This talk will explore the dramatic protest actions and repression moves to curtail civil liberties that have rocked and transformed Hong Kong during the last two decades. In the presentations, the speaker will draw on material presented in his short 2020 book, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, and the short book he is finishing up now on the "Milk Tea Alliance" that connects protesters across East and Southeast Asia. He will place particular emphasis on the theme of transnational flows and influences, paying attention to both the way that Hong Kong activists have been influenced by people from other places and the way that their tactics and strategies have been adopted or been seen as inspirational to those struggling for change in different parts of the world.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds courtesy appointments in the Law School and in the Literary Journalism Program, and he is spending the spring of 2023 as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College. He has written, co-written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books, the most recent of which are Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020), which he wrote, and The Oxford History of Modern China (2022), which he edited. In addition to contributing to academic journals, he often writes for newspapers, magazines and literary reviews.