The world suddenly paid a lot of attention to Hong Kong during the uprising in 2019 and the subsequent crackdown in 2020 and after. My book offers a long historical view as well as the political-economic background needed to understand the recent upheaval.Hong Kong has always been at the interstice between a maritime world and the continental land power China. In the book, I explain that Hong Kong sits at the fault line between two tectonic plates. Geologically, such areas are usually rife with earthquakes and volcano eruptions. But they are also very fertile areas. The 1197 fishers uprising in the Hong Kong area against the Song Empire, tenant resistance against landed gentry in precolonial Hong Kong, the rise of social and democratic movements in post-WWII Hong Kong, and the waves of protest movements in Hong Kong seeking autonomy and democracy after the sovereignty handover in 1997 through the 2019 uprising were all conflicts linked to this fault line. One needs to look at the underlying geological forces in such long time frames to study these upheavals, like earthquakes.The conflicts in post-handover Hong Kong in particular stemmed from the contradiction between Beijing’s financial need for Hong Kong and Beijing’s urge to establish full political control of Hong Kong. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party tightly controls China’s financial system and keeps it insulated from the global economy. But Chinese citizens and companies also need access to the global financial market. The solution is to maintain Hong Kong’s role as an offshore financial center of China with an internationally recognized autonomous legal system, free flow of information, a separate currency, and a government policy-making process autonomous from Beijing. This confers on Hong Kong the social and political freedoms that other Chinese cities could not enjoy. Such freedoms also make Beijing feel insecure.Beijing always fears a color revolution in Hong Kong that would take control of the city and could spread to mainland China. Hence Beijing constantly attempts to expand its direct control of Hong Kong. The resulting conflicts led to massive protests in 2003, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2019. Beijing handled the conflicts with meaningful compromises before 2019, but responded to the 2019 uprising with a National Security Law that risked destroying Hong Kong’s role as China’s offshore financial center once and for all. After the crackdown, Hong Kong’s civil society and opposition parties have been thoroughly crushed. However, the tension that gave rise to the protests is still there. The crackdown is not the end of Hong Kong. Resistance has turned underground and overseas. In the short run, Hong Kong will remain dead quiet under the watchful eyes of a newly instituted national security apparatus. But in the long run, when cracks and cleavages in the regime inevitably resurface in the future, Hong Kong could flare up in protest and conflict again.