“If we are in a new Cold War, Hong Kong is the new Berlin,” Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong (黃之鋒) said on Sept. 9 at a party hosted by the German-language newspaper Bild.
This analogy is not a new one. At the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Hong Kong was already considered “the Berlin of the East” by British policymakers, including then-prime minister Clement Attlee and foreign secretary Ernest Bevin.




