Based on the information in this book, you can see how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plans on integrating Hong Kong into their future plans. Slowly, all of the promises that the CCP made to HK in 1997, to protect their "special" situation. But as they have done in Tibet, and are now doing in Xinjiang. Xi Jinping has an agenda that has non-Han areas absorbed by Red China. The population of China is aging, and in ten years the population will have aged to the point their military will begin to shrink.

Because of the aging he knows that he has to gain control of Taiwan very soon. He understands that if he doesn't control HK, Taiwan, Tibet, the islands of the South China Sea, they will become difficult to have any chance of being able to fold them into Red China. Xi fears that what happened in Russia (USSR) in 1989 will happen to China. More than anything he fears that minorities will become the majority of the population and they will become an enemy within.

If you question this scenario, look how they forced all pro-west candidates off the ballot in HK, and this resulted in only 30% of the voting public to vote for their slate. Xi doesn't care what anyone in the West says, they will continue until anything that makes HK unique disappears.

A vitally important read about how China has tightened the noose around Hong Kong's neck and has cracked down on basic freedoms Hong Kongers have enjoyed over the last 100 years or so. This book goes into detail how China and the CCP have crushed Hong Kong dissenters and how the template of these restrictions are and will continue to have worldwide impacts. The author tells how the restrictive transformation of Hong Kong, which was once a substantially freer city, is a potential canary in the coalmine of how China could interact with the rest of the world. This is a very important read for anyone who cares about free, open societies or losing fundamental basic human rights to totalitarian governments.

This book is on the very edge of excellence but, sadly, it falls short. The author not only gives us the name of the street someone lives on but feels impelled to give us that street name several times. Also, the author's footnotes are overwhelmingly from newspaper articles that I have found over the years to be most unreliable. Citing solid sources is, in my opinion, always the better opinion.