Global Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 355 pp. (Tables, figures, coloured photos.) US$130.00, cloth. ISBN 978-94-6298-456-1.
Until very recently, Hong Kong studies was an obscure and narrow area of focus, to the extent that it even existed. The city’s spiral into political conflict with the Chinese Communist Party has changed that. It has turned Hong Kong into a locus for researching mass movements, authoritarianism, and the gathering global clash between liberal democratic values and Beijing’s particular brand of Marxism-Leninism. However, events have moved so fast in the last few years that it is incredibly difficult for social scientists to keep pace. The Umbrella Movement is a valiant effort to make sense of the seminal pro-democracy protests of 2015, which foreshadowed last year’s much more confrontational and violent series of uprisings. This book helps to explain the motivations of the Hong Kongers risking more and more in their fight for democracy, and dispels some of the myths spread by Beijing and its appointees in the Hong Kong government.
This collection of essays aims for a broad scholarly readership across those focusing on contentious politics, hybrid regimes, and China and Hong Kong studies. When the small initial Occupy protest grew into a mass movement in September 2014, the authors, who are mostly Hong Kong based, realized they needed to get onto the streets to study history as it was being made. They employed a range of techniques, from surveys to interviews with participants and textual analysis. The first section sets out the historical background and trajectory of the movement, which involved 1.2 million Hong Kongers and was named for the umbrellas that protesters used to fend off police pepper spray. The second section examines the tactics employed by the participants, from how they decided when to retreat to the impactful art and slogans they created. The third section looks at the responses to the movement from the Hong Kong government and the wider public. A final section offers comparative perspectives on young people and protest from contemporary Taiwan and Macau, and historical Shanghai.
The book is at its best when providing on-the-ground insights into what drove the movement, rather than trying to posit generalized theories about protest. Although prominent student leaders such as Joshua Wong became the face of the Umbrella Revolution, as it is also known, the authors show that the participants were mostly not students but young people with jobs. Protestors were driven by a range of factors, including a desire for genuine universal suffrage in choosing Hong Kong’s leader, moral indignation at police violence, and a growing sense of collective identity. The authors’ extensive use of empirical data rebuts repeated claims by Beijing and the Hong Kong government that the Umbrella Revolution and the wider democracy movement are largely a response to social and economic inequality by people with “no stake in society,” as Carrie Lam, the city’s leader, put it.
Like all who study social movements, the authors grapple with the core question of where contingency, human agency, and the grand forces of history meet. Most of the researchers rightly emphasize a combination of causes and highlight the seeming contradictions of the participants. Francis Lee and Gary Tang show, for example, that while most of the protesters were pessimistic about the prospects of Beijing conceding democratic elections to Hong Kong, they still relied on such a high-level goal as a motivating factor.
The weaker essays, however, try too hard to derive general rules for understanding mass movements. Yongshun Cai uses the example of a failed attempt to storm the Legislative Council building in 2014 to highlight “the limitations of violent action.” Such behaviour, Cai argues, will tend to reduce participation levels, create divisions among protesters, and erode the support of sympathetic bystanders. That may well have been true in 2014, but it evidently does not translate to a broader guideline for understanding protests in general. In 2019, pro-democracy protesters again stormed the Legislative Council, and their more violent actions succeeded in binding the democracy movement together and driving momentum in the face of heightened police repression.
It was only six years ago, but the mostly peaceful Umbrella Movement seems like a bygone era after the months of mass marches, rolling clashes with police, and university sieges last year.
This concise and informative volume demonstrates that the roots of the 2019 escalation were already emerging in 2014—but it also shows how much Hong Kong has changed since then. Moral shock at the police firing tear gas during the early days of the Umbrella Revolution was a key driver for many participants. This would prove to be an even more important factor in 2019 when the indiscriminate use of violence by the police would generate unprecedented unity across the democracy movement, even as frontline protesters hit back with Molotov cocktails and bricks. The networked, decentralized, and informal organization of the Umbrella Revolution would provide the basis for 2019’s nameless, faceless protests. But the vanguard driving the action in 2019 was far more radical than the moderates leading from the middle in 2014.
One important area that the authors mostly glossed over is identity. They refer to the deepening sense of Hong Kong identity and how it has been forged in opposition to Beijing’s creeping pressure on the city’s autonomy and freedoms, yet the issue of identity is treated more as a side issue than a fundamental cause and consequence of the Umbrella Movement. Nevertheless, this book is a valuable addition to the literature. The authors deserve credit for pursuing their research despite the growing pressure on universities in Hong Kong to stamp out work that is critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Just as with the protesters fighting for control of the contentious space on the streets, academic freedom in Hong Kong is facing its own use-it-or-lose-it moment.
Ben Bland
The Lowy Institute, Sydney