“One Day More”: Les Misérables and the Hong Kong Protests (original) (raw)
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A SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING MEDIATISATION: ON THE HONG KONG PROTESTS, 2019
Javnost: The Public, 2020
This article examines the massive protests and global media event known as the "anti-extradition protests" in Hong Kong during 2019. The protests became the most live-streamed movement ever, and were narrated globally, though not in China, as an exemplary, brave demand for democracy and freedom against the P.R.C.'s intrusions. I argue that the event and movement can also be read as an apt example of mediatisation, or the media direction if not command of the geo-political sphere. From one perspective the movement was a spectacular success in garnering media sympathy and attention, even generating American legislation in support of Hong Kong's "freedom." And yet the mainland's refusal to intervene into or pacify the conflict, despite deliberate, extreme provocations to make it do so, also suggest strong limits to global mediatisation. The movement may have triggered a new approach for Chinese resistance to mediatisation.
Total Mobilization from Below: Hong Kong's Freedom Summer
The China Quarterly, 2022
This article examines the origins and dynamics of an extraordinary wave of protests in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. Despite lacking visible political opportunities and organizational resources, the protest movement drew resilient, mass participation unparalleled in the city's history and much of the world. Drawing from original on-site surveys and online datasets, we conceptualize the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as a form of "total mobilization from below." The totality of the mobilization depended on a set of interactive mechanisms: abeyant civil society networks concealed after the 2014 Umbrella Movement were activated by threats over extradition and institutional decay, whereas affective ties developed through conflicts and mutual assistance were amplified by digital communication. The movement's characteristics in terms of protest scale, mobilizing structure, use of alternative spaces, and group solidarity are examined. The spasmodic moments of mobilization are explained by a nexus of network building that took place in an unreceptive environment and at a critical juncture. The roles of threats and emotions in mass mobilizations are also analysed.
Unleashing the Sounds of Silence Hong Kong's Story in Troubled Times
Global Storytelling, 2021
Hong Kong’s story is difficult to tell, commented Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013) in consideration of the city’s complicated historical configuration as well as the aesthetic reflection on the same by the writers and artists that have come to shape and promote the colonial city’s unique culture. Confronting the post-handover government’s suppression of democratic decision-making with massive street protests, the next generation of cultural producers continues to critically interrogate, contest, and subvert the official genealogy and nationalist master narrative. In response to the various factors contributing to the ongoing silencing of the city’s critical voices, many artists, directors, and writers have turned to (absent) sound as the aesthetic signifier of the sociopolitical turn from hope and reconciliation to despair. Their performative silence simultaneously protests and mourns the denunciation, suppression, and erasure of oppositional groups. In this paper, I apply a methodological cluster comprising concepts from ecocriticism, microhistorical-discourse analysis, social anthropology, and other disciplinary fields to address the ramifications of Hong Kong’s story as inscribed within protest-related literary and visual and multimedia art productions. Street art performance, handover-themed art exhibitions, Wong King Fai’s video “Umbrella Dance for Hong Kong,” and Samson Young’s sonic multimedia installations appositely illustrate the conundrum addressed.
2019 Hong Kong Protests: The Holistic Picture
Much analyses on Hong Kong unrest is predisposed towards liberal democracy espoused by the West. However, every coin has two faces. So, are we assimilating only the unidimensional view propagated by the West and English-language media? This issue-brief provides an alternative holistic perspective.
Panic on Whitfield Road: An Account of a Protest in Post-War Hong Kong
Panic on Whitfield Road: An Account of a Protest in Post-War Hong Kong, 2019
The recent protests in Hong Kong concerning the government’s proposed extradition law were the latest among many that have occurred in the former British colony since the end of World War II. The infamous Red Guard riots of 1967, the annual commemoration of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and the 2014 Umbrella Movement demonstrations were some of the more memorable. Other long forgotten demonstrations occurred soon after the war and were a direct result of mass movements of people leaving China that spiked Hong Kong’s population to unprecedented levels. The impact of those protests on different communities are now coming to light.
Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal, 2016
28th September 2016 is the second anniversary of the Occupy Campaign / Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. It is also the last anniversary of the said sociopolitical event, which arguably represents a most important milestone in Hong Kong’s post-1997 development, before 1st July 2017 that will mark the 20th anniversary of the “Handover”. It was on 28th September two years ago that pro-democracy protestors occupied the Admiralty, Causeway Bay, Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui areas of Hong Kong in a momentous campaign initially planned out earlier by the “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” (OCLP) movement, but launched earlier than scheduled when overtaken by the development of events, metamorphosed into unprecedented scale of demonstrations at multiple locations and was transformed into what was dubbed by the world media as the “Umbrella Movement” when umbrellas, which protestors were using to protect themselves when the police attacked them with tear gas and pepper spray, became a symbol of the occupation campaign. The scale of the protest movement, the zeal and passion of the participants and the personal sacrifices they were willing to make in pursuing the objective of the campaign and the bravery they showed in facing the formidable machinery of repression wielded by the State and at one stage an ominous prospect of a repeat of the 1989 Beijing massacre, as well as the broad-based support from the wider Hong Kong society, reflected a culmination of almost two decades of grievances against the central government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) whose one-party dictatorship not only continues to exhibit and strengthen its relentlessness in suppressing dissent in the vast Mainland but also shows an incremental, creeping infiltration of authoritarianism into the Hong Kong society, as reflected most lately by the disappearances of the Causeway Bay Five. To commemorate the second anniversary of this Occupy Campaign a.k.a. Umbrella Movement, the present issue of Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal entitled From Handover to Occupy Campaign: Democracy, Identity and the Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong represents a collection of specially selected articles focusing on this momentous event, its background of determining factors, theoretical and ideological underpinnings, as well as its implications for the future of the Hong Kong people’s valiant struggle for democracy against the backdrop of the formidable odds, since the 1997 “Handover”, as being under the sovereignty of a gigantic country with an entrenched ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime that has no foreseeable intention of allowing for a transition from the present repressive one-party dictatorship to liberal democracy that would respect political freedom and civil liberty, or of relaxing its intolerance for dissent. http://icaps.nsysu.edu.tw/var/file/131/1131/img/2375/524522545.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/s/wh5jp6dsfoudv9y/CCPS-V2N2-foreword-emileyeoh.pdf Emile Kok-Kheng Yeoh (2016), “Foreword – Upon the Second Anniversary of Occupy Campaign / Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong: Essays in Honour of a Pro-Democracy Sociopolitical Movement”, Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (CCPS), Vol. 2, No. 2, August/September 2016, pp. 635-662. [Scopus]
Continuum-Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2021
The cultural commons which foregrounded an aesthetically pleasing and affective commitment to Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement's comprised, in addition to urban graffiti juxtaposed with posters and post-it notes on Lennon Walls, a variety of consumable artworks including food items. This work introduces the notion of visceral citizenship and discusses how, through creative art forms, the identity and 'figure' of the Hong Kong protestor is (re) produced through its capacity to engender raw, affective feelings and orientations towards China through sensorial embodiments. In the aftermath of a recently introduced national security legislation creating a fresh climate of fear, cultural artefacts popular with prodemocracy Hong Kongers encourage the material consumption and (re)production of a localist identity and politics of belonging to Hong Kong that engenders visceral and affective responses from viewers. Visceral forms of belonging, it is argued, have the potential to not only create creative forms of activism but provide an important substrate to Hong Konger identities in the body.
Critique of Anthropology, 2020
Social scientists are prone to define social movements as something extraordinary, existing outside the mundane world of daily routines and lives. However, as the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong has illustrated, protest and daily routines often overlap. This is due in part to the decentralisation of protest events geographically and the mobilisation of conventional life spaces and cultural repertoires as protest tactics. When protests become daily events and daily events become protests, ordinary people can no longer maintain ‘neutrality’ by claiming that they are just ‘distant spectators’. They are turned into witnesses of history, forced to make a moral judgment and take a stand. The situation also creates new roles for those not directly involved in the movement to participate in the movement. At the same time, this ‘invasion’ of the ordinary and the local by the harbingers of political conflict, has bred fear and white terror among neighbours in local communities.