Wednesday, April 9, 2025 | 3:00 PM EDT
With the fifth anniversary of the last big Hong Kong marches behind us and the first anniversary of the National Security Law’s imposition on the horizon, Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Emily Feng assess the city’s recent past and significantly changed realities. What is the legacy of the protest surge of 2019? What is most and least surprising about how Hong Kong has been transformed in this decade? How can we place the Hong Kong story into national narratives about the way the PRC has been moving under Xi Jinping? How can we connect the Hong Kong events to trends in other parts of Asia and beyond?
In an interview conducted on April 9, 2025, Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Emily Feng, in conversation with Sewell Chan, discuss the implications of developments in Hong Kong over the last ten years for HK-mainland relations, Sino-American relations, and trends in the region.
Speakers
Emily Feng
Emily Feng is an international correspondent for NPR covering China, Taiwan, and beyond. She joined NPR in 2019. She traveled to big cities and small villages to report on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of the Asia Pacific. Ms. Feng contributes to NPR’s newsmagazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms.
Ms. Feng’s reporting has also allowed her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands and write about girl bands and art. She has filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine, the top of a mosque in Qinghai, and inside a cave where Chairman Mao once lived.
She was 2023 winner of the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, awarded to a rising public media journalist 35 years of age or younger. She also received the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award for her overall reporting on the Asia Pacific.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California Irvine and a former member of NCUSCR’s Board of Directors. He has written for newspapers, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and general interest magazines, ranging from the Atlantic to Dissent and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books are Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, published in 2020 by Columbia Global Reports, and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, forthcoming in June from the same press.
Dr. Wasserstrom received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, his MA from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Moderator
Sewell Chan
Sewell Chan joined the Columbia Journalism Review as executive editor in 2024. Previously, he was editor in chief of the Texas Tribune (2021-2024), during which the nonprofit newsroom won its first National Magazine Award and was a Pulitzer finalist for the first time. From 2018 to 2021, he was a deputy managing editor and then the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversaw coverage that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Mr. Chan worked at the New York Times from 2004 to 2018, as a metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy op-ed editor, and international news editor. He began his career as a local reporter at the Washington Post in 2000. Mr. Chan is an alumnus of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Young Leaders Program.