Hong Kong Burning: Simon Elegant on the 2019 Protests

“It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated’ by the Washington Post

Hong Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city around him is burning. Rather than a John Woo movie, this is the setting for a Simon Elegant thriller. Born in Hong Kong, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, most recently the Washington Post’s man in China until Jeff Bezos “eliminated” him three months ago — Elegant has written the definitive Hong Kong novel.

First and foremost, City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong is a crime thriller. Superintendent Killian Tong — half-Chinese, half-Irish, loved by no one in his department — investigates a murder while his sister is noisily demonstrating on the other side of the barricades. But the book doubles as a compressed history of Hong Kong: from Palmerston’s “barren rock” in the 1840s — seized from China after the opium wars — through the ninety-nine-year lease, the handover in 1997, and the slow strangulation of the “one country, two systems” promise.

Elegant is neither a hardline China hawk nor an apologist for Beijing. Yes, he credits the British with a relatively enlightened administration — from its public housing to the uncorrupt civil service that inspired the Singapore model. But he is also clear about what happened after 1997. Hong Kong people assumed Beijing would honour the Thatcher-Deng terms, and then discovered, to their horror, that they had no rights. It was a silent coup rather than a gaudy takeover of power. And so the 2019 protests — when a million people went onto the streets — are not just a backdrop to City on Fire but also the real-life stage on which Hong Kong burnt.

Five Takeaways

•       Enlightened Colonialism — With Caveats: Was Hong Kong an example of enlightened British colonialism? Elegant says: relatively, yes. The administration was light-handed. The public housing was so good that Singapore copied it. The civil service was — after 1972, when they had to create the ICAC following a police corruption scandal — genuinely clean. Milton Friedman praised the free-market model. But it was also racialized: the upper levels were almost entirely white Anglo, and the Chinese were largely excluded from administrative power. Governor Jock MacLehose changed this. Enlightened colonialism, Elegant concludes, is not a contradiction in terms — but it is relative. Compared to the Belgian Congo, Hong Kong was paradise.

•       One Country, Two Systems: A Promise Broken: The terms negotiated by Thatcher and Deng in the 1980s guaranteed Hong Kong’s autonomy until 2047. Hong Kong people assumed these terms were real and would be adhered to. They were not. The first attempt to pass a national security law came in 2004. There were mass protests in 2014. In 2019, a million people — in a city of six million — were on the streets. Beijing’s choice was not between crushing them or not. It was between blood in the streets and a silent coup. They chose the silent coup. The national security law of 2020 was the final instrument. There is no longer any meaningful “one country, two systems.”

•       The Policeman as Moral Complexity: Elegant’s decision to make his protagonist a policeman — rather than a protester — is the novel’s central artistic choice. Superintendent Killian Tong is not a villain. He is a man caught between institutions he has serve