Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World

“Powerful, comprehensive and poignant, this book offers a truthful and balanced overview of events in Hong Kong over the past three decades or more. As someone who has lived and breathed much of what Mark Clifford writes, I identify with it and endorse it totally. If you want to understand Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party and the threat to freedom itself, you must make it a top priority to read this book.”—Benedict Rogers, co-founder and Chief Executive of Hong Kong Watch

“Gripping and powerfully-written, Clifford pulls in the reader through a vivid account of Hong Kong’s history and on-the-ground reporting on the students, business tycoons, and politicians central to this disturbing drama, that tells us much about the growing threat China’s top leaders pose to global freedoms. He taps into his deep experience running Hong Kong’s top English language newspaper, directing the business association representing the region’s most powerful companies, his close contacts with senior Hong Kong officials, and his crucial role as a director for Hong Kong’s once most independent media company, whose destruction is central to this modern tragedy. Clifford, who has spent most of his adult life in Hong Kong, is uniquely suited to tell this sad story . . . A must-read account on the ongoing destruction of Hong Kong and why it matters to the world.”—Dexter Roberts, author of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism

“Mark Clifford has written a riveting and passionate account of China’s attack on Hong Kong and its broader implications. Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World parts the curtains on what every informed citizen should know and be thinking about.”—Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean Emeritus, Yale School of Management

“The world has usually viewed Hong Kong as either a last gasp of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonialism or, more recently, as a buzzing beehive of modern capitalism. Neither image captures the surprising phenomenon that Mark Clifford details in this masterly study. Hong Kong has now become a front line in the world-wide quest for human freedom. Pursuit of it has spouted like a geyser from Hong Kong wellsprings that are located neither in national pride nor in appetite for lucre but in human nature itself—in the desire to be master of one’s own life. The Communist Party of China’s repression of Hong Kong is both fierce and unscrupulous, and the world ignores this stand-off at its peril. As Vaclav Havel has taught us, an assault on human dignity anywhere is an assault on it everywhere.”—Perry Link, professor emeritus, East Asian Studies, Princeton University and author of An Anatomy of Chinese

“An agile observer and diligent journalist, Clifford leads us through Hong Kong’s fraught modern history in relation to the striving for democratic freedoms, and he reveals many stark consequences brought about by the suppression of its spirit. An intimate, eye-opening chronicle that should serve as an alarm to fragile democratic republics around the world.”—Kirkus Reviews