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COMPETING CHINESE POLITICAL VISIONS: Hong Kong vs. Beijing on Democracy. By Sonny Shiu-Hing Lo. Santa Barbara, CA; Denver, CO: Praeger Security International, 2010. xii, 294 pp. (Tables.) US$59.95 cloth. ISBN 978-0-313-36505-8.
Since Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereign control more than thirteen years ago, there has been no shortage of scholarly works that contemplate Hong Kong's political future under Beijing's "One Country, Two Systems" formula. Lo's book tackles this much-studied topic from an interactive perspective: i.e., he seeks to explain not only Beijing's impact on Hong Kong's politics, but also how Hong Kong's experimenting with city-level democracy may influence the democratization of mainland China.
The book has nine chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. Most chapters are empirical case studies, including Hong Kong activists' role in assisting the pro-democracy movement in 1989, the 1 July marches since 2003, major architects of Hong Kong's democracy movement, the Hong Kong Democratic Party, the trajectory of local elections in 2007 and 2008, etc. Chapter 9, the last chapter, addresses the larger, thematic question of the interactive pattern among Beijing, the Hong Kong government, and the democrats. The author's argument is straightforward, though unsurprising. He argues that "the vision of democracy held...