Polite Politics

A Sociological Analysis of an Urban Protest in Hong Kong

Denny Ho Kwok-leung

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138740235
• eBook ISBN: 9781351729116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: This book contributes to social movement theory and to an understanding of Hong Kong politics through analysis of an urban housing protest movement. The theoretical approach adopted is a multi-level one, and seeks to show the influence of the political context, the resources available to the groups concerned, the actors' interpretations of their situation and their strategy preferences. This approach fills a gap in social movement theory because most theoretical frameworks focus on a single level of analysis. The book also aims to help researchers in the field to re-examine the current development of social movement theories and to learn the specific trajectory of urban social movements in Hong Kong.

1 Introduction

This study is concerned with an urban movement and its role in urban politics. An urban movement is conceived here as an individual organization 'which make[s] urban demands whatever their levels and effects' (Pickvance, 1985:32). Our focus will be on the origin, the character and the effects of a housing movement in Hong Kong. A housing movement is one of the sub-types of urban movement, in particular arising in relation to issues concerning the management and distribution of housing resources. An issue concerning Aged Temporary Housing Areas (ATHAs) will be taken as a case study in order to throw light on the reasons why, and how, urban minorities in Hong Kong employ collective actions to protect or advance their interests. Furthermore, we shall draw on the findings of this study to shed light on the theoretical discussion about the process of translating a social base to a social force (Pickvance, 1977).

In this chapter, we shall discuss the significance of the study of urban movements in section 1.1. Its significance to the study of urban politics in Hong Kong is presented in section 1.2. Section 1.3 will spell out the method and data used in this study. The final section is about the structure of this book.

Before going into the discussion about the significance of the study of urban movements, it is useful to place the housing movement in Hong Kong in the context of other types of political action. Based on the data collected through a study of the social conflicts in Hong Kong in the period from 1980-91 we found a number of features of the housing movement in Hong Kong.¹ Firstly, in the period from 1980-91 social action related to housing issues was the third most frequent category of conflict issues, following labour and political issues. Secondly, most of the issues were those concerning local and sectoral benefits; 60% of the housing issues were of 'local' scope, 32% of sectoral scope and only 8% of whole-territory scope. Thirdly, as regards the forms of organization involved, 44% and 34% of housing conflicts in Hong Kong in the last decade involved loose groups and community/sectoral groups respectively. However, only 4% of housing conflicts involved federal forms of organization; in other words, organizational alliance was a very insignificant form of organization in the housing movement. Fourthly, as will be shown in detail later, most of the forms of action were confined to petitions, press conferences and sending letters to the media. By contrast, disruptive contests were less likely to be a form of action taken in housing conflicts. This indicates that the most popular form of action taken in housing disputes is 'polite protest actions' which refer to the protest activities that 'eschew or at least avoid the extensive physical damage to property and humans found in violent struggle on the one side and the restraint and decorum of staid politics on the other' (Lofland, 1991:261). These findings support Saunders' description of the nature of urban movements as 'typically fragmented, localized, limited to a narrow range of concerns, and politically isolated from broader radical movements' (1980:551).

Despite being one of the most frequent categories of social action, the housing movement has not developed into a social force with a wide scope for forming an alliance, and its concerns seldom reached issues at territory-wide level. Such features lead us to reconsider the nature of community-based movements. Boyte (1980) explained them by reference to the localism, narrowness of constituency and the dominance of paid staff in community movements. Fisher and Kling (1993) held a positive view on community movements despite the small scale of this kind of collective action. They argued that such grassroots mobilization was the result of the popular strategies of parochial and self-serving kinds.

This study attempts to shed light on these features of the housing movement in Hong Kong and to explore the factors giving rise to these features and the trajectory of working class people's collective action in pursuit of their interests. Also, we are interested in the reasons underpinning the use of 'polite protest actions' as the dominant strategy in housing movements. It will be argued that the concept 'polite protest action' is the key to understanding the nature and character of the housing movement in Hong Kong; and we shall discuss this concept farther in the next section.

Urban Movements: Their Importance in Urban Politics

Why should we study urban movements?

An urban movement is an individual organization making urban demands. It is distinguished from 'urban social movements' - a sub-type of urban movement which is reserved for denoting urban movements that can achieve high-level changes (Pickvance, 1985:32). Urban social movements have been regarded as an important agent of social change by a new school of sociological approach known as new urban sociology (Zukin, 1980). The new urban sociology is in fact a critique of the classical tradition of the Chicago School. Urbanization is conceived by the Chicago School to be the result of a natural evolutionary process, and competition and population increase are the impetus for social change. Although acknowledging the hardship and suffering of the underprivileged, the Chicago School 'falls back on oddly mechanical explanations for those facts, such as the purported effects of population density, size and heterogeneity' (Walton, 1993:99). Collective actions by the underprivileged, in the eyes of the scholars of this tradition, are considered to be the result of social disorganization or the psychological imbalance of individuals (Park, 1952).

The new urban sociology approach has a different conception of urban life. It suggests that a city is a fusion of market, political authority and community (Walton, 1993). In a city, there is a regular exchange of goods, by which resources are allocated to meet the demands of people's daily necessities. The market is the location for these kinds of practice. In order to ensure the prosperity of the market in a city, the political and administrative authority develops and regulates the practices of tradesmen and merchants. This entails political control and the creation of rules (Tabb and Sawers, 1978). Community is the third essential component of a city, which refers to 'the urban citizenry united in a corporate unit administrated by authorities who they elect' (Walton, 1993:94). It is also a specific form of association among the urban citizenry who organize collectively to defend, or advance, their interests. These three components entail three kinds of interests. Agents involved in the market are oriented to the pursuit of profit, while the political and administrative institutions regulate the operation of the market and urban life. Community arises in order to protect itself from exploitation by the market and domination by the political system. Because of the involvement of these interest groups, city life is fashioned by social conflicts concerning economic competition and political control (Goering, 1978; Walton, 1979). City life, or urban life, is understood as a process - such as residential segregation, land-use pattern, and the formation of community organizations, etc, - and as the product of the interplay of economic forces, political control and community. Studies of urban conflicts reveal the ways in which private and public agents modify the influence of economic and political forces. The suffering of the underprivileged is hence understood as the consequence of economic exploitation and political domination, and their collective actions are responses to the inherent and fundamental problems of city life.

Marxist urban sociology is one of the strands of the new urban sociology. The proponents of this perspective on urbanization anticipate the development of a new urban politics which is dominated by social conflicts arising from exploitation and domination outside the sphere of work. With the publication of his book The Urban Question in 1972, Castells brought the structuralist Marxist tradition into the study of urban politics. In Castells' theoretical framework, urban protests provide the clues to the identification of new social cleavages apart from class conflicts and inequality. Urban politics is seen as an arena in which urban social movements are the agents of social change, and hence the primary task of urban sociology is to examine their origins and effects.

Urban social movements are defined by Castells as 'a system of practices resulting from the articulation of the particular conjuncture, both by the insertion of the support-agents in the urban structure and in the social structure, and such that its development tends objectively towards structural transformation of the urban system or towards a substantial modification of the power relations in the class struggle, that is to say, in the last resort, in the state power' (1977:432). Castells argues that while class conflicts spring from the primary structural contradictions of capitalist relations of production, urban social movements arise as a result of another intrinsic structural contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. However, urban social movements are secondary in the sense that they cannot produce any 'effects' by their own efforts. Class movements are identified as the primary social force generating social and political changes, whilst any other forms of social movement are considered to be unable to give rise to the same effects. The effects of urban social movements are only related to their function of linking secondary structural contradictions in the urban system to the anti-capitalist struggle (Lowe, 1986). Significant as their role in linking different classes may be, the effects of non-class based urban social movements are to be materialized through the mediation of an efficient working class organization. In other words, urban social movements can facilitate class struggle only when they are able to develop linkages with class practices.

This conceptual framework has directed academic attention to the study of whether such a new politics has developed, and about the extent to which urban social movements engender a new and significant challenge to the hegemony of capitalist societies (Saunders, 1980). In particular, the question of the relationship between class struggle and urban social movements has opened up new research directions, including many studies aimed at finding out how these two kinds of struggles are related (Delia Seta, 1978; Folin, 1979; Janssen, 1978; Lagana, et al., 1982; Preteceille, 1986). Lagana et al. (1982) argued in his study of the urban conflicts in Turin that urban social movements could be an extension of the anticapitalist struggle from factory to society, and therefore any explanation of urban social movements without such a reference to class contexts would be misleading.

However, there are a number of shortcomings in Castells framework. Firstly, Castells' analysis is highly functionalist, in the sense that his primary concern is the functions of urban social movements, rather than identifying and examining the actual effects of particular actions. As McKeown argued, 'the consequence of Castells's functionalism...is that he explicitly avoids any analysis which would treat urban processes (such as urban planning and urban social movements) as the outcome of the conscious and calculated decisions and actions of the actors in a capitalist society' (1987:140). Secondly, less emphasis is placed on the study of movement organizations. Castells argues that 'the genesis of an organization does not form part of the analysis of social movements, for only its effects are important' (Castells, 1976:169-70). The reason for this methodological rule is pointed out by Pickvance who says that for Castells 'concrete movement organizations are the locus of observation. The point is that they are not the frame of analysis. The focus is rather on the 'problems', 'issues' or 'stakes' the organization pursues and their structural determination. It is the structural contradictions which are the crucial level of analysis, and organizations are seen as means for their expression and articulation' (original italics, 1976:199). Castells subsequently fails to explore sociologically an important theme about how the constituency of an urban movement groups together, implements mobilization and makes decisions in pursuit of their interests. Thirdly, since he does not give sufficient attention to the mobilization process, what has not been adequately studied is the nature and political orientations of the constituency which makes up the potential source of an urban movement (Lowe, 1985). Lastly, Castells puts so much emphasis on urban social movements which have a bearing on societal change that little attention is given to those urban movements with a purely local dimension, or to non-protest and quiescence in urban politics. However, the neglect of small-scale territory-based political actions may result in fewer insights into 'the mechanisms of ideological stabilisation which limit the development of broader political movements from organizations around urban issues' (Dunleavy, 1980:158-9). Similarly, as McKeown argued, 'any definition which wishes to exclude these neighbourhood and community-based movements from the general category of urban movement is likely to miss an important part of the politics that take place within urban areas' (1987:190).

In the mid-1980s the structuralist Marxist approach was widely under attack as overly deterministic. Subsequently Castells revised its original formulation. In his later modification, urban movements have been granted their own right to existence as they are held to be a potential link between different social classes, especially the middle class and working class (Lowe, 1985). Along with class movements and other pressure groups, they struggle to impart a particular 'meaning' to a given city against the interests of the institutionalized urban meaning and dominant classes. Castells in his new work redefines urban social movements as 'urban-orientated mobilizations that influence structural social change and transform the urban meanings' (1983:305). Put simply, he attempts to draw out the link between changes in urban meaning and urban social movements. Furthermore, urban social movements are classified by reference to three fronts that each movement works on: collective consumption, community culture and political self-management. Castells argues that only the urban social movements which interconnect these three fronts are capable of effecting social change. However, he has not gone so far as to give up his Marxist political concern about the power of urban social movements to effect social change, and hence did not shift his attention to the study of various forms of urban protest. Above all, as Lowe argued, Castells 'has still not integrated a sociological understanding of the importance of the nature and characteristics of social bases in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theories of Social Movements: A Review of the Literature
• 3 The Changing Political Context in Hong Kong
• 4 Public Housing Policy and Urban Minorities
• 5 A Brief Account of the Trajectory of the ATHA Protest
• 6 No Through Road: Limited Political Opportunities for ATHA Residents
• 7 Every Person Counts: The Political Participation of ATHA Residents
• 8 The Mobilization Process: External Organizers, Local Leaders and the Choice of Strategies
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Methods
• Appendix 2 A Personal Reflection on Methodology
• Appendix 3 Survey on the Tenants' Preferences in the Temporary Housing Areas in the Kwun Tong District
• Appendix 4 Survey on Kowloon Bay THA Residents' Attitudes to "Same District Rehousing" Policy
• Appendix 5 Survey of the Living Conditions of the Ping Shek THA
• Bibliography