Faith and Hope in Hong Kong

Early on in Defying the Dragon, a new book that offers an engrossing, street-level view of the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong, author Stephen Vines makes a bold claim. There are some pessimists who consider the city's overlords in Beijing invincible: Vines is not one of them. Powerful empires, he reminds us, are often brought down by events on the periphery. He argues that although Hong Kong's democracy activists are under unprecedented pressure from China's Communist party, their movement, diminished but not defeated, poses a serious threat to the party’s rule—not just in Hong Kong, but on the mainland itself.