Reinventing Civic Pride: Rationality and Utopianism in the Umbrella Movement

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

Abstract

Based on interviews, survey and participant observation, this paper argues that the umbrella movement features a fusion of rationality and utopianism that reinvent Hong Kong’s civic pride. Instead of using violence to increase the regime’s ruling cost or antisocial behaviour to vent grievances, the event was primarily built upon discipline and voluntarism. The protestors have provided a variety of common and public goods such as order and defence, sharing economy, recycling, open lecture, free tutoring, and community arts. The reasons why those struggling at the frontline are more rational than those sustaining yet consuming the event are also discussed. Despite its limitations in soliciting political concessions, this peaceful and orderly occupation has resisted the intrusions from coercive force and state-sponsored civic groups and aroused consciousness across age, class, and political spectrum. It has also materialized conditions for an ideal democratic polity, nurturing unanimity, equality, and reciprocity. Being Hong Kong people or a sense of civic pride has thus sanctioned a simple framing to check the split between protesting factions and normalize a discourse to fight an insurmountable proxy war. This further reveals the dynamics of coexistence between a free and pluralistic city-state and a rising yet authoritarian sovereign or hegemonic empire.

Author

• Edmund Wai Cheng, London School of Economics