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From ‘be water’ to ‘be fire’: Nascent smart mob and networked protests in Hong Kong
Abstract
In recent months, masses of Hong Kong citizens have taken part in a remarkable wave of protests, known as the Water Revolution. Ignited by the Hong Kong government’s attempt to pass a bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, and later in response to police brutality and rights abuses, hundreds of thousands of protestors abruptly gathered in various parts of the city to rise up against the encroachment of the incumbent regime. Through novel uses of social media and mobile technology, they acted in concert to confront riot police in wildcat actions. In effect, they exhibit a contemporary type of smart mob, as digitally savvy citizens engage with each other in largely ad hoc and networked forms of pop-up protest. This article illustrates both the continuity and changes in the recent development of a nascent smart mob in Hong Kong. It fleshes out how its protest repertoires and movement objectives have emerged and evolved vis-à-vis state suppression in the global city of East Asia. With a focus on changing contours, this article brings to the fore the pragmatic and temporally emergent properties of the smart mob to consider the widespread and protracted movement in Hong Kong.
... Mobile activism assumed a fundamental role at the beginning of Hong Kong's AEBM. In the summer of 2019, digitally savvy protesters proposed the smart-mob strategy of 'be water' to move in a mobile and agile fashion while protesting (Ting, 2020), prompting an intense wave of street protests that speedily paralysed the transport system and prevented mass arrests by the police (Independent Police Complaints Council, 2019). This strategy pays tributes to Hong Kong's famous kungfu movie star, Bruce Lee, who stated the quotes -'Be formless, shapeless, like water' and 'Water can flow, or it can crash. ...
... Hence, protestors urgently needed alternative arenas and means of contention to put sustained pressure on the authorities' leading to the protest diffusions into other urban spaces. Facilitated by the intensive use of mobile technology and social media, 'blossom everywhere', as this strategy was known, called for multiple protests to take place simultaneously across different districts without lingering too long in any one place (Ting, 2020). The catchphrase of 'blossom everywhere' can be traced back to previous Hong Kong protests and their popular culture, in which democracy is described as a 'flowering' that the flowers of democracy will blossom everywhere. ...
... A day or two before the mall protests, LIHKGa Reddit-like discussion forum that ranks threads by popularitywas employed as the de facto virtual command centre, where users discussed the latest agendas, scheduled protest events and shared the most up-to-date tactics. This open-ended, consensus-based operating system of LIHKG facilitated the crowdsourcing of leadership linked to robust feedback loops, whereby decisions were based on momentary reputation online (Ting, 2020). Rather than a completely structureless and leaderless movement, LIHKG functioned as the central communication platform, whereby opinionleader-like users, whose threads tended to attract more attention and responses on the web forum, became the informal and diffused leaders (Liang and Lee, 2021). ...
Although heterotopia has been widely studied as relating to the marginal or subliminal sites of the city, the ubiquity of social media and mobile technology has facilitated the development of transient forms of heterotopia in support of large-scale urban movements. Using the case of Hong Kong’s networked mall protests, this article examines acts of mobile activism, whereby the urban landscape and its routines are temporarily reconfigured and turned into spaces of popular dissent joined by people in all walks of life. Drawing on multiple data sources and guided by connective ethnography, this study illustrates how digitally connected protestors created fleeting counter-sites in and across shopping centres to defy urban policing and subvert the spatio-temporal order it imposed. Rather than reclaiming urban public spaces to offer reservoirs of freedom, the protestors enacted occasions of opposing otherness not outside of urban repression but rather carved out of it as a nimble, counter-normative type of political resistance. By charting the contours of several types of these networked mall protests, this article reveals how contemporary mobile activism invents and reproduces alternate protest time-spaces. Focusing on their capacity to refashion contentious political life in the city, it offers nuanced insights into the latest form of spatial political engagement in a networked urban setting.
... The main goal of the present study is an explorative analysis of the Telegram-based activity related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Telegram was used by the protesters to coordinate their activities [21] but the dynamics of the use of Telegram during the protests is unclear. For instance, at what point Telegram, previously not very popular in Hong Kong, became the main platform for the protesters, and how fast the movement grew on the platform. ...
... Groups are essentially group chats where anyone can post, while channels are normally administered by few people, and only these people-channel administrators-can post to a given channel. This structure is strikingly different from that of Facebook and Twitter and, at the first glance, is perhaps more conducive to the emergence of leaders (i.e., specific channels coordinating protest actions) rather than to the development of a leaderless protest as the 2019 protests in Hong Kong were according to the previous research [21]. We aim to scrutinize the claim about the leaderlessness of the movement with the following research question: ...
... The analysis also reveals that the protests were de-facto leaderless, as previously claimed [21], with different channels switching in terms of the dominance in the network every month. We would like to reiterate, however, that the nature of the data allows only testing for the presence of sustained leadership (in the context of coordination and mobilization) constituted by group chats and/or public channels. ...
Online messaging app Telegram has increased in popularity in recent years surpassing Twitter and Snapchat by the number of active monthly users in late 2020. The messenger has also been crucial to protest movements in several countries in 2019-2020, including Belarus, Russia and Hong Kong. Yet, to date only few studies examined online activities on Telegram and none have analyzed the platform with regard to the protest mobilization. In the present study, we address the existing gap by examining Telegram-based activities related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. With this paper we aim to provide an example of methodological tools that can be used to study protest mobilization and coordination on Telegram. We also contribute to the research on computational text analysis in Cantonese—one of the low-resource Asian languages,—as well as to the scholarship on Hong Kong protests and research on social media-based protest mobilization in general. For that, we rely on the data collected through Telegram’s API and a combination of network analysis and computational text analysis. We find that the Telegram-based network was cohesive ensuring efficient spread of protest-related information. Content spread through Telegram predominantly concerned discussions of future actions and protest-related on-site information (i.e., police presence in certain areas). We find that the Telegram network was dominated by different actors each month of the observation suggesting the absence of one single leader. Further, traditional protest leaders—those prominent during the 2014 Umbrella Movement,—such as media and civic organisations were less prominent in the network than local communities. Finally, we observe a cooldown in the level of Telegram activity after the enactment of the harsh National Security Law in July 2020. Further investigation is necessary to assess the persistence of this effect in a long-term perspective.
... This case examines one such tactic of making collective decisions on Telegram channels. Based on the use of new apps and platforms, along with their 'Like Water' tactics, the movement has been characterized as a smart mob (Ting, 2020) and we agree that it indeed resembles a networked protest. However, this characterization does not reveal the mechanisms and processes necessary for movement mobilization and organization. ...
... In the following months, spontaneous acts of contention had taken place in strategic locations in all districts of the dense city. Lessons from the recent Umbrella Movement translated to activists' commitment to preserving solidarity in 2019, even when the radicalization of tactics tested the movement's unity in terms of beliefs (Lee, 2020;Ting, 2020). ...
Datafication increasingly transforms all layers of societal functions with specific ramifications. With digital technologies becoming increasingly central to how activists organize for collective action, there is a need to better understand data-related practices. To interrogate the role of technologies in the dynamics of a movement's 'backstage' organizational practices, we analyzed a communicative episode by pro-democracy activists of 2019 Hong Kong. With 'data-as-repertoire,' activists mobilized data-based tactics to escalate protest activities in order to oppose a proposed extradition bill. The bill was perceived by activists as China's exertion of control on the semi-autonomous region-a unique status stipulated under 'one country two systems' for 50 years since the handover from British colonial rule in 1997. One such tactic was the use of the chat app Telegram's polling feature to make collective decisions. Applying a communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) approach, the concept of technology affordances-the possibilities of action generated from actors' engagement with a specific technology-is appropriated to focus on authorship affordances for authority practices. We further apply the concept of organizationality-a proposed set of criteria for the degree to which a social collective displays organizational characteristics to instantiate the organizationally constitutive elements in the authorship/authority dynamics of the polling texts. For our analysis of Telegram polls, we apply the matters of concern to matters of authority framework. It points to how matters of concern voiced by someone can become legitimized through the collective negotiation of its meaning through communication. Our findings reveal three authorship affordances of Telegram that shaped how concerns were communicated and gained authority status: anonymity, temporal boundary, and affect in dialogue. We make three contributions to the literature. First, we provide a refined use of the affordances concept, which can be widely applied to different forms of ICTs to interrogate their influences on data-related practices in contentious politics. Second, we demonstrate the utility of the organizationality concept with its three criteria to shed light on backstage movement Achieving Organizationality through the Communicative Affordances Authorship 2 organizing dynamics. Third, we show the applicability of the matters of concern and matters of authority framework to bracketing the processual dynamics of ICTs interactions in our analysis.
... The most prominent example of this is the Chinese government's institution of the Law of the People's Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (hereafter National Security Law or NSL), which severely restricted civil liberties in Hong Kong. This move came after one year of protest in Hong Kong (for more, see Ting 2020 ). The imposition of the NSL led to arrests of opposition politicians and dissidents and had a general chilling effect on the freedom of speech and the press. ...
... In 2019, protests erupted again, this time over a new proposed extradition law. This larger movement, the Water Revolution, lasted several months, impacting economic activity and ultimately forcing the withdrawal of the proposed law ( Ting 2020 ). However, Beijing also indicated that they would be more actively involved in administering Hong Kong in the future ( Hui 2020a ). ...
As governments sought to manage the coronavirus pandemic, many pursed temporary increases in centralized authority, a general tactic of crisis management. However, in some countries, public health was not the only motive for centralization. The COVID-19 response coincided with broader worldwide trends toward autocratization. Some of these efforts happened while the world was preoccupied with responding to the pandemic without concretely referencing coronavirus; however, in other cases, public-health rationales are clearly and explicitly invoked as a pretext for actions that instead aid the consolidation of regime authority. This has been especially pernicious in subnational politics, where efforts have been made to undermine the ability of opposition parties to fairly contest local and regional politics. This article examines four cases in which political actors either opportunistically used distraction from the COVID-19 pandemic or explicitly invoked public health while seeking to undermine long-term political contestation in their jurisdictions: Hong Kong, Hungary, Uganda, and the United States. We characterize the use of pandemic response as pretext or opportunity for undermining opposition parties, recentralizing political authority in dominant actors, and inhibiting the fair contestation of elections.
... The present essay thus focuses on two forms of participatory activities in the prominent social media platform Telegram, used during the 2019 anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (anti-ELAB) movement in Hong Kong. In the anti-ELAB movement, the dominant information communication technologies (ICTs) dramatically shifted to the open-platform social networking app Telegram and the Reddit-like online forum LIHKG (Lidan), with fewer people continuing to use Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp (Lee, 2020;Ting, 2020). Given the uniqueness of Telegram, digital media use in social movements like the anti-ELAB movement can be located in two conspicuous forms of participatory activity: 1) symbolic participation to navigate tactical repertoires of user groups through subscriptions to diverse Telegram channels and 2) spontaneous interactions to engage with and exchange information with other social movement participants who attended or were interested in attending events, primarily by using hashtags on Telegram. ...
... As a result, there were more local communities and fewer media and civic organizations in the anti-ELAB movement than in the 2014 Umbrella movement (Urman et al., 2021). Finally, the lack of publicity in Telegram largely contributed to the leaderless and decentralized characteristics of the anti-ELAB movement Ting, 2020). Telegram users do not see what their friends have publicly posted, as happens on Facebook and Twitter. ...
Networked social movements can create autonomous communication networks supported by digital media and are often viewed as leaderless and decentralized under the logic of connective action. Nevertheless, a certain level of leadership may exist and is informally distributed among movement participants. This essay examines protest activities in networked social movements and discusses how loosely connected protests can be collectively mobilized and organized utilizing social media affordances through two forms of participatory activity: symbolic participation and spontaneous interaction. Specifically, this essay investigates the messages and chats of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement (anti-ELAB) in Hong Kong on the public channels of the social media platform Telegram. An analysis of two million anti-ELAB messages revealed two important protest activities conducted to organize and mobilize social movements. First, Telegram users, although they varied in their usage of the platform’s technology, engaged with subscription models to navigate the symbolic and tactical repertoires of diverse user groups and to organize theme-oriented actions by creating informative, supportive/backup, and cooperative networks. Second, they employed hashtags to promote and organize spontaneous interactions to rally and sustain autonomous individuals. Furthermore, geolocation hashtags allowed for engagement with others by scaffolding real-time and spontaneous communications that transcended space and time. This essay provides insights into how participants in networked social movements use digital media to mobilize, organize, publicize, and participate in protests.
... It is a Reddit-like, multi-category discussion forum that allows people registered with an institutional or ISP email (not Gmail or Hotmail) to sign up and anonymously post, upload, vote, and chat. On LIHKG, users can vote discussion threads up or down and thereby popularity drives the top threads to be seen first (Lee, 2020;Ting, 2020). During the 2019 protest, a lot of protesters have utilized LIHKG to exchange ideas, dissemination protest information, and even make decisions. ...
... This open-ended, consensus-based operating system facilitated the crowdsourcing of leadership, linked to robust feedback loops. It helped to replace entrenched elites with collective wisdom and decision making, crucial for a movement without leaders (Ng, 2020), whereby decisions are based on real-time performance and momentary reputation on the Internet (Ting, 2020). ...
In Hong Kong’s social unrest of 2019, protesters adopted a variety of strategies to express their demands, including demonstrations on the street, political consumerism, and vandalizing stores of retailers perceived to be ideologically opposed to the movement, among others. When the Hong Kong government began to more forcefully suppress and monitor the protest, data became a contentious object as well as a weapon in the repertoire of political struggle. Taking the protesters’ collective initiative of doxing the policemen and their families as an example, this article examines protesters’ engagement with data during the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-ELAB Movement. Specifically, we explore how movement participants adapted doxing practices in response to shifts in the political opportunity structure namely the passage of the National Security Law 2020 (NSL). This article investigates how the discourses, targets, strategies, and sentiments within the doxing changed following the introduction of the NSL. It also discusses the meanings and challenges of data activism and the contentious nature of doxing under different political opportunity structures.
... While most Hong Kong people are ethnically Chinese, 156 years of British rule has led to the rise of a distinct Hong Kong identity since the 1970s. Although Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, many To start with, the economic damage caused by the ongoing social unrest is unprecedented, with damage of major public transportation and government property, fire set on state-owned bank branches and pro-China businesses (known colloquially as "blue" shops,) alleged excessive force used by the police, and closure of many local businesses (Shek, 2020;Ting, 2020). Hou and Hall (2019) stated that vandalism by protesters has resulted in the damage of 740 sets of traffic lights, 52.8 km of railings along the road, and 21,800 square meters of paving blocks, requiring an estimate of HK$65 million to repair. ...
... However, the impact did not seem to be that significant as all the parents of this study claimed that they have good relationships with their children, and one student protester even said that his relationship with his parents became better after the mass protests due to their common enemy, i.e., the government. Although there was no significant impact on the relationships between parents and children due to the mass protests, 4 out of 5 parents expressed their concerns regarding their children's safety, confirming existing literature regarding Hongkongers' concerns about public safety such as disruptions to public transport, school suspensions, conflict between protesters and police, and destruction to public property during mass protests (Purbrick, 2019;Shek, 2020;Ting, 2020). ...
In 2022 it will be 10 years since the publishing of Vivian Louie’s Keeping the Immigrant Bargain: The Costs and Rewards of Success in America, which depicts the challenges and opportunities encountered by the 1.5- and second-generations of two Hispanic groups while navigating life as immigrants in the US in the 2000s. Considered an important example of ethnographic work with immigrant families, the book was well received at the time and is still widely read and recommended today. For over three and a half years, Louie studied 76 second-generation college students and graduates (37 Colombians and 39 Dominicans) and 37 immigrant parents. In examining the various reasons for their success, Louie identified several major factors and stakeholders that facilitated the academic achievement of the second-generation.
... While most Hong Kong people are ethnically Chinese, 156 years of British rule has led to the rise of a distinct Hong Kong identity since the 1970s. Although Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, many To start with, the economic damage caused by the ongoing social unrest is unprecedented, with damage of major public transportation and government property, fire set on state-owned bank branches and pro-China businesses (known colloquially as "blue" shops,) alleged excessive force used by the police, and closure of many local businesses (Shek, 2020;Ting, 2020). Hou and Hall (2019) stated that vandalism by protesters has resulted in the damage of 740 sets of traffic lights, 52.8 km of railings along the road, and 21,800 square meters of paving blocks, requiring an estimate of HK$65 million to repair. ...
... However, the impact did not seem to be that significant as all the parents of this study claimed that they have good relationships with their children, and one student protester even said that his relationship with his parents became better after the mass protests due to their common enemy, i.e., the government. Although there was no significant impact on the relationships between parents and children due to the mass protests, 4 out of 5 parents expressed their concerns regarding their children's safety, confirming existing literature regarding Hongkongers' concerns about public safety such as disruptions to public transport, school suspensions, conflict between protesters and police, and destruction to public property during mass protests (Purbrick, 2019;Shek, 2020;Ting, 2020). ...
This qualitative study examined the impact of mass protests on various Hong Kong individuals. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic data collected through extensive interviews and social media, the impacts of mass protests on social relationships, economic development, and mental and physical health of Hong Kong students, parents, and educators are discussed. Answers pertaining to why Hong Kong university students participated in mass protests and how their parents and teachers responded to their participation are found by examining their rationales for joining mass protests and the possible consequences they are facing in the present and future.
... Currently, open elections are only held for the appointment of members of the Legislative Council, the Chief Executive is appointed by a decree of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. During the height of the movement (June to October 2019), citizens engaged in a wide variety of resistance strategies, including but not limited to boycotting companies perceived as being in favour of the establishment, occupying the airport to bring international awareness to their cause, organising mass sing-ins at shopping malls and constructing Lennon Walls (Ting, 2020;Wan Chan and Pun, 2020). Each of these strategies not only encapsulated the struggle over Hong Kong's political and cultural identity, collectively, they also provide examples of how the practices of protestors and citizens appropriated space and thus created new meanings of place. ...
... At the specified time and place, thousands of people seemingly 'materialised' and occupied the space. Thus, these events also had the hallmarks of a 'smart mob' (Ting, 2020). ...
Set in the context of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest movement in Hong Kong, this study focuses on selected material and social appropriations of space including community-focused events held in shopping malls, the establishment of networks connecting consumers to suppliers with like-minded political values, and human chains. Drawing on popular concepts such as scale, network and place-frames found in the literature on contentious politics, we argue that the place-making practices observed during the period of study became claim-making practices that effectively framed movement aims and projected movement claims beyond the neighbourhood scale into a dynamic contestation at the city and national scales. Adopting key elements of neighbourhood as defined by Jenks and Dempsey, we highlight that the socio-spatial practices of the Anti-ELAB protests not only re-cast city spaces into neighbourhood spaces but also redefined traditional understandings of neighbourhood as a socio-spatial construct. We argue that during the Anti-ELAB movement an ‘ideological neighbourhood’ emerged in which spatial relationality is not borne out through physical proximity. Instead, connections between functional and social units were established through ideological affinity. These new connections and the replication of neighbourhood-based practices reinforced the construction of a socially and politically distinct Hong Kong identity. We extend the literatures on contentious politics and urban sociology by showing that the ideology and the imaginaries of movement participants can become spatially manifest and thus defensible in the physical world through new territorialities such as the neighbourhood.
... The mobility was a key factor in contributing to its impressive longevity. One of the most famous slogans of the movement was "be water"-a quote from martial arts star Bruce Lee, who advised people to be "formless" and "shapeless" as water (Ting, 2020). Arguably, MLS was the best media technology to follow and capture this highly fluid movement. ...
This study proposes a sociotechnical framework to study digital media and social movements and uses it to analyze the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Informed by actor-network theory, this framework examines media technology as infrastructure, practice, and text, and discusses its relation to other actors/actants in the network of social movements. Based on qualitative analysis of live streaming sessions and in-depth interviews with journalists and audiences, I identify and explicate the major actors/actants related to mobile live streaming and argue that mobile live streaming became an obligatory passage point through which actors/actants reached other parts of the network and realized their goals. The assemblage of heterogeneous actors/actants not only contributed to the solidarity and longevity of the movement but also brought risks. This study extends the line of research on media technology and social movements by proposing a framework that examines one specific media technology while maintaining an ecological lens.
... Their text-analysis results also demonstrated that Telegram was predominantly used to distribute information about police presence, protest-related actions, and deliberation. Furthermore, their results also confirmed a previous claim (Ting, 2020) that the protests were de facto leaderless. Lastly, through a time series analysis, they showed that the introduction of the National Security Law in July 2020, triggered a significant decrease in Telegram activity. ...
The popularity of the instant messaging app Telegram in Ukraine and Russia
was strong even before the still-ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, since
24 February 2022 (when the Russian invasion began), it has seen huge increases in
subscribers and even become the primary communication and news source in Ukraine.
In this exploratory research, we analysed Telegram channels from both Ukraine
(@UkraineNow — the official channel of the Ukrainian government, and @V_Zelenskiy_
official — the official channel of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy) and
Russia (@rt_russian — the official channel of the news network RT) to discern the
content of posts during this invasion. Our analysis of 37,172 posts in total showed
that while @UkraineNow is particularly being used to communicate invasion-related
news, @rt_russian is working as merely an extension of RT, which is part of the
pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation ecosystem. However, Zelenskyy has opted
for a completely different approach: he has used his Telegram channel to encourage
Ukrainians and garner support from the World. The present conflict is at a critical
juncture, and our timely research seeks to determine how both countries’ governments
are utilizing Telegram as a weapon for the information war and what impact this has
on ground.
... Their text-analysis results also demonstrated that Telegram was predominantly used to distribute information about police presence, protest-related actions, and deliberation. Furthermore, their results also confirmed a previous claim (Ting, 2020) that the protests were de facto leaderless. Lastly, through a time series analysis, they showed that the introduction of the National Security Law in July 2020, triggered a significant decrease in Telegram activity. ...
The popularity of the instant messaging app Telegram in Ukraine and Russia was strong even before the still-ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, since 24 February 2022 (when the Russian invasion began), it has seen huge increases in subscribers and even become the primary communication and news source in Ukraine. In this exploratory research, we analyzed Telegram channels from both Ukraine (@ UkraineNow — the official channel of the Ukrainian government, and @V_Zelenskiy_official — the official channel of Volodymyr Zelenskyy) and Russia ( @rt_russian — the official channel of the news network RT) to discern the content of posts during this invasion. Our analysis of 37,172 posts in total showed that while @ UkraineNow is particularly being used to communicate invasion-related news, @ rt_russian is working as merely an extension of RT, which is part of the pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation ecosystem. However, Zelenskyy has opted for a completely different approach: he has used his Telegram channel to encourage Ukrainians and garner support from the world. The present conflict is at a critical juncture, and our timely research seeks to determine how both countries’ governments are utilizing Telegram as a weapon in the information war and what impact this has on ground.
... Ollas Comunes revived a long tradition of public kitchens as spaces of community engagement and solidarity. Unfolding protests were shaped by extreme police brutality and repression (for a different context see Ting 2020). Specific forms of engagement and strategies to counter police brutality emerged such as first aid teams and Primera Linea (First Line), protestors that sought to shield the main protests from police brutality (Green Rioja 2020). ...
The Chilean uprising has been defined by detractors and sympathizers as an “estallido social” or social explosion, alluding to its perceived transient character. Assumptions about spontaneity have similarly underpinned diagnoses of its political significance. It is either a problem to be pacified or limited for generating alternatives. This article problematizes this perceived transience, focusing instead on the event’s rhythms, atmospheres and materialities. The article seeks to contribute to projects of collective knowledge production that underline the need to archive, map and theorise events as lived history. Studying the uprising as lived history does not elicit a particular response but rather initiates an investigation into what it makes possible. The figure of the atlas is developed for such an investigation. An atlas curates the emerging archive by composing images and text, not to close off meaning but rather allow for imagination to enter the realm of knowledge.
... They adopted the slogan "Be Water" to signal the movement's formlessness and flat hierarchy, and prominent activist Joshua Wong made his leaderless claim: "I do not lead the Hong Kong protests, because no one person leads the protests" (Wong, 2019). Platform and other technologies were "the backbone for the mobilization and coordination of a nascent smart mob" (Ting, 2020). ...
We applied a communication as constitutive of organizing (CCO) perspective in a case study to examine Twitter’s influence on the leadership dynamics in the 2019 Hong Kong Protests. We argue that Twitter is a powerful nonhuman leadership actor by demonstrating how it coordinates a plenum of co-participating agencies to construct meaningful narratives. In addition, we show that while many social movements call themselves leaderless, because of Twitter’s co-participation, they are not leadership-less. Using digital methods, we first harvested movement-relevant tweets based on hashtags and retweet counts from a key event of the protests, and then analysed the video content in the three most-retweeted tweets. Our analysis shows that Twitter’s various mechanisms dictate how online conversations unfold, and that Twitter therefore influences how “authoritative text” is established. Our study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, we contribute to critical leadership studies by showing that Twitter is a leadership actor that enacts sociomaterial leadership, which further challenges the dominant human-centric and masculine views of leadership. In doing so, we reveal that the persistent leaderless movement narrative is a fantasy. Second, by illustrating how Twitter’s authorship mechanisms generate authority and polarity, we contribute to a stream of CCO studies showing that platforms influence power dynamics. Third, by attending to multivocality and dissensus, where a myriad of voices could speak up against the established and perceived injustice, we assert that Twitter as a leadership actor dictates specific modes of communication with performative effects.
... Lee, 2009). A recent example of complex endings is Hong Kong's 2019/20 anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (anti-ELAB) movement, a movement during which protestors made use of persistent digital sites of organisation even after protests taking place in physical sites across the city ended (Ting, 2020). During this movement, those engaged in contentious action -initially marches over occupations, as 2014's occupations had been displaced (Lam, 2015) -used the protest philosophies of "be water" and "blossom everywhere " (Keck, 2019). ...
This paper conceptualizes digital displacement as both a way through which the digital, dynamic and fragile spatialities of contentious politics can be examined and as a geographic critique of censorship. Digital displacement, understood here as the act of removing users from the digital places and spaces they wish to remain in and use, often through the act of deletion, is conceptualised through the digital displacement of two contentious political groups that attempted to contest the forced eviction of migrants from Beijing in 2017; hashtag focused #BeijingSurgery# and instant messaging group using BeijingTogether. Explored through participant observation, interviews and playful digital exploration, this paper examines the spatialities that made multiple digital displacements possible and the activist spatialities that emerged during and post‐displacement. In exploring this I develop a flexible vocabulary around digital place, space, scale, territory and mobility to analyse the practices of digital displacement, to understand the socio‐spatial positionality of activists involved in digitally centred contentious politics and to contextualize their territorial positionality within Chinese digital territory and global digital territories. Through the examination of #BeijingSurgery# and BeijingTogether the article highlights: the importance of digital territorial positionality for both activists and the digital places and spaces used for contentious politics; that within systems of digital spatial governance deletion and displacement can be effective strategies of repressive governance with wide ranging displacement effects; and that while digital displacement is not necessarily the ending point of contentious politics the re‐production of activist spatialities is more difficult when the authority being protested against governs the digital territory used for protest.
... While researchers have commonly observed that MSM can enable and connect new repertoires of citizen action, these streams of research have limited their investigation to public involvement merely in formal and contentious politics. Particularly in the case of Hong Kong, research has focused on how activist digital media usages were reproduced in people's daily routines, work patterns, and habitual activists during the Umbrella Movement (Ting, 2017(Ting, , 2019 and Anti-Extradition Bill Movement (AEBM) (Ting, 2020). Albeit from a different perspective, researchers have also investigated how abeyant civil society networks connected the two social movements through everyday digital media uses (Cheng et al., 2021). ...
Using digital ethnography to examine the daily mobile (micro)blogging (moblogging) practices of local residents as they confronted a wave of inbound shopping tourists in pre-Covid-19 pandemic Hong Kong, this article explores how the latest mode of mundane citizenship emerges from the communicative mobility of urban dwellers equipped with mobile phones and social media applications (apps). Recent research on the role of mobile devices and social media apps in citizen participation has focused on more visible forms of civic-political events, such as protests and voting, and tended to neglect the effects of mobile communication performed during banal travel and quotidian activities. This article offers an alternative reading of the relevance of mobile social media (MSM) in contemporary public lives by examining how they open up new temporalities and spatialities for counter-public engagement in the contexts of mundane urban mobility. The findings demonstrate various moblogging practices that entail modalities of counter-public engagement that traverse the personal, proto-political, and communal, and reveal how local residents used these modalities to articulate alternative public agendas, connect acts of consumer activism, and perform communal belonging vis-à-vis inbound shopping tourism amid their daily routines and modest journeys. Focusing on mobile socialities enabled by smartphones and networking apps, this article explicates how contemporary moblogging can, on the one hand, extend people's capacity to engage in citizen talk and connective action, while on the other hand, allow them to flexibly connect and contribute personal photobiographies and narratives to counter-public communities. By unpacking the novel pathways to citizen participation, it offers insights into new ways in which everyday mobile communication can be transformed into public involvement, albeit often in agonistic and emotional forms, and the role of MSM in this process.
... Similarly, local identification invites local support as opposed to isolation (Birman et al., 2005). In Hong Kong, people and businesses identifying with the nation are the targets and victims of the localist riot, and thus suffer losses (Lo, 2021;Ting, 2020). Conversely, people and businesses claiming support for localism avoid victimization and losses inflicted by localist rioters. ...
National and local identifications among the youth are likely to increase and reduce, respectively, following personal and societal losses experienced due to the localist riot. The localist riot occurs as an opposition to the nation or its regional government, such as that in Hong Kong. According to exchange theory, such riot losses are likely to change the identifications. With the aim to clarify this likelihood, this study surveys 2,000 Hong Kong Chinese youths aged 18–29 years. The survey measured the youth identifications in 2020 and
2019 and riot losses in early 2020 to predict national or local identifications. Results first demonstrate the inverse relationship between national (i.e., Chinese) and local (i.e., Hongkonger) identifications. Essentially, national identification increased with societal riot loss experienced unconditionally and personal riot loss experienced conditionally on prior national identification. Conversely, local identification decreased with personal and societal riot losses experienced conditionally on prior local identification. Results imply
that the youth identifications can change due to the riot loss experienced.
... The air pollutant concentrations can be affected by social dynamics, such as the trigger of mass protests due to economic troubles, job insecurity and rapidly growing inequality [2]. In 2019, a huge number of public protests and strikes spiked up in developing and developed countries, including Europe, Asia and the Americas [3][4][5][6]. At the end of 2019, Latin America was in the center stage of demonstrations against governments in Mexico [7], Chile [8], Bolivia [9,10], Colombia [11] and Ecuador [12]. ...
Political and economic protests build-up due to the financial uncertainty and inequality spreading throughout the world. In 2019, Latin America took the main stage in a wave of protests. While the social side of protests is widely explored, the focus of this study is the evolution of gaseous urban air pollutants during and after one of these events. Changes in concentrations of NO2, CO, O3 and SO2 during and after the strike, were studied in Quito, Ecuador using two approaches: (i) inter-period observational analysis; and (ii) machine learning (ML) gradient boosting machine (GBM) developed business-as-usual (BAU) comparison to the observations. During the strike, both methods showed a large reduction in the concentrations of NO2 (31.5–32.36%) and CO (15.55–19.85%) and a slight reduction for O3 and SO2. The GBM approach showed an exclusive potential, especially for a lengthier period of predictions, to estimate strike impact on air quality even after the strike was over. This advocates for the use of machine learning techniques to estimate an extended effect of changes in human activities on urban gaseous pollution.
... Such activities have, for example, shown to facilitate on-the-ground protest action and the evasion of violent responses by repressive regimes (e.g. Hong Kong protests -see Ting, 2020). Some of these evasive tactics have been extended to the digital realm through the manipulation of keywords and hashtags, also called "morphs" (see Rauchfleisch & Schäfer, 2015). ...
In recent decades, digital activism has received a lot of scholarly and journalistic attention. Even so, there remains no firm consensus on its precise definition and scope. This paper addresses this conceptual haziness and contends that there are analytical issues and conceptual implications in the openness of the term and its description as digital, as 'digitality' is neither the sole nor the primary feature along which activism has changed. Drawing on extant practices of digital activism and conceptual approaches to its scope, the paper aims to (1) critically discuss & highlight a range of conceptual obscurities in digital activism scholarship, (2) provide a glimpse into the concept's evolution, and, through these (3) suggest that the term (incl. synonyms) suffers from myriad conceptual and epistemological fallacies: omissions of the concept's complexity (e.g. hybridity, rhizomatism, multi-mediality), implications of digital dualism and therefore potentially technological determinism, and the invitation of stigma, luddite sentiment, and other social constructions of the technologies to which the term is attached.
... In mid-2019, an intense social movement sparked off by the introduction of the controversial Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) has generated another public mental health crisis (Hou and Hall, 2019). The social movement has quickly escalated from peaceful mass demonstrations into widespread and intense clashes between the protesters and the police (Ting, 2020). Ni et al. (2020) found a prevalence of 11.2% for depression and 12.8% for probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during the heights of the movement in late 2019, compared to just 1.9% for depression before the 2014 Umbrella Movement (UM) and 4.9% for probable PTSD shortly after the UM. ...
Post-traumatic growth (PTG) emerges from highly stressful situations. The coronavirus (COVID) pandemic may qualify as one. This study investigated the PTG among Hong Kong citizens during the first outbreak in spring 2020, shortly after a large-scale social movement subsided. A longitudinal online survey was launched during the peak (Time 1) and the palliation (Time 2) of the outbreak. Among the 327 participants who completed both waves, 28.4% exhibited probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Time 1, while 18.0% reported significant PTG in at least one domain in Time 2. The interaction between the sense of coherence (SOC) and post-traumatic stress mediated the relationship between Time 1 perceived outbreak severity and Time 2 PTG, such that PTG was more likely among participants with higher post-traumatic stress and SOC. PTG was also associated with a weaker contingency between Time 1 and Time 2 perceived outbreak severity. Echoing the transformational model, our findings show that both experienced stress and coping resources are essential for PTG to emerge. We also demonstrated how PTG might lead to more flexible risk perceptions according to the development of the outbreak.
... Such activities have, for example, shown to facilitate on-the-ground protest action and the evasion of violent responses by repressive regimes (e.g. Hong Kong protests -see Ting, 2020). Some of these evasive tactics have been extended to the digital realm through the manipulation of keywords and hashtags, also called "morphs" (see Rauchfleisch & Schäfer, 2015). ...
The past decades have generated a wealth of literature on digital activism. Even so, the phenomenon has been little historicised. This paper engages in a deconstructionist exercise on historical references in digital activism literature towards exploring implicit meaning-making in a symbolic-interactionist tradition. It identifies four distinct narratives: 1) a technology narrative [activism as technology-driven]; 2) a communications narrative [activism on the basis of communication options]; 3) an online-off-line narrative [activism based on an online-off-line dichotomy]; and 4) an engagement narrative [activism based on its affordances for public engagement]. The paper argues that these narratives contribute to a distinct, polysemic, and paradoxical understanding of digital activism as a phenomenon that is technologically driven (technological determinism), and both distinct to and enmeshed with traditional activism. In doing so, this narrative analysis shows a range of underlying ideological assumptions in digital activism study and conceptualisation, which informs how the phenomenon is understood today.
... Occurring during a more optimistic time, The Umbrella Movement featured peaceful protests and coalitions that came together in three Occupy-like encampments in Hong Kong's busiest and most prominent spaces for shopping and governance. Learning from the government's strategy of prosecuting publicised Umbrella leaders after the encampments were peacefully disassembled, Anti-ELAB protests have largely been made to appear faceless and leaderless, which has similarities to the indigenous Zapatista movement in Mexico (Marcos, 2004), and modern protest movements which use guerrilla tactics to disrupt and confuse government surveillance and policing, including via dark web applications (Ting, 2020). While international media has tended to focus on mass police brutality (looting-less) vandalism, and sieges of Hong Kong's three most famous universities, the Anti-ELAB protests have also been widely supported by school and university communities (Lee, 2019). ...
(*Free to download at: https://www.academia.edu/45073408/_Critical_Literacy_in_Hong_Kong_and_Mainland_China_) This chapter focuses on the development of critical literacy scholarship and practices in Hong Kong over the past 30 years, against the backdrop of increasing influence and control by the People's Republic of China. The chapter begins with an overview of relevant social, political, and economic developments in the Hong Kong city-state's history, and intersections of those developments with its schooling system and academia. Key issues of educational equity and social justice are highlighted, followed by a breakdown of significant works in critical literacy research literature, methodologies, and pedagogies at the primary, secondary, and university level. This chapter also tackles elements of the ongoing protest movement and possibilities for more transformative research and praxis, including through application of intersectional and transnational approaches.
... Recent scholarship has also highlighted the significance of digital technology to the Anti-ELAB protests. For example, "novel uses" of communication technology by Anti-ELAB protesters led them to form ad hoc and networked "pop-up" protests, creating a new form of a "smart mob" facilitated by digital technology [103]. Platforms such as Telegram and LIHKG worked to mobilise and establish a sense of community among young activists [86] and created a "symbiotic network" of protesters [60]. ...
The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests in Hong Kong present a rich context for exploring information security practices among protesters due to their large-scale urban setting and highly digitalised nature. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 11 participants of these protests. Research findings reveal how protesters favoured Telegram and relied on its security for internal communication and organisation of on-the-ground collective action; were organised in small private groups and large public groups to enable collective action; adopted tactics and technologies that enable pseudonymity; and developed a variety of strategies to detect compromises and to achieve forms of forward secrecy and post-compromise security when group members were (presumed) arrested. We further show how group administrators had assumed the roles of leaders in these 'leaderless' protests and were critical to collective protest efforts.
... Being water and blossoming everywhere was contingent on a consistent presence in digital sites of protest and organisation. These sites guided people and advised on tactics (Ting 2020). During the most effective moments of protest, physical bodies were mobile and digital bodies were relatively static, moving between a few specific digital sites. ...
This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of migration and mobilities through an examination of how translocal migrants engage in a variety of mobilities in order to practice long-term stillness in Beijing, China. To achieve this the paper proposes the concept of dynamic stillness, a stillness at one scale achieved through mobility at other scales. Dynamic stillness builds on other forms of (im)mobility, including turbulent stillness, waiting, suspension, immobility and emplacement. The concept returns agency to the non-mobile individual, agency that is lacking in other terms used to describe various (im)mobilities. This paper also conceptualizes mobility and stillness as taking place in both physical and digital sites, and it explores the role that digital sites, such as instant messaging groups, play in projects of stillness. Empirically, the paper explores unsuccessful attempts to displace translocal migrants engaged in food work in Beijing. While seemingly successful at first, when the analysis moves beyond simplistic snapshots of displacement and takes into account a variety of sites, scales and temporalities, the paper shows how dynamic stillness can be practiced at the scale of the sub-district by being mobile at other scales, including streets, neighbourhoods, across the nation state and to digital sites.
... Particularly in today's networked environments, the common use of mobile social media can create new opportunities for lay citizens to engage in contentious politics on a daily basis traversing political and everyday arenas (Ting 2019). Whilst the pervasiveness of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can facilitate the mobilisation and coordination of networked and ad hoc forms of urban protests (Ting 2020), it can also shape the contours of collective actions by enabling new modes of engagement (Earl and Kimport 2011) and by personalising contentious politics (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). Integrating these research insights, we seek to uncover the political texture of mundane activities in the networked urban settings of Hong Kong. ...
This chapter examines the emergence of urban contention against inbound tourist shoppers in the Chinese global city of Hong Kong. Drawing on netnography of citizens’ digitally enabled activities and qualitative analysis of news coverage, this chapter discusses how the local residents self-mobilised on the internet and engaged in a series of contentious activities, ranging from confronting shopping tourists, storming stores in major tourist nodes and nurturing political consumption in the communities. Moving beyond conventional protest demonstrations, the analysis of these networked acts of urban contention adds to our understanding of how bottom-up attempts are assembled with the use of mobile social media to balance neoliberal, tourist-oriented planning of urban spaces and livelihoods. With the case of Hong Kong, this chapter illustrates the impact of shopping tourism on local communities as well as the critical responses it prompts from digitally savvy urban dwellers. It informs the study of New Urban Tourism by revealing the growing tension between local communities and inbound travellers through the lens of cross-border consumption and mundane networked politics.
Scholars have noticed that contemporary digitally-mediated activism is hybridized in terms of organizational structures, action-repertoires, and underlying movement logics. However, to what extent such hybridization takes place in contentious politics and whether or not the process benefits the goal of movement mobilization remain uncertain. This study scrutinizes the mechanism of online activism in an analysis of 2 million Telegram Channel messages collected during the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement. It highlights the logic of cross-boundary action – a mixture of action actors, organizational structures, repertoires, network positions for empowerment – through which self-organized activists played overwhelmingly vital roles in the movement but were critically supported by small numbers of organizational and news media actors in some essential functioning. The study also establishes a relationship between the online audience’s attention to the call-for-action messages and the subsequent protest turnout, indicating a private-to-public shift via networked media, in which most of the diversely connected self-organized activists captured most of the attention. It finally summarizes the multidimensional nature of digital activism in defining the way social media affordance shapes the landscape of contemporary political participation.
Protests could exhibit properties of an asymmetrical, nonconventional war when paramilitary police utilise counterinsurgency measures and decentralised protestors adopt guerrilla tactics. This study examines the structural characteristics of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and the organisation of the police and protestors. Strategic challenges seen in civil wars emerged. Blurred frontlines and identification problems escalated violence for collaboration and control. The civil war theoretical framework explains the role of civilians, the logic of violence, and the realignment of social and economic life in prolonged protests. The resemblance of society at civil war suggests civilians were forced to take sides and participate.
The 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill movement (Anti-ELAB) in Hong Kong peaked the tactical radicalization of the city’s recent protest history. At the same time, it signified unprecedented tactical reconciliation between moderate and radical protestors that maintained strong movement momentum and a high degree of solidarity for a long period. An ethics of solidarity was successfully formulated to illuminate deliberative practices among participants. However, the change of protest spatiality and repertoire from wildcat protesting to temporary occupation at a university campus altered the dynamics of protestors and weakened deliberative communication. This paper illustrates the struggles and learning curves of students who suffered deliberative deficit in the interaction with other protestors. This paper argues that the occupation, despite its contested nature, offered informal experiential learning of civic engagement for the students to their political literacy and civic mentality towards social movement under the intense setting of real politics.
This is the first dedicated study on how verbal violence is strategically and instrumentally used in social movements. Its primary objective is to contribute to the emerging debate on protest violence. Its secondary objective is to enrich the interdisciplinary field of swearing research by identifying ‘political swearing.’ Based on data on Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Movement, I identify four major instrumental uses of political swearing: attacking enemies of the movement, mobilization and politicization, identity-building, and ‘personal political emotion work.’ I find that political swearing can directly hurt people and indirectly do so by initiating violent enchainment processes. I also find that political verbal violence yields instrumental utility for social movements. This study’s data include in-depth interviews with 30 informants, documentary and video data, and participant observation.
Protest immobilities have political potential because of the affective atmospheres they produce. In 2019, the Hong Kong protest movement targeted Hong Kong International Airport in a series of sit-ins resulting in a two-day shutdown and cancellation of more than 1,000 flights. This article is based on participant observation and interviews with thirty-two people—aviation workers, tourists, expatriates, and demonstrators—who were present at one or more of the sit-ins, and it uses a perspective informed by work on affective atmospheres and social movements in geography. We demonstrate the political potential of four forms of embodied mobility– arrival, friction, waiting, and departing from the airport on foot. Arriving to unexpected scenes produced micropolitical change among passengers, as the fatigue of air travel heightened the emotional impact of the sit-ins. Frictions were politically generative because they forced passengers to slow down and notice the assembly. Waiting produced solidarities between different factions of the protest movement and generated animosity from previously apathetic passengers who were stuck. Walking was an anxious ordeal for those forced to depart the airport on foot after public transport was suspended. The article shows how demonstrators can resist, alter, and transmit affective atmospheres through the grounding of aeromobilities.
In October 2018, a collaboration between young rap artists in Thailand’s Indy rap scene, Rap Against Dictatorship (RAD), launched a video criticizing the ruling Junta that went viral within days of publication. The Junta soon after released its own video as a response to RAD. The production and publication of both videos are what Scollon (2001) calls social actions mediated by a distinct cultural toolkit. This study analyzed how modes such as music, text, color, camera angle, gestures, voice, image and iconicity emerged in both videos to realize scalar differences in civic participation. The Junta’s video represents a high sociolinguistic scale, whereas RAD realizes a lower scale. In a time of political unrest in Thailand, sociolinguistic scale and the semiotic resources that people employ to realize scales are a lens to analyze how different stakeholders address various perspectives of the political situation and appeal to different levels of civic participation.
The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement in Hong Kong has involved the use of media arts as propaganda by both the pro-establishment and pro-democracy parties. The role of media arts, together with that of social media and instant messaging platforms, has expanded to include political advocacy within an international society and the co-creation of symbolic artifacts by netizens who are activists in the online community. In addition, media arts have played a role in disinformation campaigns and the dissemination of “fake news.” Taking this landmark social movement as an example, this chapter explores the use of media arts as a tool for both political advocacy and propaganda, discusses their dialogue with fundamental human rights and universal values, and suggests formal and informal education pathways for media arts as political advocacy.KeywordsDigital mediaMedia artsSocial movementPolitical advocacyAnti-Extradition Law Amendment BillFake newsDisinformationHong Kong
An increasing number of social movements have taken the form of connective action achieved through datafication structures in the absence of central coordinating social movement organizations. Social movement demobilization in digitally-mediated connective action remains a relatively understudied area. Drawing together social movement studies and communication studies, we introduce the theoretical framework of ‘implicated networks of demobilization’ (INsD) to explore the dynamics and implications of datafication for social movement demobilization. Based on examples from the Anti-Extradition Bill movement in Hong Kong and the 2020 George Floyd protests in the United States, we theorize that the connective action embedded in the datafication structure confronts three demobilizational dynamics: implicated data, materiality, and epistemic dynamics. These dynamics imply that connective action mobilization in datafied societies faces constraints pertaining to state-level network oppression, potential threats imposed by the material datafication structure, and the spread of digital knowledge of self-protection. The INsD framework contributes to understanding the interactive data-mediated dynamics between the state and activists in connective action.
This paper explores the variety of alternative, local platforms that flourished in Hong Kong during 2019–2020, a tumultuous time which was shaped by the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests and the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the app and platform landscape by tracing the differences between local platforms, platforms made in Hong Kong for communities there, and mega platforms, platforms owned by international technology giants such as Google and Facebook. It examines this along two axes: the differences on (1) “platform logics”: what alternative organising logics are possible within this landscape? And on (2) “platform mobilities”: how do these alternative platforms compete and co-exist with global conglomerates?
In particular, the paper excavates the disparate logics and mobilities in the array of (a) social media platforms, (b) shopping aggregator/city guide platforms, and (c) ride-hail platforms that grew in tandem with local socio-political rhythms of life in the city. This includes the differences between a “growth-at-all-cost” logic versus the incentives that encourage tailored services to a very specific user-base. Likewise, the disparities that emerge when extraction of data is not the priority – and instead, when the aim is to retain as little data as possible. Similarly, it gives examples of what platforms could look like when they are not centrally characterised by capital accumulation, value-extraction, and race-to-the-bottom logics.
This paper thus highlights the vast range of alternative platform possibilities and argues for the importance to think more critically about what platforms we are platforming, where we look to when we think of innovation, and what we forgo in a landscape starved of options. In putting the range of creative local platforms in dialogue with mega-platforms, this paper joins the larger movement urging for a better space for alternatives to flourish.
While existing studies assert that citizens actively use digital media to exert their political agency, the various roles and impacts of digital media should be further unpacked. Building on the notions of ‘digital democratic affordance’ and ‘cross-platform play’, this article uniquely theorises political consumerism as a multi-scalar mode of human–non-human interactions. The concept of multi-scalar cross-platform affordances is formulated to demonstrate how different digital platforms – large or small, corporate or amateur, global or local – co-constitute an environment in which citizens are progressively channelled to engage in multiple platforms, reinvent them in concert with one another and participate in political consumption across time and space. In the case of the Yellow Economic Circle, against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement, we examine such cross-platform dynamics and their multi-scalar enactment of everyday political consumption practices across four stages: deliberation, crowdsourcing, materialisation and habituation.
This article analyses the youth social movements in Hong Kong employing ‘conscientisation’ popularized by Paulo Freire. It is argued that the youth, as historical beings, promote humanisation by seeking to effect structural changes with the help of the social media. However, the youth-led movements in Hong Kong differ from Freire’s ideas in two significant ways. First, the increasingly violent nature of the protests departs from Freire’s emphasis on peaceful resistance. Secondly, Freire’s call for loving dialogue is not evident in Hong Kong despite meetings between the authorities and protesters. Hong Kong highlights the usefulness of the notion of conscientisation in shedding light on the youth social movement in an Asian context. At the same time, the developments in Hong Kong extend the existing literature on Freirean thought by situating it in a Confucian cultural setting.
This brief response to Riding and Dahlman's compelling paper offers two reflections that seek to build on their rich analysis of the complex geographies and geopolitics of Liberland. Firstly, it explores how the ‘restless river’ might be further enlivened as an actor within this intriguing context. It then digs further into the non-human complexities of the project by suggesting that the animals of Liberland warrant further attention. In doing so, it seeks to add additional complexity to the challenge of rethinking ‘traditional ways’ of writing about disputed territories and to shed further light on the violence associated with ascriptions of ‘terra nullius’.
In the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill resistance movement, Hong Kong netizens used a popular digital platform known as LIHKG (連登) as a communicative center to exchange time-based information, express outrage or solidarity, and assemble decentered actions of agitation. There was an implied sense that LIHKG was facilitating a “wild” mode of politics oriented toward agitation, disturbance, and chaos. This paper examines its “wild politics” and asks: how might we trace the evolution of a complex political vernacular capable of creating a chaotic form of organizing, and what did this vocabulary tell us about the latent meanings, desires, and identity-making of the networked protesters? Utilizing the LDA topic-modelling method, we analyzed a large corpus of discussion threads on LIHKG to develop a customized domain-specific thematic repertoire, and revealed a “language in the wild” as part of a cultural archive that embodied the netizens’ ambivalent hopes.
Annually, around 10 million Chinese tourists, constituting almost a quarter of Thailand's total foreign visitors (before COVID‐19), have started to make a strong imprint on Thailand's tourist landscape. At the same time, a new wave of Chinese migrants to Thailand are seeking business and work opportunities. This paper focuses on these new encounters between local Thais and the incoming mainland Chinese in terms of how cultural boundaries are created, contested and renegotiated, specifically within the context of Thailand's long history of Chinese migration, which dates back several generations. The paper investigates the phenomenon of ‘re‐Sinicization’ in Thailand, and its contested nature within the broader Thai political and cultural milieu. It draws upon recent controversies regarding online battles between Thai and Chinese netizens to argue that the controversies are indicative of the unease from the increasing Chinese presence within Thai society and the increasing embroilment of Thailand within the political contestation of the wider Sinosphere.
The migration literature has examined migrants' political motivations separately from their family's mobility strategies in the face of macro‐political uncertainties. Bridging the two bodies of literature, this study analyses how parental status moderates the relationship between individual political considerations and migration intentions in an increasingly tense political climate. Based on the quantitative data on political protests in Hong Kong, we find that migration intention increases both with mobilisation by protestors and repression by the government. While more active protestors are less likely to migrate, parents who have participated in the protests tend to have a stronger intention to migrate. Our qualitative data explain that despite parent protestors' commitment to the pro‐democratic protests, their encounters with law enforcement create a strong migration intention to ensure their children's political freedom and physical safety. While pro‐government citizens have less intention to migrate than pro‐democracy citizens, both are likely to migrate if they have children. Interviews show that pro‐government citizens' migration hopes for their children's future are de‐politicised. Finally, future‐oriented characteristics of migration motivates parents to prioritise their children's prospects over their obligations to their ageing parents. This study therefore contributes to the understanding of the relationship among migration, politics, and family life.
Based on Appraisal Theory and critical discourse analysis, this corpus-assisted study examines how China Daily (CD) and South China Morning Post (SCMP) used appraisal resources to express their respective stances towards the anti-extradition bill movement. The results show that both newspapers employed negative resources of Judgement and the predication strategy to convey their stance, but SCMP seemed more refrained in the use of appraisal resources. CD openly stated that any illegal actions should be punished, and SCMP also criticised these actions. Besides, CD emphasized the consequences brought by violence and attributed the breakout of the protests to the opposition camp’s political intention for their own benefit, whereas SCMP highlighted Hong Kongers’ widespread opposition to the bill. These differences in language use and stance might be explained by the different press systems they respectively belong to and related to their respective historical and socio-political contexts.
The combined impacts of COVID-19 and global climate change are destabilising the infrastructures and future prospects of formal educational systems, with schools and universities struggling to adapt to conditions of radical precarity. At the same time, activist movements are generating alter-educational platforms that reappropriate the learning infrastructures of cities as mobile architectures of pedagogical resistance. Building on Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons, this paper discusses transnational examples of radical pedagogies that engage the city as an ecology of deformalised study. We highlight examples from Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown regime, emphasising how informal study enabled community-led responses to crisis at city-scale. We then turn to urban ecologies of study arising from contemporary activist movements, drawing connections between protest movements in Hong Kong and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘war machine’. This leads to a speculative re-imagining of alternative educational values and futures within a milieu of activist study, care, and resistance.
Background
Popular protests have broken out in worldwide, particularly in the last few years. In 2019, numerous demonstrations against an extradition bill occurred in Hong Kong until pandemic restrictions were imposed. The policing response relied heavily on methods such as batons, tear gas and rubber bullets. Given the relevance for other geographical contexts, the current study investigated the mental health impacts on protest participants and spillover to community members.
Methods
Surveys were disseminated on social media in August and October 2019 to collect demographics, political views, protest participation, exposure to (protest-related) potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and mental health symptoms. A latent class analysis (LCA) was conducted using demographic data and inter-class differences in PTEs and mental health symptoms were examined.
Results
There were 37,541 (59.8% female) and 40,703 (50.0% female) responses in August and October. Respondents, even those with low participation, reported significant levels of depression, anxiety, and symptoms of traumatic stress (STS). The LCA suggested a 5-class solution (youth, allies, supporters, sympathizers, and frontliners). Mental health symptoms and PTEs varied with class membership, with 50.8% of frontliners reporting severe STS.
Limitations
The non-random sampling and self-reported measures may over-estimate the prevalence of mental distress in the wider population.
Conclusions
Large numbers of pro-democracy supporters in Hong Kong reported high rates of depression, anxiety and STS during mass protests. Younger and more heavily involved respondents faced the highest mental health risks, however elevated rates were also observed for respondents with low participation.
Particulate matter (PM) accounts for millions of premature deaths in the human population every year. Due to social and economic inequality, growing human dissatisfaction manifests in waves of strikes and protests all over the world, causing paralysis of institutions, services and circulation of transport. In this study, we aim to investigate air quality in Ecuador during the national protest of 2019, by studying the evolution of PM2.5 (PM ≤ 2.5 µm) concentrations in Ecuador and its capital city Quito using ground based and satellite data. Apart from analyzing the PM2.5 evolution over time to trace the pollution changes, we employ machine learning techniques to estimate these changes relative to the business-as-usual pollution scenario. In addition, we present a chemical analysis of plant samples from an urban park housing the strike. Positive impact on regional air quality was detected for Ecuador, and an overall − 10.75 ± 17.74% reduction of particulate pollution in the capital during the protest. However, barricade burning PM peaks may contribute to a release of harmful heavy metals (tire manufacture components such as Co, Cr, Zn, Al, Fe, Pb, Mg, Ba and Cu), which might be of short- and long-term health concerns.
This paper 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 movement drew resilient, mass participation unparalleled in the city's history and much of the world. Drawing from original sets of onsite and online datasets, we conceptualize the anti-extradition movement as a form of total mobilization from below. The totality of mobilization depended on a set of permissive and productive conditions: abeyant civil society networks concealed after the Umbrella Movement activated by fear over extradition to authoritarian encroachment, anger towards police conduct and coordinative communication through digital media. Its characteristics regarding protest scale, mobilizing structure, alternative space, and group solidarity are examined. The spasmodic moments of mobilization are explained by the nexus of network building in an unreceptive environment and a critical juncture. The roles of threats and emotions in mass mobilizations are also analysed.
This paper gives an account of a series of three Zoom zine-making workshops run between March and July 2020 that were themed the political, the personal and the practical. A micro-reading of the zines is offered as data that mirror the aims of the workshops, to queer time by slowing down and creating a pause. The process of zine-making as feminist praxis is examined, and the zines themselves are discussed as data that reflect specific moments in time during the early phases of the pandemic. By inviting everyday feminist academic workers, from PhD candidates to professors to participate in a collective act of zine-making, this paper argues that a type of feminist work exists between academia and activism that subverts institutional definitions of productivity, collaboration and output.
The cultural commons which foregrounded an aesthetically pleas- ing 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 con- sumable 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 pro- democracy 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 impor- tant substrate to Hong Konger identities in the body.
This article shifts attention from elite actors’ Internet uses to self-joining citizens’ everyday networked activism at the grassroots. Stepping beyond conventional technocentric accounts, it expands on contemporary practice theory to examine the role of digital media in recent movement protests, focusing on their embeddedness and (re)productiveness in everyday practices. Based on the case of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, this article investigates the ways in which activist digital media usages were enacted and retained as part of people’s daily routines, work patterns, and habitual activists. It presents qualitative findings to explicate how, through the reworking of mundane routines with digital media, the ordinary engaged in everyday networked activism traversing quotidian activities and movement participation. By situating activist media in the increasingly mediated mundane, this article offers insights into the emergence and expansion of contemporary networked activism and reveals the nuanced interplay between contentious politics and everyday life therein.
Recent times have been defined as momentous: great transformation, great recession as well as great regression have been frequently used short-cut terms to characterize the period following the financial breakdown of 2008. As for contentious politics in these times, we frequently hear references to crisis as well as eventful protests, as calls for what was expected to be routine protest triggered portentous waves of contentious politics. Reference to moments of change can be found in different approaches addressing social movements from the macro, meso, and micro levels. While neoinstitutional approaches have looked at extraordinary times from a macro perspective, the Chicago School adopted a micro perspective, looking at the sudden breaking of established paths, the reproduction of ruptures, and their stabilization. An emerging concern in social movement studies with ‘great transformations’ that triggered big mobilizations can also be seen at the meso level Drawing on these perspectives, I argue that some eventful protests trigger critical junctures, producing abrupt changes which develop contingently and become path dependent. While routinized protests proliferate in normal times, under some political opportunities, some protests – or moments of protest – act as exogenous shocks, catalyzing intense and massive waves of contention. Referring to the debate on critical junctures, and bridging it with social movement studies, I thematize a sequence of processes of cracking, as the production of sudden ruptures; vibrating, as contingently reproducing those ruptures; and sedimenting, as the stabilization of the legacy of the rupture. With the aim of mapping some relevant questions, rather than providing answers, I refer for illustration to research I carried out on movements in democratic transitions during economic, political, and social crises, as well as their legacy and memory.
Recent protest movements worldwide have painted a picture of youth striving in times of crisis to secure self-determination and justice for more democratic futures. While traditional theory of collective behaviour has viewed youth activism as the result of structural strains or collapse of order, recent studies have focused attention upon the role of future orientations merely as movement strategies. What is missing from these accounts and what this article seeks to address is the initiatives of youth to carry out their future-oriented agendas and struggles at the grassroots. Drawing upon interview data with young citizens, who took part in recent political activism in response to a democratic crisis in Hong Kong, this article illustrates how young people involved in political struggles as they enacted life goals and identities. Rather than static political ideals, these visions of future were constantly reconstituted in the activist practices alongside unfolding crises. This article thus re-theorizes youth activism simultaneously as the manifestation as well as the constitution of alternative futures in practice. Moving beyond the notion of youth activism as passive reaction to repression or abstract political anticipation, it leverages for youth agency and everyday experience to understand youth’s political imagination and commitment to social transformation.
Exploración del desarrollo de nuevas tecnologías de comunicación inalámbrica (telefonía celular, computadoras portátiles, entre otros) y la interacción que ocurre entre estas tecnologías y sus usuarios. Así, por un lado el recorrido conduce a la tramoya que son los talleres de ingenieros e inventores donde son creados aparatos cada vez más pequeños y mejores, en tanto que la contraparte lleva a los escenarios donde las personas están experimentando con estas tecnologías. Es analizado un amplio espectro de las implicaciones resultantes de estos desarrollos, como la evolución de los sistemas de membresía y "reputación", la presión de los grupos mediáticos y las agencias gubernamentales para controlar el acceso y uso de las tecnologías o los desafíos potenciales para la seguridad y privacidad de los usuarios. Desde un enfoque que cruza la sociología, la antropología, la economía y la inteligencia artificial, el autor plantea que el impacto real de estas herramientas no proviene de la tecnología, sino de cómo las personas la usan, se resisten o adaptan a ella y en último término, se transforman a sí mismas, a sus comunidades y a sus instituciones.
Rupture: The crisis of democracy
- M Castells
Castells, M. (2018). Rupture: The crisis of democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Our research in Hong Kong reveals what people really think of the protesters -And the police. The Independent
- F Lee
Lee, F. (2019, October 16). Our research in Hong Kong reveals what people really think of the
protesters -And the police. The Independent. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/
voices/hong-kong-protests-police-violence-public-opinion-polling-support-a9158061.html
What is an event? Chicago
- R Wagner-Pacifici
Wagner-Pacifici, R. (2017). What is an event? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.