, Cantonese, was forbidden on campus, with Mandarin being the medium of instruction. When her friends from the Singaporean school went off to even pricier international high schools, she ended up back in the public school system, where she was “smack in the middle between the kids on social welfare and the ones who get sent off to English boarding schools.”

When Cheung’s old primary-school friends later called her “local,” it wasn’t as a compliment. And while other high school students set their sights on prestigious universities in the United States or Britain, she knew nothing about applying for scholarships and stayed home. “To the world I am in then,” she writes, “the University of Hong Kong is the holy grail.” She excelled in English and was drawn to writing and journalism, even though her teachers called it a “waste” because she didn’t choose to study law.

Her lyrical book is part diary and part love letter to her hometown, although she concedes that she didn’t actually come to love it until she moved away from her family’s apartment to attend the University of Hong Kong. She inhabited an entirely different world than the one known to expats, starting out cloistered in a working-class area called To Kwa Wan on the Kowloon side of the harbor, where, she recalls, “I don’t recall ever running into a single white person.”

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Cheung’s Hong Kong was far removed from the power brokers and business types who frequented the Mandarin Oriental hotel coffee shop and the prestigious Hong Kong Club. She hung out in the small bookstores that doubled as coffee shops, the restaurants atop the wet markets, the warehouses where indie bands played, the record shops and the waterfront parks. She had 22 different roommates in six different apartments from the time she left home for university until she met her partner.

Clifford had a close-up look at the 1997 handover events, from the rain-drenched ceremony on the harbor front to the Chinese border, where he watched thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops pour over.

Cheung in 1997 watched the handover unfolding on television as an unknowing 4-year-old kindergartner enjoying steamed fish. When planes took off from the nearby airport, rattling her home as they whisked away Hongkongers anxious to flee Chinese rule, Cheung professes that she was “oblivious to it all.” Later, she says, “Post-handover, my life is exactly the same.” She was still eating her pork and egg congee and enjoying Japanese anime cartoons.

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She writes about joining the protests in 2019 but never feeling entirely a part. She went to work most weekdays and on weekends donned her yellow hard hat and protective gear, not really knowing many of her fellow protesters. “It feels as if those two worlds do not converge,” she writes.

She has considered leaving, like many of her friends. But “for now,” she writes, “I’d like to stay as long as is possible, knowing one day it won’t be possible anymore.”

While coming from different vantage points, both books end on a similarly bleak note. Clifford concludes, “Hong Kong as a free city is no more.” Cheung writes, “This book is about the many ways a city can disappear, but also the many ways we, its people, survive.”

Keith Richburg is the director of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center. He covered the Hong Kong handover as a correspondent for The Washington Post.

Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World

What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere

By Mark L. Clifford

St. Martin’s. 306 pp. $29.99

The Impossible City

A Hong Kong Memoir

By Karen Cheung

Random House. 320 pp. $28

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