MCLC: Pre-Handover HK, Cold War West Berlin analogy?

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Pre-Handover HK, Cold War West Berlin analogy?
Pre-Handover Hong Kong, Cold War West Berlin: An Imperfect but Useful Analogy?
I've been doing a lot of writing in recent years that tries to shed light on contemporary China via the use of unexpected and admittedly only partially apt comparisons.  These are the sort, such as likening Xi Jinping to the Pope (something that builds on previous comparisons of the CCP to the Catholic Church) and likening Beijing's strategies of control in and rhetoric about Tibet to Tokyo's approach to Manchukuo during World War II, that obviously can't be taken too far, but which still seem to me worth playing with in print using for pedagogic purposes in the classroom.  Eight commentaries of this sort from the last eight years are being published next month in a little "Penguin Special" book. I've also just done a new commentary of this sort, inspired by the disappearing booksellers. It appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books in a commentary titled "Then They Came for the Bookseller," which is also now available in Chinese (translated by Ting Guo for the BBC), places side by side the relationship between Hong Kong and mainland cities before 1997 and that between West Berlin and East Berlin before the Wall came down--then contrasts the way West Berlin norms spread into a formerly Communist-run urban space after unification with the sense in Hong Kong now that moves are underway to make its public sphere more like that of a mainland city.  (I also did a short spin-off piece for the Huffington Post, which nods to le Carré having set Cold War era novels in Hong Kong and Berlin.)  I'll be very curious to see the reactions to the piece, especially on the BBC Chinese service site, and also am curious if anyone on this list has seen the Hong Kong-Berlin analogy used before--or others that use comparison well to put former unusual city into perspective.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom <jwassers at uci.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on January 12, 2016
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