Civility and passivity: Dynamics of Contention in Umbrella Movement

• In Event: Negotiating Autonomy at the Edges of Authoritarianism: New Activism, Identity Politics and the Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong

Abstract

While the planned “Occupy Central” was originally conceived to be a smaller and less disruptive civil disobedience movement, the massive turnout and the resilience of what instead came to be called the Umbrella Movement had taken both protester leaders and government authorities by surprise. What explains the enormous mobilization of the occupation and its resilience in a city known for moderate collective actions? This article examines the causal mechanisms and the dynamics underlying the movement. It argues that while grievances towards the city’s political and socioeconomic future and the fear of “Sinicization” constituted a mixed bag of motivations, the large turnout would not have been possible without contingent acts of police violence. Resilience was subsequently sustained through perceived threats of crackdown, horizontal linkages between self-organized groups and the reinforcement of civility through high level of voluntary and recreational participation. However, these factors also sowed seeds for the stagnancy of the protest. The conflation of protesters’ demands under the absence of a deliberation mechanism, police’s gradual refrainment from provoking clashes with protesters and the emphasis of being civil and also being spontaneous without top-down leadership have all increased the difficulty for protest leaders to escalate the protest, or come up with a viable and focused strategy to solicit political concessions. These factors significantly limited the movement’s agenda-setting power, and put protesters in a passive position. However, as the movement is still ongoing by the time of writing, the final outcome will be reflected in my full paper.

Author

• Samson Yuen, Oxford University