So many events from 2015 to 2018 now seem disturbing harbingers of things to come: the opening of a rail station w/ security controlled by the mainland, Beijing blocking Joshua Wong from going to Thailand, the kidnapping of the booksellers... https://twitter.com/yuenok/status/1289451226002677760

2015-2018 Hong Kong harbingers continued...the CCP succeeding in getting Lancome to drop Denise Ho after the singer began speaking out boldly, Beijing intervening on a case about legislators being disqualified while it was under review in a Hong Kong court, a long list...

Hong Kong harbingers cont.--the speed with which worrying events followed each other during that period seemed striking then, even if it was clearly nothing like the speed of recent disturbing events, which come day after day, not year after year of month after month

Hong Kong harbingers cont. 1/2 quote from my book Vigil: Lord Patten's May 2019 response after I proposed the following: "Historians of the future may well claim it was surprising both how light a touch the [CCP] used when dealing with Hong Kong in the immediate wake of 1997...

2/2 quote cont:"and by how quickly Beijing tightened the screws on the city from the mid-2010s on. [Patten] nodded in assent [&] made a comment that has stuck w/ me more than anything that anyone else I have interviewed/has said: 'When the snow starts melting, it melts quickly.'”

Note: the quote from Lord Patten appears on p. 36 of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink/for a longer quote from the relevant section & some added material about interviews in the book & related materials, see this post for @AgeofRevs https://ageofrevolutions.com/2020/05/04/fiction-films-and-the-hong-kong-protests-of-2014-2019-three-vignettes/

Note on how fast, to draw on Patten's image, the ice is melting in Hong Kong: on July 7, @maryhui tweeted that changes had begun to take place "at warp speed" but arguably, as @yuenok suggests in her Tweet that launched this thread, the pace has quickened even more since then