Social Movements in Hong Kong

Social movements occur not only because of political opportunities but also due to a perceived threat to citizens. Popular contention has remained an important mode of political participation in Hong Kong since 1997 when its sovereignty was handed over to China. Many influential collective actions in Hong Kong occurred when residents felt a threat had arisen from policies made by the city government or Beijing. By examining the Anti-Extradition-Bill movement in Hong Kong, this paper explores how threat triggers and sustains social movements. It finds that threat both facilitates the mobilization of social movements and sustains them. Threat strengthens solidarity among movement supporters because of their shared concerns and goals. It sustains a movement when government responses confirm participants’ belief in the continual existence of the threat. The Anti-Extradition-Bill movement deepened the distrust between local residents and Beijing, resulting in the promulgation of the National Security Law by Beijing in May 2020.

CIVIC AND NONCIVIC ACTIVISM UNDER AUTOCRACY: SHIFTING POLITICAL SPACE FOR POPULAR COLLECTIVE ACTION*

China is an authoritarian state with different sophisticated strategies for dealing with popular contention. Research shows that the Chinese state sharply distinguishes between popular protests on materialist claims and those on nonmaterialist claims, but it is rarely recognized that in China civic activism faces a dramatically different political environment than noncivic activism. While the distinction between civic and noncivic activism has seldom played an important role in differentiating state strategies in democracies and some other authoritarian regimes, I contend that the Chinese state has developed sharply different strategies based on this distinction throughout the history of People’s Republic. To account for different strategic patterns, we need to investigate the functions that different types of popular collective action can fulfill and the threats they may pose to the regime. Using labor and feminist activism as examples, this article examines the evolution of the space for civic and noncivic activism in three historical periods—Mao’s era, the Reform era, and Xi’s era. It elucidates how regime transformations interacted with the nature of claims to produce different political environment for popular collective action in China.

Relational interaction and embodiment: Conceptualizing meanings of LGBTQ+ activism in digital China

This article theoretically and empirically explores meanings of recent activism practised by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other non-heterosexual groups (LGBTQ+) in China. Chinese LGBTQ+ individuals, like the majority of Chinese citizens, are generally self-restrained in popular contention because of the political risks involved. They also face widespread discrimination from the public when revealing their LGBTQ+ identities. This article is concerned with the perceived meanings of Chinese LGBTQ+ individuals suppressing engrained self-constraint to promote LGBTQ+ contention and certain level of collective action. Theoretically, I conceptualize Chinese LGBTQ+ protests as relational interactions undertaken by LGBTQ+ individuals with other people of queer identities (ingroup members), authorities and the public based on the logic of connective action. I also explore the concepts of embodiment and online embodiment to understand individuals’ sensual experiences during LGBTQ+ contention. Empirically, I examine university student Qiu Bai’s lawsuits with the Education Ministry and her social media campaign against homophobic textbooks. Drawing on in-depth interviews and textual analysis, the case study provides a dialectical account of individuals’ experience of embodiment and self-constraint.

Revolutionary mass uprisings in authoritarian regimes

This article explores the conditions under which revolutionary mass uprisings are likely to occur. We offer a probabilistic explanation of the social and political conditions that make people rise against autocrats. The article presents a medium-n dataset of 79 revolutionary mass uprisings in 165 autocracies since 1945. Since revolutions are rare events, a combination of factors must come together to trigger them. Drawing on the extant literature on revolutionary change, we find initial support for a range of discrete factors. Our findings suggest that four such factors are particularly powerful explanations of revolutionary mass uprisings—and a combination of those factors will go a long way in predicting revolutionary change: a history of protracted low-level popular contention; the presence of personalist regimes; long tenure of incumbents in office; and the showroom effect of uprisings in the temporal and spatial vicinity of states. In a broader theoretical perspective, these findings give rise to a breaking-point explanation of revolutionary situations, emphasizing that mass uprisings build up over time, whereas structuralist theories or grievance-based approaches fare less well in predicting revolutionary ruptures.

Mediating state–society disputes in China: Outsourced lawyers and their selective responses

Where popular contention in China is concerned, third parties are not merely supporters of protesters but also allies of the state. Through quantitative and qualitative methods, this article uses an actor-centred perspective to explore the dual role of Chinese lawyers in state dispute resolution projects. When providing legal counselling services to the public, lawyers adopt selective strategies and channel non-political cases into legal channels while keeping political cases within the political arena. When handling social disputes for the government, however, they apply professional diagnoses and legal persuasion, and intervene through mediation and negotiation. Three factors constrain the effectiveness of Chinese lawyers during dispute resolution. These are the limited access to cases, the dilemmas inherent in acting simultaneously both as a third party and as a state agent, and the restricted influence of lawyers over the final resolution of social disputes. This article argues that the selective responses of Chinese lawyers during legal counselling and strategic defence of state power in dispute resolution make them a governance tool for stability maintenance. Their participation contributes more to legal repression than to legal development in contemporary China.

Hong Kong’s Hybrid Regime and Its Repertoires

This chapter analyzes the roots of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) regime's learning curve in managing popular contention and the mechanisms that have enabled the regime to develop its authoritarian structure and practices. It first defines Hong Kong's hybrid regime in terms of its liberal–autocratic and central–local contradictions and then discusses various state countermobilization strategies used to respond to mass protests. The chapter then examines how the hybrid regime's strategies of disciplinary exclusion, patron-client politics, ideological work, and attrition have mobilized or incentivized proregime and nonstate actors against dissent. On the one hand, the hybrid regime has co-opted formal institutions and has manufactured informal networks through which political crisis has been maneuvered by the regime to monitor the ruling class's factional quarrels and to further develop its authoritarian protocols. On the other hand, the party-state's local apparatuses have extended and refined their united propaganda and mass-line strategies to address the rise of activism in Hong Kong.

Revolutionary Origins of Political Regimes and Trajectories of Popular Mobilization in the Late Communist Period

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in Communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late Communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political, and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction.