Disclaimer: Please note that the views expressed below represent the opinions of the article’s author. The following work does not necessarily represent the views of the Synergy: Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies.
Abstract
In 2014, the Umbrella Movement involved a series of protests that led to the practical shut-down of Hong Kong. Studying the history of this movement through the lens of student activism reveals a newfound generational divide in the political support of local rule projects. The standard view is that the movement was a reaction to the August 2014 decision in Beijing to continue the approval of Chief Executive electoral candidates. However, placed in the context of youth identity developments, it is evident that a clash of nationalisms led to the development of this system. This paper explores the notion that Hong Kong is not passive, instead suggesting that colonialism and educational systems gave rise to student activism and collective memory.
Keywords: Hong Kong, Umbrella Movement, Localism, Occupy Central, Citizenship, Beijing
The world remembers the 2014 occupation of Hong Kong through the images of pro-democracy protestors holding up umbrellas against tear gas sprayed at them by riot police.[1] These protests were seen as a reaction to Beijing’s decision to continue vetting all candidates for the Chief Executive of Hong Kong in order to maintain control over the Hong Kong government. However, this protest has a more complicated history, rooted in Hong Kong’s possession of a separate political entity. The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration states: “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will enjoy a high degree of autonomy,” and “[t]he current social and economic systems in Hong Kong will remain unchanged, and so will the life-style,” for 50 years post-1997.[2] However, Beijing stated in 2017 that the Joint Declaration was a “historical document that no longer had any practical significance.”[3] This affront to an international agreement stems from Beijing’s position as per the “One-Country, Two-Systems” ideology, emphasizing the “One-Country” side of the agreement. The dominant participation of youth in forming the 2014 Umbrella Movement (UM), also known as the Umbrella Revolution (UR), qualifies as what Anderson describes as “provincial creole printmen” who “played the decisive historic role” in imagining Hong Kong.[4] In this history we see the interplay between national political ideologies in the framing of Hong Kong. Hong Kong youth and Chinese-imposed Official Nationalism intersect at the UR because of the expression of handover anxiety in popular culture in the 1980s-90s, backlash from youth education reforms from 2003-2012, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the rise of student solidarity from 1998-2014, and social media and student identity becoming legitimate modes of political mobilization.
Hong Kong’s colonial history is traced in its multi-ethnic community; as one of Britain’s most important ports and then as a capital anchor after the Second World War,[5] the colonial government diminished the role of nation-building in Hong Kong to prevent the decolonization movement from reaching the city’s shores. The administrative-led bureaucracy, albeit a non-democratic government, contributed to the economic success of Hong Kong from a set of rocky islands to a commercial powerhouse of over 6 million people.[6] The political system in Hong Kong has never been purely democratic, although, after 1996, it became the goal of the British-led administration to implement a full democracy, despite Chinese opposition. As a result, pro-Chinese political and business leaders formed a political alliance focused on local issues.[7] During the 2000 Hong Kong legislative election, a dominant pro-Beijing political alliance won by directly addressing post-handover anxiety, wherein Beijing would protect democratic rights.[8] However, a divided electorate between pre-1984 voters, who were likely to be pro-Beijing, and post-1984 voters was created.[9] Between 2003 and 2007, the pro-Beijing faction pursued the rapid integration of Hong Kong, both economically and socially, with China as a result of foreign direct investment ties between Hong Kong and the Shenzhen/Pearl River Delta Special Economic Zone. This led to disillusionment beginning in 2010 with the anti-High Speed Railway protests, a protest against the development of a bridge that would connect Hong Kong with mainland China.[10] In addition, integration entailed dominating public broadcasting stations wherein outlets played the Chinese national anthem at the beginning of all broadcasts, and news stations used Mandarin Chinese.[11] Reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system at this time called for an end to prescreening of Chief Executive candidates by the Chinese Communist Party. However, on August 31, 2014 the Standing Committee of the National Peoples’ Congress in Beijing asserted their right to the prescreening process, representing integration as Official Nationalism that “is an anticipatory strategy adopted by dominant groups which are threatened with marginalization or exclusion from an emerging nationally imagined community.”[12] By late September of 2014, the Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP), a pan-Democratic movement, was growing among pre-1984 voters; in part due to an article entitled Civil Disobedience’s Deadliest Weapon (2013) by Benny Tai Yiu-ting, a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong. His articlecalled for the creation of an occupy movement, as a result of Beijing’s encroachment.[13] This seemed to be a legitimization of students’ ideas, and opened up the Hong Kong government to negotiation. However, it failed to differentiate between pan-Democratic and Localist movements.[14]
The intersection of the internationalization of Hong Kong Arts and the anxiety surrounding the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong back to China resulted in the development of youth culture and identity that was highly influential in shaping localism. I locate the development of this identity in the public debates surrounding handover anxiety, and its role in shaping film culture in Hong Kong. Hong Kong film culture was essential to visualizing the city and inherently contributed to the naming of Hong Kong people as manzuk (民族), a semiotic term which identifies ethnic groups. Internationalized throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, film culture in Hong Kong played an essential role in setting the parameters of Hong Kong identity. Hong Kong film “creates a world that includes different values and attitudes that is full of conflicts and inconsistencies, making particular references to the issue of cultural identity.”[15] The creation of a visual discourse on identity through film culture is a contemporary form of Anderson’s print capitalism, and the implications of this are deeply rooted in handover anxiety. For example, Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994) is an allegory to the 1998 anxiety of handover, referencing obsessive interest in time and dates and the sense of loss and abandonment.[16] At that moment in history, contradicting identities are forming along the intersections of conflict, cultural identity, and abandonment, which are all represented throughout Hong Kong’s long history of protest. Locating these themes in film uniquely defines Hong Kong as a separate entity from China, with its own history, born out of the 1967 Hong Kong riots. These riots, which came out of a leftist labour dispute, grew and were defined by the use of terrorism and bombing to achieve the aims of Communist sympathizers. The fear created by the protests directly contributed to a rejection of Communist China.[17] While the leftists failed to take Hong Kong, the British colonial government worked with Hong Kong manufacturers in the creation of a “Hong Kong Week,”[18] wherein “the theme of Hong Kong Week would be repeatedly tied to the development and prosperity of the city, the security of the working populace, and the new sense of community pride.”[19] Through the initial rejection of Communism and the acceptance of consumerism, the anxiety surrounding the return of Hong Kong to China represented in film culture led to the naming of the Hong Kong people as Manzuk, with a distinct identity based on individuality and consumption.
The effects of film culture as a means of creating identity are exacerbated in the education system of Hong Kong, post-handover. Education is a contested field in Hong Kong because it pits Official Nationalism against a quasi-Creole Nationalism. In 2002, the Chinese government implemented the “Basic Education Curriculum Guide” which directly states that:
In order to meet the challenge of the 21st century, as well as to respond to the change of sovereignty, students are also expected to show concern for their well-being; understand their national identity and be committed to contributing to the nation and society.[20]
These changes include the use of Mandarin as an official language for instruction, changes to the history curriculum that name the Hong Kong people as “Hong Kong Chinese” (中华香港人), stating that the Cantonese language is a dialect of Mandarin,[21] and discussing differences between democratic and authoritarian political systems by highlighting Beijing’s system as ideal to maintaining the peoples’ happiness.[22] As a result of these changes, contestations occurred because of the use of these examination subjects as a vehicle for promoting Chinese nationalism and destabilizing Hong Kong identity.[23]
After the 1967 Leftist Riots, the British colonial government introduced an education curriculum that was notably devoid of any national attachment, where “national” history focused only on Ancient Chinese history. However, in Communist China there was a particular mobilization to destroy connections to Ancient China through the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).[24] These historical differences have contributed to direct contestations by new youth identities, juxtaposed against a hegemonic-nationalist Official Nationalism being promulgated within the Hong Kong education system by China. As a result of these contestations in education, a majority of 18–29-year-olds reject Chinese national identification.[25] Due to contested curriculums and film culture, conclusions have been made regarding the specific identity of Hong Kong Youth, which has direct repercussions in framing the nation:
As a group, they lay claim to an indigenous Hong Kong identity. Students are willing to engage with each other, and with interested listeners, about their individual processes of identity formation and negotiation…this process is a hybrid of hope, realism, and duality and possibly multiplicity – of cultural identification.[26]
Hong Kong youth, through their contested position, have an identity based in contestation, negotiation, individualism and choice, which is being challenged by Chinese hegemony.
Hong Kong youth have not been passive about the education system’s changes. If Hong Kong youths’ identity is one that is contested, then the fabric of their society should be contested too – and it is, which is seen through the development of social movements. In 2011, Joshua Wong, a student activist and a future UR leader, founded the Scholarism Movement.[27] Scholarism was founded as a reaction to a new curriculum in 2010 that mandated patriotic education that is friendly towards Beijing.[28] Through protests, the implementation of the curriculum was withheld until 2014.[29] Within three years, Scholarism became a deeply developed grassroots organization, and would consequently come to play an essential role in organizing students in the UR.
The youth identity developments that I have explored are anchored by conflicts in cultural identity. A significant crisis that spurred the reverence for democratic ideals in Hong Kong youth, continually counter to Beijing’s anti-democratic propaganda in schools, is the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Immediately after the massacre, vigils were organized all around Hong Kong by the Hong Kong Federation of Students, and to this day this event occurs every June 4thin Victoria Park; a large park in the middle of Causeway Bay, the busiest and most economically productive area of the city which would later become a site of the UR. Every year, a candlelit vigil is held in solidarity for those killed. The actions of Hong Kong students in the organization of these vigils have given rise to the role of collective memory in framing a set of ideals and superimposing them on “our Hong Kong”. The creation of a geographic location that is a site for the outlet of political expression legitimizes and accepts youth identity as a form of political mobilization.
The important role of the Hong Kong Federation of Students – as the dominant organizers of the vigil – in shaping collective memory and contemporary youth identity cannot be overstated. As China wants to tear down physical borders with Hong Kong, this vigil is one way in which the people of Hong Kong are constructing social borders. Therefore, “[c]ollective memory should be understood as those representations that serve as the basis of a group’s identity and sense of community.”[30] Images of Tank Man, along with journalists and arrested authors, are hung in Victoria Park and have become icons that Hong Kong collectively remembers as symbols of the democratic rights they are entitled to but which have not been respected. These vigils have taken on power in recent years wherein:
the vigil in Hong Kong is a stark departure from the situation in China, where protests are banned and the mentions of the Tiananmen crackdown, in which hundreds if not thousands of protestors died, are scrubbed from social media.[31]
They have become a way to create and contest memories, and by extension history, as a form of political mobilization that foils Hong Kong against China. China has responded to the growing power of these vigils through contesting this political memory. Donald Tsang, a former pro-Beijing Chief Executive of Hong Kong, stated in 2008 in regards to a question posed to him regarding the public release of information regarding the June 4thmassacre that “China had achieved great development in various area” and that “people should look at the past more objectively.”[32] These comments were viewed as a departure of democratic representation of Hong Kong society and led to the pan-Democratic and Localist coalition boycotting Hong Kong SAR government meetings.[33] Thus students’ role in shaping collective memory politicizes history, and also contests memories by shaping and spreading local values through visual movements like the Victoria Park vigil.
Where these vigils have highlighted free speech and gathering as something that could be lost if China were to absorb Hong Kong, the power of these vigils have been explored as an outlet for expression in fighting for the survival of the Hong Kong and its people. The vigil in memory of those killed has become one that has taken on a distinctly nativist flare, wherein:
refrains had taken a more aggressive, defiant, and vulgar tenor as exemplified by banners, hats, T-shirts, and placards bearing slogans like “Better Dead than Red”, “Fucking Chinese Dictators”, “Fuck the Police”, “FUCY”,[34] and “Nice Day for a Revolution.” One pro-democracy political banner posted at the entrance of the park declared “Hong Kong Comes First!”[35]
The turns to violence in the Hong Kong protests that have become noticeable since 2012 make this the first time that Hong Kong society is collectively visualizing a movement in the protection of their specific Hong Kong identity. While this stems from original pressures on Britain to negotiate the return of sovereignty without consulting the people,[36] this highlights an evolution in the practice of democratic rights wherein the people of Hong Kong are fighting for their survival. Hong Kong has some of the world’s highest costs for living, and at present, half of Hong Kong’s legislative council is elected by “Functional Constituencies,” which represent business interests. This issue is exacerbated by constituents who have traditionally held ties with Beijing due to structural transformations that benefited them after the turnover.[37] Hong Kong Functional Constituenciesrepresent a failure in democracy, and an inability to solve the needs of the Hong Kong people, and are therefore the recipients of the anger of these vigils. The Functional Constituencies’proximity to Beijing is a point of anger that has given rise to the acceptance of youth identities based on the notion of Hong Kong for Hong Kong people as well as in the creation of a fully functioning democratic society.
The presence of nativist anger at these vigils has contributed to the rise of student politicians becoming official politicians through movements such as Scholarism, a pro-Democracy political party most made up of students,[38] and Civic Passion,[39] founded in 2012 by radio host and television producer Wong Yeung-tat. Both parties found political success by utilizing the collective memory created by student unions at vigils in shaping constructed realities regarding national identification. Thus, youth identity, cultures, ideas, and realities become accepted political practice in the creation of the Hong Kong imagined community through political legitimization. Furthermore, geography plays an integral role in creating spaces for these ideas to flourish. Whereas in mainland China the practice of assembly is illegal, in Hong Kong, student unions are building grassroots assemblies within geographic spaces which have allowed students to form a biased collective memory in favour of localist rule sentiment.
Where the Victoria Park Vigils have been a space to legitimize the ideas of Hong Kong students through political movements, these movements mobilized online from 2012 through 2014. As a result, both defined their own political messages and turned Hong Kong’s UM into a negotiation regarding citizenship within the definition of Hong Kong as a nation. Internet mobilization through social media platforms has become a form of creole print capitalism, similar to that which Anderson explores through Noli Me Tangere (1887) in the Philippines.[40] Twitter and YouTube have become mediums for political organizations to imagine, define, and exclude boundaries on Hong Kong. Studies have been conducted regarding Twitter usage and the hashtag #hongkongprotests in the days leading up to and during the Umbrella Movement. Kwok and Chan (2017) find that “[t]he rise of digital media enabled a crucial form of mobilisation in the Umbrella Revolution – that is, a seemingly “leaderless” connective action.”[41]. The seemingly grassroots connotation of the Umbrella Movement’s broadcast turns Twitter into a publication medium that masks differences within localist political messaging. Pro-government voices are rarely seen in #hongkongprotests[42] and therefore, Twitter becomes a space where localist and student leaders both dictate their message and hide the extremist tendencies of their messages. For example, Scholarism and Civic Passion are both localist movements, but they both have their own goals for which they have been pursuing and negotiating through online and physical spaces. Civic Passion is a Hong Kong fundamentalist group that practices a form of xenophobic localism, and Scholarism practices a comparatively progressive localism.[43] However, both of these organizations use Twitter as a way to mobilize followers and expound idealistic goals.
YouTube has played a role in visualizing Hong Kong values by becoming the dominant website to which music has been published. Music and music videos play a similar role to that played by movies in the 1980s. However, they are strengthened by the power that music has in the ability to build solidarity around protest songs.[44] By studying discourses on themes of these music videos, it becomes apparent that Hong Kong citizenship is contested and that their use in framing UM highlights public anger towards Beijing; public anger is fractured by different political organizations negotiating space through their arguments. The music video for Gau Wu [Shopping] Everyday (2014), a song that was highly influential as a protest song during the Umbrella Movement, creates a sense of shared and consumerist identity that is bound together by the use of the Cantonese language.[45] In fact:
music is an essential part of forming and expressing identity, it contributes to group solidarity, cohesion, and collective identities that are essential to mobilising and maintaining support for protests.[46]
Gau Wu’s widespread distribution brought out political differences between localist camps that Twitter did not. With the rising cost of living in Hong Kong, and with consumerism entrenched in Hong Kong society, rising costs impede consumption as a social practice. Groups like Civic Passion have blamed immigrants from China and the Philippines for making it harder for Hong Kong people to get jobs and increasing the cost of living.[47] A political divide between Scholarism and Civic Passion developed, and this had implications for the cohesiveness of the UR, blurring the lines of who the movement was for, as all actors involved in it had their own goals. September 22, 2014 was the beginning of the 926 Boycott, in which students boycotted classes for one week[48] and met for a massive protest on the night of September 26thas a direct response to the Beijing Standing Peoples’ Committee’s decisions. This was organized by Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students to reopen Civic Square in the Admiralty District.[49] The Civic Square is government property, and its July 2014 closure was a representation of the closure of the public debate regarding free elections of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. The UM is thought to have begun as a response to these two events, which were predicted by Benny Tai Yiu-ting’s article mentioned earlier. His work in setting up the OCLP called for an Occupy movement, however, the OCLP appropriated the goals of what would become the UM. The OCLP movement is ideologically aligned with the pan-Democratic parties in the Hong Kong Legislative Council, and therefore its goals were to remain within the ‘One-Country, Two-Systems’ agreement, but to assert Hong Kong’s handover rights. The presence of this pan-Democratic movement in UM had the effect of delegitimizing a mass civic uprising. After Scholarism announced the 926 Boycott, OCLP announced that it would participate in the movement in Civic Square.[50] This was an appropriation of Scholarism’s goals, and it shows, as only 17.1% of participants found Occupy Central with Love and Peace to be a legitimate leader during the Umbrella Movement, whereas 56.5% found the Hong Kong Federation of Students to be the legitimate leader,[51] thereby defining the Umbrella Movement as a movement concerned with framing Hong Kong, but also fundamentally a student movement. On September 27th, Joshua Wong and other student leaders stormed the barricades of Civic Square,[52] however because of fractures in the UM’s message, as well as misreporting naming OCLP as the main organizer of the event, the world did not process this as a legitimate and focused movement. Then Beijing decided to do the same.
Throughout this paper, I have posited that the history of the Umbrella Movement is an international history that formed the identities of youth in Hong Kong. Two forms of nationalism have intersected in the development of a national identity of the Hong Kong people, owing itself to international contexts. Youth have then built their own political movements which have become accepted through outlets such as the Victoria Park Vigil. These new political movements have cemented themselves through grassroots support, yet the medium they use to communicate their message actually ended up splintering localism as a movement. The days leading up to September 27th, 2014 saw conflict between a pan-Democratic movement and localist movements that further fractured the Umbrella Movement’s legitimacy. The world saw tear gas sprayed onto a sea of umbrellas, but that moment in contemporary history is still not over. The rise of groups such as Hong Kong Indigenous, and events such as the “Fishball Revolution,”[53] highlight the power of youth identity in Hong Kong in shaping a new nationalism. Hong Kong is not a passive city, and its values are rooted in a history of identity contestation.
Thomas Elias Siddall 劉夢飛 is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto and does research on global youth movements as movements of re-spacialization. They are interested in Queer politics and how the politics of space shape our narratives of home.
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[1]Tania Branigan and Jonathan Kaiman, “Hong Kong police use teargas and pepper spray to disperse protesters,” The Guardian, (September 2014).
[2]Government of China, Full Text of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, (December 1984). Accessed; http://www.gov.cn/english/2007-06/14/content_649468.htm
[3]Ben Blanchard and Michael Holden, “China says Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong no longer has meaning,” Reuters, (June 2017).
[4]Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 2006): 65.
[5]Catherine Schenk, “The Empire Strikes Back: Hong Kong and the Decline of the Sterling in the 1960’s,” The Economic History Review 12, no 11 (August 2004): 553.
[6]Ming K. Chan, “Hong Kong: Colonial Legacy, Transformation, and Challenge,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 547, (September 1996): 14.
[7]See Chan, “Hong Kong: Colonial Legacy,” 18.
[8]Cindy Yik-yi Chu, “Back to the Masses: The Historiography of Hong Kong’s Recent Political Developments and the Prospects of Future Scholarship,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 10, no. 1 (April 2003): 33.
[9]H. Christoph Steinhardt et Al., “The Identity Shift in Hong Kong since 1997: Measurement and Explanation,” Journal of Contemporary China 27, no. 110 (October 2017): 268.
[10]Chiew-ping Yew and Kin-ming Kwong, “Hong Kong Identity on the Rise,” Asian Survey 54, no. 6 (November/December 2014): 1091.
[11]Anne Marie Law, “I Know Hong Kong is Over – Because My Mother Has Stopped Watching TVB.” Quartz, (March 2016).
[12]Anderson, “Imagined Communities,” 101.
[13]Eddy Luk, “Hot talk swirls on ‘occupy Central’ idea,” The Standard, (February 2013).
[14]Peace Chiu, “Explain this: the rise of student unions in Hong Kong – how did they come to hold such sway?,” South China Morning Post, (September 2017).
[15]Ping-kwan Leung, “Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong,” in The Cinema of Hong Kong, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 246.
[16]Gina Marchetti, “Buying American, Consuming Hong Kong,” in The Cinema of Hong Kong, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 290.
[17]Clement Tsz-ming Tong, “The Hong Kong Week of 1967 and the Emergence of Hong Kong Identity Through Contradistinction,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 56, (2016):49.
[18]Tong, “The Hong Kong Week,” 53.
[19]Tong, “The Hong Kong Week,” 59.
[20]Curriculum Development Council, 2002, 4
[21]The Cantonese language is much older and is more closely related to Middle Chinese.
[22]Curriculum Development Council, 2002, 4
[23]Chiu-ping Iris Kam, “Personal identity versus national identity among Hong Kong youths – personal and social education reform after reunification,” Social Identities 18, no. 6 (November 2012): 652.
[24]See Kam, “Personal Identity,” 653.
[25]Sebastian Veg, “The Rise of ‘Localism’ and Civic Identity in Post-handover Hong Kong: Questioning the Chinese Nation-state,” The China Quarterly 230, (June 2017): 325.
[26]Stacilee Ford, “Claim Jumping at Century’s End: University Student Identity in Late-Transition Hong Kong,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 547, (September 1996): 86.
[27]Joshua Wong and Archie Hall, “THREE YEARS AFTER THE UMBRELLAS: AN INTERVIEW WITH STUDENT ACTIVIST JOSHUA WONG,” Harvard International Review 38, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 51.
[28]Michael Davis, “Hong Kong Demands Democracy,” Journal of International Affairs 68, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2014): 210.
[29]See Wong and Hall, “THREE YEARS AFTER,” 210.
[30]Francis LF Lee and Joseph Man Chan, “Collective memory mobilization and Tiananmen commemoration in Hong Kong,” Media, Culture and Society 38, no. 7 (2016): 998.
[31]Angie Chan, “Hong Kong Marks Tiananmen Crackdown, as China Ignores Event,” New York Times (June 2018).
[32]See Lee and Chan, “Collective memory mobilization,” 1007.
[33]Ibid.
[34]FUCY is an abbreviation of “Fuck You CY”. CY is an abbreviation of Leung Chun-ying, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong (2012-2017) who was known for torturing pro-Democracy protestors and played a pivotal role in the decision to spray tear gas on protestors during the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. You can read more here;
England, Vaudine. “Hundreds of thousands protest as Hu Jintao visits Hong Kong.” The Guardian, (July 2012)
[35]Daniel Garrett, “Venues of Counter-Hegemonic Visuality; Days of Contention,” in Counter-hegemonic Resistance in China’s Hong Kong (Singapore: Springer): 260.
[36]Mark Y Wang, et. Al Transforming Chinese Cities (New York: Routledge, 2014): 63.
[37]Richard Yue-Chim Wong, “Hong Kong in Transition: Economic Transformation in the Eighties,” Proceedings of the Conference on the Changing World Community 9, (October 1991): 13.
[38]Ying-ho Kwong, “The Growth of Localism in Hong Kong,” China Perspectives 3, no. 107 (2016): 64-65.
[39]Ibid.
[40]Anderson, “Imagined Communities,” 26.
[41]Chi Kwok and Ngai Keung Chan, “Legitimacy and Forced Democratisation in Social Movements: A Case Study of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong,” China Perspectives 3, no. 111 (2017):9.
[42]Irmgard Wetzstein, “The Visual Discourse of Protest Movements on Twitter: The Case of Hong Kong 2014,” Media and Communication 5, no. 4 (December 2017): 31.
[43]Tim Ruhlig, “”Do You Hear the People Sing” “Lift Your Umbrella”? Understanding Hong Kong’s Prodemocratic Umbrella Movement through YouTube Music Videos,” China Perspectives 4, no. 108 (2016):60.
[44]Ruhlig, “Do You Hear,” 59.
[45]Ruhlig, “Do You Hear,” 63.
[46]Ruhlig, “Do You Hear,” 60.
[47]Echo Huang, “Ten years after China’s infant milk tragedy, parents still won’t trust their babies to local formula,” Quartz, (July 2018).
[48]Chris Buckley and Alan Wong, “Hong Kong Students Boycott Classes in Democracy Fight,” The New York Times, (September 2014).
[49]Jasmine Siu and Lok-kei Sum, “Government’s decision to limit public’s access to Civic Square was unconstitutional, Hong Kong court rules,” The South China Morning Post, (November 2018).
[50]Ibid.
[51]See Kwok and Chan, “Legitimacy and Forced,” 11.
[52]Elizabeth Barber and Charlie Campbell, “Pro-Democracy Students Storm Government Square in Hong Kong,” Time Magazine, (September 2014).
[53]A series of civil conflicts, from 2016 until now, between Hong Kong food hawkers and police who were shutting down food stalls that violated recently passed health and safety legislation. Hong Kong Indigenous posits that this was done as a way of further removing Hong Kong iconography as a way to destroy its culture. Source: Antony Dapiran, “Control and Resistance in Hong Kong,” in Control, ed. Jane Golley et. Al., (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017).
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