Hong Kong skyline. Flickr/Michael Hansen. Some rights reserved.
When I finally arrive back in Hong Kong in the early hours of a September morning, two years after the 2014 pro-democracy protests, it’s in the middle of a storm. Walking through the rain-splattered city, I see that the highways running across the heart of the finance district have been restored. It’s utterly unrecognizable from when I was last here, when activists led mass occupations, in a bold claim to redefine popular power, using umbrellas to shield themselves from waves of tear gas fired by police, and turning the heart of Hong Kong into a untamed tent city. But although public space in the city-state has been resanitised, we still need to understand the ways in which Hong Kong is entering an unprecedented identity crisis.
