Summary

Centralist authoritarians and localist democrats have fought each other in Hong Kong especially during the last few decades of the long period in which the city’s regime type developed. Process tracing to understand this clash, its causes and political results, can use two approaches together. One describes the city’s historical evolution. Another seeks, in each of six time periods, the material (wealth-related) or ideal (identity-related) factors that have created local freedoms or central controls. The most influential actors in Hong Kong politics have been commercial companies and families. The Chinese or British national governments were often less effective than local agents, including surprisingly independent governors acting on their own views. Hong Kong’s evolution offers tests of polity development in a space that was situated among formal states, not just Britain and China but also others. Accidental as well as structural factors have driven this development.