Taiwan, Hong Kong, Columbia

Chris Horton’s ‘Ghost Nation’ and Ching Kwan Lee’s ‘Forever Hong Kong’ follow protesters and revolutionaries who, successfully or otherwise, challenged the power of the state.

By Paul KreitmanFebruary 11, 2026

• Politics

• History

IF YOU WERE looking for a textbook example of a successful protest movement, Taiwan would be a good place to turn. When former Harvard Law School student Annette Lu founded Formosa Magazine in August 1979, the island had just entered its third decade of martial law administered by a brutal, unelected, US-backed dictatorship. In Taiwan, these years are known as the “White Terror” era (1947–87). Power was concentrated in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, composed overwhelmingly of Chinese who had retreated to Taiwan after defeat at the hands of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War (1945–49).

The civil war had resumed after Japan’s surrender in 1945 ended an uneasy wartime truce between the rival parties, which had nominally set aside their conflict in 1937 to jointly resist Japan’s invasion (though they still clashed intermittently). For decades after the Nationalists took control of Taiwan, elections were suspended, secret police swept up suspected dissidents into a sprawling torture gulag, schools and universities were surveilled by political officers dedicated to rooting out communism, and government-affiliated triad gangs intimidated, beat up, and sometimes murdered anyone rash enough to openly criticize the regime. Lu’s magazine was immediately shut down, its offices raided. Within a year, Lu found herself in front of a military tribunal, which sentenced her to 12 years in prison for violent sedition.

Twenty years later, in 2000, the Democratic Progressive Party, the political party that grew in part from Lu’s protest movement, defeated the Nationalists in open multiparty elections. Lu herself was sworn in as Taiwan’s vice president. Under the DPP, Taiwan became the first Asian country to recognize Indigenous rights (2005) and legalize gay marriage (2019). It has a good claim to be the most progressive and perhaps also the most democratic country in the region.

There have been more recent successes too. By 2014, the Nationalist Party was back in power and planning to push through a trade deal that would have opened Taiwan’s service sector, including media outlets, to investment from companies in the People’s Republic of China. A “Sunflower” movement of students, scholars, and activists managed to derail the deal by occupying the Taiwanese legislature for 24 days. At the height of the movement, which followed other Taiwanese ones with naturalistic names such as the Wild Lily protests in the 1990s, clashes between students and police brought tens of thousands of Taiwanese to rally around the presidential palace in solidarity with the protesters. Twenty-two of the Sunflower organizers were later arrested and tried, but they were acquitted in a remarkable display of judicial support for disobedience. In the words of one activist, “the Sunflower students saved Taiwan.”

This may seem obvious in hindsight. Of course US support for the Chiang regime was going to soften after President Richard Nixon pivoted to Beijing in the 1970s. Of course the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975 (and of his antagonist Mao Zedong the year after) would open up new political possibilities. Of course Chiang’s son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo would agree, on his deathbed, to lift martial law and allow elections. Of course a new generation of Nationalist leaders, born and raised in Taiwan, would have a different outlook. But it was not obvious at the time and it was not inevitable. Had it not been for protesters like Annette Lu, things could have gone very differently indeed.

This is the story Chris Horton tells in his book Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival (2025). Horton reported from China early in his career but has spent the last decade as a foreign correspondent in Taiwan, during which he secured interviews with many key players in its contemporary history. One was with its most recent former president, Tsai Ing-wen, who led the DPP to victory in 2016 and 2020 and remains one of the very few female heads of an Asian state who was not related to a previous male leader. Horton also met and profiled an earlier former president, Lee Teng-hui, the first Taiwan-born Nationalist leader. Lee was involved in student politics as a youth, helping to organize a 1947 protest against the United States that followed the rape of a university student by two American soldiers in Beijing. In Horton’s account, Lee comes across as a fascinating Gorbachev figure. Although he was a direct beneficiary of the Nationalists’ repressive apparatus, he actively chose liberalization because he believed the time was right for it. More generally, the rapid dismantling of one-party rule in Taiwan after 1986 has elements that look remarkably similar to accounts of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, which unfolded at roughly the same time.

But for me, the most intriguing character in the book is the Marxist revolutionary Su Beng, author of the first-ever modern history of Taiwan. Su grew up under Japanese colonial rule, studied at Waseda University in Tokyo, fought alongside Mao’s communists in China, then returned to Taiwan but fled after a failed attempt to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. He wound up back in Tokyo, where he ran a Taiwanese restaurant by day and taught bomb-making to would-be revolutionaries by night. Somehow, he also found time to research and write Taiwan’s 400 Year History, published in 1962. Strikingly, it was first published in Japanese, a language that Taiwanese who had grown up under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) would have been able to read.

Su Beng’s action-packed life illustrates a key theme of Horton’s book: the movement for Taiwanese independence has always been international. Along with Su in Tokyo and Annette Lu at Harvard, there was Henry Liu, an émigré journalist who supported himself by running a gift shop at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Liu’s writing, which appeared in Chinese-language publications in San Francisco and Hong Kong, sufficiently enraged Nationalist intelligence agents that they hatched a plot to brazenly murder him. In doing so, they miscalculated, for Liu was a naturalized US citizen, and the resulting scandal helped to fatally weaken American support for the Chiang regime.

Su Beng also supplies another key framework for Horton’s book, for his was the earliest historical account to argue that “a distinct Taiwanese identity had been forged by four centuries of serial colonization.” For Su (and for Horton), this began with the Dutch in the 17th century, then continued with Qing and Japanese rule, and was repeated after 1945 under the Nationalists. Under the Chiang dynasty, new arrivals from China dominated political and administrative appointments, and schooling was conducted in Mandarin rather than languages with deeper roots in Taiwan, of which there are not just multiple Indigenous ones but also localized ones like Hokkien and Hakka. Local Taiwanese resistance was crushed, often brutally, as in the case of an uprising against Nationalist rule on February 28, 1947. And this was all justified by an appeal to crude ethnonationalism: Taiwanese were ethnically Chinese, the Nationalists insisted, and Chiang’s government was the legitimate ruler of all of China, albeit temporarily only in control of part of it. Ethnonationalism, in other words, was used to justify what was effectively colonial rule.

It’s not hard to see why this narrative of successive colonial governments appeals to critics of the Nationalist Party. For the DPP to acknowledge Taiwan’s Indigenous people as victims of multiple colonizers is tactically smart because it helps emphasize a distinctively Taiwanese identity opposed to the Chinese identity pushed by both the Nationalists and the Chinese Communist Party. But the historian in me is tempted to split hairs, for we are talking about very different types of colonial domination here. For the Dutch, Taiwan was essentially a trading post, and the colonial footprint on the island was relatively light. Qing administration of Taiwan saw something more akin to classic settler colonialism, with migrants from China seizing arable land and pushing Indigenous groups into the island’s mountainous interior. Under Japanese rule, there was not much immigration from Japan proper, but Japanese firms made inroads into the economy, and there was also an aggressive push towards acculturation, particularly during wartime. Nationalist rule arguably contained all of these elements, but flattening them into a simple story of a four-century struggle against colonial domination risks sacrificing important nuance. Are the DPP really heirs to a resistance struggle begun by Taiwanese Indigenous groups four centuries ago? Would Su Beng, in his Marxist revolutionary phase, have seen multiparty liberal democracy as the inevitable end point of Taiwanese history?

Still, caviling about details maybe misses the point. Perhaps, to paraphrase David Graeber, historians can tell us why colonialism happened, but sociologists can tell us what to do about it. Certainly, this is the approach adopted by Ching Kwan Lee in Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle (2025).

Like Su and Horton, Lee frames her narrative as a prolonged struggle against colonialism. Hong Kong, she suggests, has been doubly colonized by both Britain and China. This colonization has been not only literal (in the sense that one state and then the other has administered the territory) but also conceptual. Both governments have collaborated in promoting a narrative of “China as destiny” through the slogan “One Country, Two Systems.” And as with Nationalist rule over Taiwan, this colonial domination has been cloaked in the language of ethnonationalism. Both London and Beijing pushed the narrative that, because (most) Hong Kongers are ethnic Chinese, the territory must inevitably be incorporated into the Chinese nation-state—even if that means stifling democracy or self-determination.

But the handover of Hong Kong to the PRC in 1997 was not inevitable, Lee argues. At one point Hong Kong appeared on a UN list of colonial territories slated for eventual self-government. At another, British officials mooted a Singapore-style diplomatic solution that would make the city perpetually self-governing, albeit under Chinese sovereignty. Lee also attacks the idea that Hong Kong is fundamentally economically reliant on China. The city has always imported much of its food from overseas, she points out. Even the decision to rely on Chinese water imports was a political one. At one stage, the British colonial government invested in desalination plants and reservoir capacity in order to minimize the territory’s reliance on China. But once London committed to ceding the colony to China, administrators prioritized economic growth and fiscal stability over resource security. If the idea of a Hong Kong economy completely severed from China’s seems fanciful, even imagining it (as Lee does here) can be read as an act of defiance.

After the handover, Lee argues, Chinese colonialism took many forms. At the legal level, Beijing slowly chipped away at the “two systems” part of the One Country, Two Systems framework that was supposed to underpin governance of the territory for 50 years after the end of British rule. Belatedly, the British had ushered in democratic reforms that were supposed to continue after 1997, eventually resulting in universal suffrage. But these were postponed indefinitely. Instead, Beijing pressured the government to introduce educational reforms that would inculcate patriotic values in Hong Kong’s schoolchildren. Most gallingly, it also pushed for legislation that would allow dissidents to be extradited to China and tried for sedition, and for a national security law that introduced harsh penalties for a broad range of speech acts. In this version of One Country, Two Systems, it began to seem that all that would be left in the second half of the equation was a separate stock market and some different laws associated with contracts and banking.

This post-1997 colonialism, Lee argues, had an economic dimension as well. Chinese investors snapped up Hong Kong real estate, and pregnant Hong Kong mothers struggled to get places in maternity wards filled with mainland Chinese birth tourists. Chinese parallel traders selling Gucci handbags to cross-border day-trippers squeezed out businesses that catered to locals, sucking money out of the economy. Though many Hong Kongers prospered from the deepening economic integration with the PRC, others felt marginalized. Youth felt particularly powerless as they watched real estate prices spiral beyond affordability, and began to define themselves against the “yellow locusts” from China. Yet the territory’s gerrymandered democratic system, rigged in favor of big business and real estate developers, offered no outlet for their frustration.

In the early years after the handover, protests in Hong Kong were overwhelmingly peaceful, with organizers punctilious about acting within the bounds of the law. They applied for permission to march, which was generally given without much fuss. Relations between protesters and police were cordial, even warm. But something shifted after Beijing deployed an unusually crude maneuver to install its own candidate in the chief executive office, and punted universal suffrage into the long grass. In 2014, law professor Benny Tai and two other senior figures launched a campaign to occupy Hong Kong’s financial district. This was partly inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York three years earlier. The ferocity of the police reaction to this unsanctioned protest shocked the public, as Hong Kongers watched footage of officers firing tear gas canisters into crowds of peaceful protesters holding black umbrellas. The crowds swelled. The Central District occupy zone was joined by two in other parts of the city, including one in a working-class section of Kowloon. Student leaders quickly rivaled and then surpassed elder ones as the key faces of the encampments, and over 79 days, the goals expanded from a campaign for suffrage to a struggle for the right to protest itself. At the peak of what became known as the “Umbrella Movement,” Lee estimates, 20 percent of Hong Kongers participated in some way, and some 2,500 tents blocked main intersections in downtown Hong Kong and Kowloon.

The Umbrella Movement, named for the way students used umbrellas to protect against pepper spray, tear gas, and the rainy Hong Kong weather, marked a sea change in the scale and timbre of protests. A younger generation of activists had lost patience with the painstaking legalism of the prodemocracy campaigners. They channeled their energies into direct action and civil disobedience. The new movement did have leaders, or at least prominent spokespeople such as Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow in the early to mid-2010s and various others later, but the agenda was just as often set by viral posts or polls conducted on social media platforms. Lip service to the principle of One Country, Two Systems fell away, and new groups such as the Hong Kong Indigenous party flirted openly with the notion of independence from Beijing. Slogans such as “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” directly challenged both Communist Party rule and the ethnonationalist shibboleth of China as Hong Kong’s destiny.

Forever Hong Kong takes us inside this movement as it unfolded in five crucial years between 2014 and 2019. It is not hard to find parallels with Taiwanese history. Both protest movements were framed as decolonial struggles. Both made extensive use of international networks. As well as lobbying the US government for diplomatic support, Hong Kong activists drew on a repertoire of protest from Occupy Wall Street but also from South Korean farmers and China itself. There were, for example, annual Tiananmen vigils that honored the victims of the 1989 Beijing massacre but doubled as rallies for greater democracy in Hong Kong. Hong Kong activists even learned directly from Taiwan’s own prodemocracy movement as they attempted to calibrate the exact level of disruption the public would tolerate.

But whereas Horton sketches a fairly linear narrative of the Taiwan independence movement, focusing on prominent activists and politicians, Lee’s dense ethnographic account paints a more granular and, in many ways, more chaotic, open-ended picture. Even as the movement gathered steam by agglomerating a stew of grievances, it remained riven by class and gender tensions and by disagreements over tactics and strategy. Protesters deployed a range of methods including petitions, marches, human chains, strikes, boycotts, occupations, media appearances, and foreign lobbying to get their message across. And although the majority of protesters remained committed to peaceful activism, from as early as 2014, some began to skirmish with riot police using sticks and barricades. By 2019, teams of black-clad gas-masked youths were erecting barricades on campuses and lobbing bricks and Molotov cocktails at officers on a nightly basis. Some even switched to what was effectively guerrilla warfare, launching attacks on off-duty police, prominent Beijing supporters, and their families.

Lee takes particular care to understand the motivations behind these more militant activists, even as their tactics became more extreme. Some were simply more exposed to police violence due to their position on the fringe of the encampment, and those at Mongkok, the site of the Kowloon occupy zone in 2014, were targeted by mask-wearing pro-CCP mobs with suspected links to organized crime. But many working-class protesters also took pride in their militancy, to distinguish themselves from the elite students in the financial district. These tactics would only escalate as the 2010s neared their end.

Lee is at pains to contextualize the increasingly militant tactics of 2019’s protest in particular, arguing that they were a reaction to the institutional violence of the law and the marketplace. She even suggests that they helped elevate the consciousness of ordinary Hong Kongers, insofar as they unmasked this violence by eliciting such a brutal response from the authorities. In fact, we don’t hear much from politically apathetic, ambivalent, or even pro-Beijing Hong Kongers in Lee’s book, just as Horton mainly gives us the DPP perspective on Taiwanese history. But polls suggest, as Lee notes, that public tolerance for violent protest does seem to have increased. Between June and October 2019, the proportion of respondents who insisted on the necessity of nonviolence shrank from 83 to 67 percent, and by December, nearly a fifth of Hong Kongers supported vandalism of subway infrastructure and the hurling of bricks and Molotov cocktails. (Throughout, however, it does seem that a solid majority of the population disapproved of the violence, a fact that pro-Beijing forces undoubtedly exploited to help justify their crackdown.)

Unlike many histories of the Left, Lee’s is not an autopsy of what went wrong. She does not seek to assign blame or to question strategic decisions made by organizers or tactical choices by individual protesters. She is more interested in exploring attempts to “bend the arc of violence” by appealing to solidarity among the different camps. Even when protesters argued over tactics at street level in real time, she emphasizes the consistent care they displayed for one another as allies in the independence struggle. Some of the book’s most rewarding passages describe how different parts of the movement interlocked with each other. Teenagers leveraged teamwork skills learned from marathon online gaming sessions to parcel out roles: building barricades, extinguishing tear gas, blocking sight lines with umbrellas. Bartenders, many of them foreign born, invited fleeing protesters to hide from the riot police and left empty bottles in alleys to be repurposed as Molotov cocktails. Anonymous donors funded networks to smuggle tactical gear (gas masks, bulletproof vests, tasers) from China or overseas. There were less radical forms of collaboration as well. At certain times, bystanders worked to de-escalate situations, while at other points, crowds formed spontaneously to heckle the police and shame them into retreat. These sections reminded me of the old quip: revolutions are won when the army refuses to shoot.

But the police did shoot, of course: tear gas and rubber bullets and sponge grenades. And eventually, the protests fizzled out due to police repression and perhaps also public exhaustion. COVID-19 delivered the coup de grâce, scaring people indoors and allowing the police to use public health ordinances to disperse gatherings. At the height of the COVID-19 emergency, the government passed a draconian new national security law criminalizing any speech that could be interpreted as inciting secession from China. At the time of writing, the movement is unquestionably at bay. Its leaders have either been imprisoned or chased into exile; Hong Kong’s once raucous media has been muzzled; One Country, Two Systems is a desiccated shell; and it seems harder than ever to imagine a democratic Hong Kong freed from the shackles of ethnonationalism and market rationality.

Did the activists ever stand a chance going up against the might of the Chinese government? Even many inside the movement were doubtful. One former urban guerrilla reflected that “from the beginning we knew we would certainly lose; we did not stand a chance of beating the Chinese Communist Party. […] In their eyes, we were just kids playing with sand … The best and the worst outcome was scorched-earth.” As the reporter-turned-prodemocracy-candidate-turned-political-prisoner Gwyneth Ho put it shortly before she was jailed for subversion, “our historical significance is to die, and not fucking hang on for a last gasp of life.”

Despite all this, Lee is determinedly upbeat about the future. She insists that, even if they failed to achieve their immediate aims, the protests have created what Achille Mbembe calls “a will to community”—the common ingredient of decolonizing struggles the world over. The decolonial struggle continues overseas among a politically awakened Hong Kong diaspora, and the final outcome is too soon to tell. “Postimperial possibilities include stateless nationhood, city diplomacy, transnational governance, and regional solidarity networks. […] Hong Kong’s decolonization struggle has only just begun.”

Horton’s and Lee’s books both feel eerily timely. Taiwan appears in the news regularly, with geopolitics wonks muttering dark prognostications of a future Chinese invasion. Globally, we are living through another student protest cycle comparable to the late 1960s. In 2024, students in Bangladesh succeeded in toppling the government, and activists in South Korea foiled an attempted presidential “self-coup” by pouring onto the streets of Seoul outside the National Assembly. Over the past few months, Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Iran have all been swept by waves of student protest, often couched in the idiom of global pop culture. In September last year, the pirate flag from the Japanese manga One Piece was pinned to the gates of the Nepalese parliament as the building burned. As I write this in early 2026, the same flag is serving as a key symbol of youth activism in Indonesia, Madagascar, and the Philippines.

Then, of course, there is the global pro-Palestine movement, probably the world’s longest-running decolonial struggle. This has been rekindled by the Gaza war, with protests on my own university’s campus attracting a particularly large share of media attention. The scale and militancy of the Columbia demonstrations pales in comparison to the Hong Kong protests, and it may even seem distasteful to draw direct parallels. After all, at the time of writing, nearly 1,000 prodemocracy campaigners remain in Hong Kong jails while others are being forced to adjust to life in exile.

Still, reading Lee’s book soon after its publication in August 2025 gave me uneasy shivers of recognition: The fierce debates over the limits of free expression. The way the protests metastasized in response to arbitrary rule changes designed to suppress pro-Palestinian activism. The youthful idealism and ethic of mutual aid that animated the movement, and the reliance on transnational social media feeds for inspiration and practical know-how. The use of umbrellas in barricade lines, and face coverings to guard anonymity in the face of surveillance cameras and smartphones, which must surely have been learned directly from Hong Kong. The heavy-handed external pressure from trustees, then the Republican-controlled Congress, and finally Donald Trump’s White House. The complex interplay between digital and analog space, and the tension between moderates and militants over strategy and tactics. The attention to operational security, and the parceling out of complex tasks according to each individual’s appetite for risk. The tent occupations of public spaces, and the riot police charging in to dispel them. The arrests. The masked government agents spiriting activists into detention centers. And, finally, the chill that descended after the crackdown.

And here I must choose my words carefully. But I think it is at least safe to note that we at Columbia, just as in Taiwan and Hong Kong, must also tiptoe around an ethnonationalist taboo. China threatens retaliation, invasion even, should Taiwan declare formal independence. In 2021, one Hong Kong man was jailed for nine years for chanting the popular protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.” At Columbia, I feel free to call for the breakup of China—or to restore Manhattan to the Lenape for that matter. But the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, imposed by the university’s trustees under pressure from the federal government, defines criticism of the State of Israel as a form of hate speech. If, for example, I were to claim that Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial apartheid ethnostate predicated on the systematic dispossession of the Palestinian people, I would not face jail time. But I might face a potentially career-ending investigation from the university’s Office of Institutional Equity.

In New York, there is no song as dangerous to sing as the quasi-national protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong” is for Hong Kongers. But there is a certain decolonial protest slogan (containing the words “river,” “free,” and “sea”) that no one dares chant on campus anymore lest it be classed as harassment under the new rules. And for the nearly 40 percent of Columbia students and faculty who are not US citizens, merely mentioning “Palestine” in a social media post might trigger a State Department investigation that would jeopardize their immigration status. Free speech restrictions rarely announce themselves as such. Even this piece, with its carefully worded phrasing, would be risky to assign on a US college syllabus in the current climate. If it is discussed at all, it will be discreetly, in furtive conversations among students and some of the more activist faculty.

For all these reasons, the distance between here and Hong Kong feels less like a chasm than a gap. Not because the situations are identical, but because the pattern is familiar: ethnonationalists drawing a line to demarcate what can be said, what ideas expressed, what worlds imagined.

These are dark times, and getting darker. Governments around the world have access to the kind of financial resources, surveillance technology, and raw firepower that their predecessors could only dream of. Since the start of this year, at least two US citizens, a legal observer and a protester against immigration raids, respectively, have been shot dead in Minnesota by federal agents. And right as this article was going to press, prodemocracy newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in jail by a Hong Kong court, in a trial with eerie parallels to Annette Lu’s in 1980. It is hard to imagine he will not die in prison. But who knows what the future has in store? Just look at Taiwan.