From Collectively Empowered to Individually Powerless: Everyday Frustrations with Living under an Autocratizing Government

• In Event: Authoritarian Politics

Abstract

Much past research has analyzed the obvious, overt, and sudden impacts of autocratizing government upon the most politically engaged segments of populations after the government has crushed collective resistance, but over time, autocratization gradually has many banal second-order impacts upon the more apolitical portions of the population that change their relationship to their government, foreign governments, and fellow residents. Scholars have conceptualized their distinct types of reactions to this change as tactics of “camouflage” (Frei 2023) but have less extensively examined changes in civilians' understanding and experiences of autocratization in non-political domains within different occupations/professions. I draw upon a subset of 446 oral history interviews from the Hong Kong Emigration Project (HKEP), a social survey of Hong Kongers (N=4869). I illustrate how during a period that spans the beginning of the anti-extradition bill protests in 2019 to Hong Kong’s domestic codification of the National Security Law in 2024 (Article 23), many Hong Kong residents who considered emigrating went rapidly from feeling collectively empowered to feeling individually powerless. My analysis focuses on a part of this individual-level disempowerment through which they begin to slowly notice over time how they cannot as practice their occupation or conduct their personal life as freely as before. They also recount how new employees suddenly joined their workplace and began changing its structure, organization, and practices. Many potential emigrants frequently describe such changes as disempowering after they could no longer assure themselves, “But I am safe…” Hong Kong migrants observe how one of the first things they do after emigrating is to recapture the sense of political empowerment by contacting other Hong Kongers and forming associations to collectively regain a sense of power. This paper deepens our understanding of how people’s experience and understanding of power transform in everyday ways within “non-political” spheres of an autocratizing polity and provides suggestive evidence for how many, only after emigrating, can they reconstitute their sense of collective power.

Authors

• Jacob Richard Thomas, Corvinus University of Budapest

• Priscilla Kam, Independent Scholar