Shawn Liu
Central Asia has long been imagined less as a place and more as a passage. In travelogues, school maps, and even much scholarship, it appears as a corridor—the Silk Road that carried goods and ideas between “centers” like China, Persia, or Europe. Historian Adeeb Khalid warns against this flattening: to see Central Asia only as a “road between somewhere and somewhere else” erases its internal histories, its experiments in reform, its revolutions and ruptures. The problem is not unique to Central Asia. Many spaces that sit at the hinge of empires or global circuits suffer this epistemic fate, understood only through what they connect, and rarely what they generate.
Hong Kong, my hometown, is also persistently narrated as a threshold. It is the gateway to China, the crossroads of East and West, a crucible of urban and nature, as well as a port where capital and culture shuttle between spheres. Sinologist Elizabeth Sinn famously described Hong Kong as an “in-between space,” an intermediary framing imbued with real historical purchase—colonial authorities cultivated it, global investors still rely on it. But not unlike Central Asia, this generalization risks reduction. When Hong Kong’s role is lauded primarily as a bridge, its own social histories risk receding: the grassroots struggles, local identities, and epistemologies that give the city meaning independent of its role as conduit.
What, then, does it mean to write a local history of Hong Kong, one that resists the gravitational pull of these external narratives? To ask this is not merely a methodological question but an epistemological one. It encourages us to reconsider how archives are assembled, which voices are foregrounded, and how historical time is narrated. If Central Asia’s challenge is to be seen as more than a road, Hong Kong’s challenge is to be seen as more than a gateway. To think them together is to glimpse the stakes of writing histories that treat places not as conduits but as centers in their own right.
To take Hong Kong seriously on its own terms requires more than just recovering “local detail”; it demands an epistemological shift. The city’s history has often been written from above, through colonial records, financial flows, or diplomatic crises, but local historiography gestures toward other archives: vernacular newspapers, community associations, oral histories, even the contested landscapes of housing estates and ancestral halls. These sources open different ways of knowing; where everyday survival, neighborhood solidarities, and cultural practices unsettle the dominant story of Hong Kong as a perpetual gateway. In this sense, writing local history becomes an act of resistance against reduction: a refusal to let the city’s past be subsumed into narratives of East–West mediation, and an insistence that its epistemic center can lie within rather than beyond.
Such a reorientation also raises the question of power: who gets to define what counts as Hong Kong’s history? Official archives privilege the colonial state; Beijing’s narratives emphasize integration into the national story; global scholarship often frames the city as a case study or exception. Local historians, activists, and cultural workers push back by assembling counter-archives: oral testimonies, neighborhood memories, independent museums, and even digital projects that preserve endangered materials. These alternative practices of history-making reveal that the struggle over Hong Kong’s past is inseparable from struggles over its future. To write history differently is not simply to correct distortions, but to claim the right to imagine a different horizon.
Seen alongside Central Asia, Hong Kong illustrates a recurring predicament of “in-between” places: they are narrated through the gravitational pull of larger powers, yet I hope to highlight that their own histories pulse with autonomy and invention. Central Asia has been reduced to a Silk Road passage, Hong Kong to a gateway city, but in both cases, the act of local historiography destabilizes these tropes. To write their histories from the inside out is to insist that they are not merely bridges or corridors but centers of lived experience, cultural creativity, and political struggle. In this comparative light, the task of historians is not only empirical but also ethical. We need to resist the temptation of easy metaphors and instead build epistemologies that allow marginal places to speak as worlds of their own.
Shawn Liu (MAGIC/MSFS) graduated from Northwestern University in Fall 2022 with a major in History and Cognitive Science. Currently enrolled in the MA/MSFS dual degree program at Georgetown, he is interested in Chinese environmental history as well as Sino-American competition and collaboration, with a specific focus on their policies regarding the polar regions. He hopes to enter a doctoral program or enter the public sector working in international development after completing his dual degree at Georgetown. Outside of his career interests, he also enjoys listening to (and occasionally dancing to) classic rock, running, and traveling with his friends! He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Footnote.
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