1. Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

Take Back Our Future

Take Back Our Future ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501740916.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-33

Author(s):

Ching Kwan Lee

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Early Years ◽

Communist Regime ◽

British Colonialism ◽

Political Actors ◽

Student Activists ◽

Republic Of China ◽

Civic Values ◽

Take Back ◽

The Government

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Umbrella Movement, which emerged in the fall of 2014. The genesis of the Umbrella Movement can be traced to an intensification of popular discontent against the Hong Kong government and its principal, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Since China's resumption of sovereignty in July of 1997, the end of British colonialism has been experienced by many Hong Kong citizens as the beginning of another round of colonization, this time by the Mainland Chinese communist regime. Such recolonization, which proceeded with fits and starts in the early years after the handover and had become more aggressive since 2003, can be broken down into three constitutive processes: political disenfranchisement, colonization of the life world, and economic subsumption. Increasing encroachment by China to turn Hong Kong into an internal colony has spurred the rise of new political actors and groups to defend Hong Kong's way of life and liberal civic values. The chapter then looks at the series of contentious mobilizations leading up to the Umbrella occupations, to trace how the contradiction constitutive of this Hong Kong regime in transition from liberalism to authoritarianism have contributed to nurturing and growing the collective capacity of at least three general categories of political actors who would converge during the Umbrella protests: the self-mobilized citizenry, the localists, and the student activists.

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Enter the dragon: China's courtship of Hong Kong, 1982–1999

Communist and Post-Communist Studies ◽

10.1016/s0967-067x(99)00019-7 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 32 (4) ◽

pp. 417-436 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Richard Baum

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Large Scale ◽

Local Reaction ◽

Chinese Government ◽

Political Leaders ◽

Core Group ◽

Take Back ◽

British Colony ◽

One Country Two Systems

From 1982, when the Chinese government first signalled its intention to take back Hong Kong, to the actual transfer of sovereignty in 1997, the PRC engaged in a long-term campaign to “win friends and influence people” in the British colony. Hoping to prevent a large-scale flight of capital and manpower, and wishing to cultivate a core group of sympathetic local notables as future political leaders, Beijing issued frequent pledges of non-interference in Hong Kong's affairs and adopted classic “united front” tactics — flattering, cajoling, and otherwise wooing potential supporters while snubbing (and sometimes smearing) outspoken critics. Despite intensely negative local reaction to the 1989 “Tiananmen Massacre”, over the long haul Beijing largely succeeded in disarming public fears of a heavyhanded Chinese takeover. Consequently, the handover itself was an extremely calm, tranquil affair. And in the first 2 years of Hong Kong's new status as a “Special Administrative Region” of China, the PRC earned generally high marks for honoring its pledge to uphold the principle of “one country, two systems”.

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Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement Edited by Ching Kwan Lee and Ming Sing Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2019 xii + 270 pp. $26.95 ISBN 978-1-5017-4092-3

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741020000855 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 243 ◽

pp. 874-876

Author(s):

Agnes Shuk-Mei Ku

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Cornell University ◽

Take Back

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Take Back Our Future

10.7591/cornell/9781501740916.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Civil Society ◽

Prior Experience ◽

Civil Society Organizations ◽

Take Back ◽

Financial Center ◽

Structural Closure ◽

Internal Colonization

This book unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The chapters ask, how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? The book argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The chapters outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, the book demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.

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