Commemoration of Tiananmen and Hong Kong’s Democratic Movement

• In Event: 3451 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Temporality, History, and Collective Memory

Abstract

Since the Tiananmen Incident took place in 1989, the commemoration of those who died in the incident was held every year on June 4 in Hong Kong by a social movement organization (SMO) called Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (briefly as the Alliance). After declining for over a decade, attendance began to jump and remained at a heightened level of over 100,000 after the twentieth anniversary of the event in 2009. A key challenge of SMOs is movement maintenance and keeping supporters focused. I use the case of the Alliance to examine how the changing structure of commemoration rituals over the years may have contributed to the generation of emotional attachment of participants to the symbolic ideas represented by the event, thus maintaining interest and engagement in the democratic movement associated with this SMO. The data show that, over the years, the Alliance increased the proportion of segments in each ceremony devoted to activities that engaged the participants. Participant engagement is in turn found to invoke emotions of unity, remembrance, mourning and sadness that strengthened the participants’ identification with the event being commemorated. An increase in emotional engagement in these commemorative ceremonies is also found to correlate with an increase in attendance, supporting Collins’ interaction ritual chain theory that explains the role of emotional energy generating group rituals in maintaining social movements.

Author

• Rebecca S.K. Li, The College of New Jersey