Abstract
Since June 2019, a series of protests has again erupted in Hong Kong; this time over a proposed amendment of the extradition law. The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement (hereafter Anti-ELAB Movement) has enjoyed much broader public support than the Umbrella Movement in 2014, and, at the time of writing, it shows no signs of receding even with widespread arrests and amidst severe restrictions on public gatherings in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The sustained and resilient nature of the protests tells how protesters have learnt from the earlier ‘failed’ struggle in 2014 and how organization, repertoires, and strategies have evolved since. This edited volume on the Umbrella Movement thus offers important insights in understanding the background and trajectory of the territory’s protest movements. Most of the contributors are locally based and have engaged in on-site field research during the 79-day occupation. They thus provide rich first-hand empirical details regarding the protest and the movement dynamics among the participants, the public, and the state.
The introductory chapter situates the Umbrella Movement in a larger historical perspective of new forms of social activism – massive in scale but at the same time decentralized and networked – both globally and in Hong Kong. The book’s chapters are divided into four parts. Part A authored by the two editors respectively focuses mostly on the impetuses to the movement. Chapter 1 by Ngok Ma charts the long road of unsuccessful democracy movements in Hong Kong, which alongside heightened tensions over greater integration with the mainland since the mid-2000s has forged a new local identity among the younger generation who are more determined to defend their own future. In Chapter 2, Edmund Cheng examines the movement dynamics from the perspective of spontaneity, and he argues that spontaneous occupation, which departs hugely from the originally planned Occupy Central Campaign, facilitated a horizontal protest structure with participatory practices that in turn sustained a resilient occupation. Chapter 3, by Ngok Ma, finds that many committed occupiers at the three protest sites were indeed newcomers to protesting and they were ‘awakened’ by undue police violence. The decentralized nature of the movement, spontaneity in protest actions, and involvement of a large number of new protest participants, most notably teenage students and retirees, all bear much resemblance to the current Anti-ELAB Movement in 2019.
Part B looks at the diversity of protest strategies and repertoires in the movement. Based on on-site survey data, Francis Lee and Gary Tang in Chapter 4 suggest that participants’ willingness to retreat was guided by both rational calculations as well as their emotional response to what was achievable. Thus, instrumental rationality played a role in the highly decentralized Umbrella Movement. Both Chapters 5 and 6 look at expressive and performative forms of participation in the movement. Cheuk-Hang Leung and Sampson Wong discuss in Chapter 5 how the diverse forms of artistic participation represented deliberative democratic practices and thus contributed to participants’ sense of deliberative citizenship. Chapter 6, by Sebastian Veg, conducts a textual analysis of the movement’s slogans and visual material which attest to the hybrid nature of Hong Kong identity in general and to the self-reflexivity of the movement in particular. Interestingly, Veg documents the ‘be water’ tactic as only a proposed alternative strategy in the movement then (p. 174), which however has evolved to become a key principle of flexible and tactical protests in the current Anti-ELAB Movement.
Part C analyses the strategies and responses of the movement, the state, and the public respectively. Samson Yuen in Chapter 7 discusses how the hybrid regime adopted a strategy of attrition with both defensive and offensive tactics that extended beyond mere ignoring or tolerating the protests. In Chapter 8, Yongshun Cai argues that tactical escalation by radical protestors was counterproductive and that it contributed to the loss of public support at the later stages of the movement. Both Chapters 9 and 10 deal with the issue of public support. Ming Sing suggests in Chapter 9 that widespread grievances among the younger generation towards both the Hong Kong and Beijing governments fuelled the drive for protests. In contrast, in Chapter 10 Stan Wong shows why people refrained from supporting the movement. He notes that scepticism towards democracy itself and an orthodox belief in the rule of law and thereby a disapproval of civil disobedience all coalesced into their opposition against the movement. In comparison, the 2019 Anti-ELAB Movement witnessed drastic changes in all these aspects: the state no longer tolerated the protests but resorted to brutal repression, which ironically contributed to a more generalized support of the movement across different age groups and social classes as well as increasing tacit approval of more radical and militant protest strategies in the face of police violence.
Finally, Part D brings the Umbrella Movement into a comparative perspective. Chapter 11, by Ming-sho Ho and Thung-hong Lin, discusses the origins of the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan in 2014 in the widespread perception of threatened democracy and economic victimization as a result of cross-strait trade liberalization. In Chapter 12, Eilo Yu shows why Macao, the other Special Administrative Region under the principle of ‘one country, two systems’, tended to evaluate the Umbrella Movement negatively because it was perceived as counterproductive to economic growth and damaging to its relations with the central government. The last chapter, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, brings readers on a temporal and spatial journey to different historical episodes of student protests in Shanghai in the past and notes the striking similarities with protests in Hong Kong in recent years. It is clear that a lot can be learnt from history, just as the current Anti-ELAB Movement learnt from the ‘failed’ Umbrella Movement five years ago.
Although the Umbrella Movement in 2014 has largely been perceived as a failure since it did not bring about any change in the political institutions of Hong Kong, it has surely left a huge imprint in the territory’s protest movements and serves as a precedent for the current Anti-ELAB Movement which is even more massive in scale, more spontaneous and militant in its tactics, and more sustainable in its resistance. The current movement both converges with and diverges from the Umbrella Movement, and both represent two instances of a long history of movements in the territory’s struggle for democracy and self-determination. This edited volume lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the trajectory of protest movements in Hong Kong and its subsequent twists and turns in 2019. It is a must-read for anyone interested in Hong Kong’s political development and democracy movements as well as civil disobedience and contentious politics in general.