Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement
Ching Kwan Lee and Ming Sing
Abstract
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 formula ... More
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.
Keywords:
occupation movement,
Hong Kong,
Umbrella Movement,
civic disobedience,
Chinese colonization,
political disenfranchisement,
economic subsumption,
identity reengineering,
popular consciousness
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501740916 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501740916.001.0001 |
