Protest Art, Hong Kong Style

This chapter presents a photo essay featuring protest art during the Umbrella Movement. One of the most outstanding achievements of the Occupy Movement was its artistic creation during the occupation, inside and outside of the occupied zones. The movement triggered an unprecedented outburst of creative expressions, turning the occupied zones into giant theaters and galleries that provided new definitions of political/community art. Outside the occupied zones, there were also countless images, texts, and animations delivered via websites, e-mail, and Facebook. The adaptation of popular culture not only created commonly identified images and values, but it also generated a sense of humor with a touch of cynicism, which is typical of Hong Kong's pop culture. Starting at the turn of the century, when street protest became a common activity in Hong Kong, a new concept called “happy confrontation” was invented. This was a belief that political confrontation could be undertaken in a celebrative mode and that street demonstrations could take the form of a carnival. Of course, there were people who disagreed with such a concept, especially for the Umbrella Movement, which was full of hardship, conflicts, and brutal attacks. Nevertheless, throughout the occupation, such humor and cynicism could be easily found, especially at Mongkok.

Mediascape and Movement

This chapter reviews the relationship between the media and the Umbrella Movement. The mainstream media, aided by digital media outlets and platforms, play the important role of the public monitor in times of major social conflicts, even though the Hong Kong media do so in an environment where partial censorship exists. The impact of digital media in largescale protest movements is similarly multifaceted and contradictory. Digital media empower social protests by promoting oppositional discourses, facilitating mobilization, and contributing to the emergence of connective action. However, they also introduce and exacerbate forces of decentralization that present challenges to movement leaders. Meanwhile, during and after the Umbrella Movement, one can also see how the state has become more proactive in online political communication, thus trying to undermine the oppositional character of the Internet in Hong Kong.

Take Back Our Future

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.