The Occupy Movement in Hong Kong

Sustaining Decentralized Protest

Yongshun Cai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138604650
• eBook ISBN: 9781315532677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Occupy movement in Hong Kong was sustained for about 80 days because of government tolerance, the presence of determined participants, and a weak leadership. The government tolerated the occupation because its initial use of force, in particular teargas, was counterproductive and provoked large-scale participation. Unlike other social movements, such as the 1989 Tiananmen movement, the Occupy movement reached its peak of participation at the very beginning, making it difficult to sustain the momentum. The presence of determined participants who chose to stay until the government responded was crucial to the sustaining of the movement. These self-selected participants were caught in a dilemma between fruitless occupation and reluctance to retreat without a success. The movement lasted also because the weak leadership was unable to force the government to concede or devise approaches for making a "graceful exit." Consequently, site clearance became the common choice of both the government and the protestors.

This book develops a new framework to explain the sustaining of decentralized protest in the absence of strong movement organizations and leadership. Sustained protests are worth research because they not only reveal the broad social context in which the protests arise and persist but also point out the dynamics of the escalation or the decline of the protests. In addition, sustained protest may not only lead to more dramatic action, but they also result in the diffusion of protests or lead to significant policy changes.

1
Sustaining social movements

In mid-September 2014, People Power, a pan-democratic political coalition in Hong Kong, responded to the call for the Occupy Central Movement by purchasing four mobile toilets, 2,000 drainage bags, 1,000 raincoats, and 1,000 packs of bread from taobao.com to prepare for the long-planned occupation. People Power also organized an order-keeping team of roughly 50 members to maintain the peace during the coming movement. People Power estimated that the occupation would not last long after it started on October 1. The police would clear the site within a couple of days, which was the same approach they had employed to deal with protestors who carried out an occupation rally as a trial between July 1 and 2, 2014. In this rally, the police cleared the site by arresting more than 500 participants. In the forthcoming occupation, mobile toilets and drainage bags would be required because the protestors were believed to be surrounded by the police.¹ Nevertheless, similar to People Power, very few people, including the founders of the Occupy Central Movement, the Hong Kong government, and the Chinese central government, expected that the movement would last for nearly 80 days after it started on September 28, 2014.

The Occupy Movement, which is “the most severe political conflict” or “the largest mass movement” since the handover of the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China,² was a direct response to the decision the Standing Committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC) made on August 31, 2014 (hereafter the 8.31 decision). The decision allows the direct election of the chief executive of Hong Kong but without a civil nomination of the candidates. In other words, the central government will retain its control over the selection of the chief executive. Protestors demanded direct universal suffrage with civil nomination and the resignation of Leung Chunying, the incumbent chief executive.³

The Chinese central government rapidly responded. Two days after the movement started, the State Council clearly stated that the central government supported Leung and the Hong Kong government. From October 1, the Chinese central government issued a series of statements about the Occupy Movement through the People’s Daily and Chinese Central Television, the mouthpieces of the central government. Beijing denounced the movement as illegal, criticizing it for breaking the rule of law in Hong Kong and jeopardizing its prosperity and stability. The editorial published in the People’s Daily on October 1 rejected the demand of protestors for civil nomination by stating that the 8.31 decision “has an unshakable legal status and effect.”⁴ The resolute standing of the central government boded ill for the movement, suggesting the movement was doomed to fail.

People stage collective action not merely because of their grievances, but, more important, because of their faith in the effectiveness of the action. In discussing the social movement of weak groups, Piven and Cloward contend that people stage collective action not only because they believe in the diminished legitimacy of the existing system and the increased awareness of rights, but also because of their “sense of efficacy.” In particular, “people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless come to believe that they have some capacity to alter their lot.”⁵ Similarly, as Chong suggests, group members are enthusiastic about contributing to collective action or are pressured to do so only when such collective action has a realistic opportunity to achieve the desired public good. “When collective action is widely regarded as futile, or as an ineffective symbolic protest, these social and psychological incentives vanish.”⁶

Indeed, not long after the Occupy Movement started, many participants acknowledged that the chance for the central government to make concessions in the face of protest was slim.⁷ If people stage collective action because they believe that the action helps their cause, then the case of the Occupy Movement appears puzzling. Why and how did the protestors sustain a seemingly fruitless movement for such a long time? This book aims to address this issue by focusing on the factors that contributed to the standoff between the protestors and the movement target, or the government in this case. It argues that the sustained movement resulted from government tolerance and the decentralized movement structure.

Sustained movements require research because they reveal not only the broad social context in which the movements arise but also the dynamics of the escalation or decline of the movements. In addition, sustained movements may not only lead to more dramatic action (e.g., the hunger strike in the 1989 Tiananmen movement) but may also result in the diffusion of protests or “a propensity for collective action from its initiators to both unrelated groups and to antagonists.”⁸ For example, the Occupy Wall Street Movement diffused from New York not only to other cities in the United States but also to cities in other countries. Furthermore, sustained movements may become the driving force for political or socioeconomic changes and lead to long-term consequences even if they fail.

Explaining the sustainability of social movements

Social movements serve different functions, but they generally aim to induce changes, although their success is highly conditional. For example, Gusfield defines social movements as “socially shared activities and beliefs directed toward the demand for change in some aspect of the social order.”⁹ Social movements are distinguished from more anomic forms of “contentious episodes,” such as short-lived protests or demonstrations, because the former are sustained collective actions or have a continued presence of movement participants or symbols.¹⁰ Tarrow therefore defines a social movement as “collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interactions with elites, opponents and authorities.”¹¹ Similarly, Tilly stresses that a movement is “a sustained series of interactions between power holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal representation.”¹² Movement participants are generally denied effective institutionalized channels to pursue their interests, and staging sustained collective action serves as a possible recourse.

An important issue is what sustains a movement. In his research on the civil rights movement of black people in the United States, McAdam points out that political opportunities, organizational strength, and cognitive liberation are crucial for the rise of social movements; such factors, together with the social control response to the movements, also determine the development of a movement.¹³ The continual existence of political opportunities and the cognitive liberation influence the development of the movement in considerably similar modes as they did in the generation of the movement. Movement participants still believe that conditions are unjust and need to be changed through group efforts. Social control response is an important factor that affects the development of a movement because it reflects the relationship between the movement and its external environment. If the movement is to be sustained, then it must retain sufficient power to withstand the opposition.

Existing studies have highlighted the role of organizational strength in the occurrence, success, and endurance of a movement. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly argue that “would-be activists must either create an organizational vehicle or utilize an existing one and transform it into an instrument of contention.”¹⁴ Research on the relationship between organizations and protest outcomes suggests that organizations contribute to movement success. For example, Shorter and Tilly report that in France, strikes with the presence of unions were less likely to fail than strikes that lacked union backing.¹⁵ Similarly, organizations purportedly play important roles in sustaining movements.

Organizational strength and movement sustaining

According to McAdam, indigenous organizational strength dictates the “structural potential” of challengers to mobilize and take advantage of political opportunities. Specifically, “insurgents must be able to create a more enduring structure to sustain insurgency. Efforts to do so usually entail the creation of formally constituted organizations to assume the centralized direction of the movement previously exercised by informal groups.”¹⁶ This also involves resource mobilization in that movement participants must be able to exploit the initial success of the movement to mobilize those resources required to facilitate the development of a more permanent organizational structure for sustaining the movement.

The importance of organizations in sustaining social movements is therefore manifold. First, organizations are crucial in mobilizing the resources required for sustained movements. Scholars highlighting the importance of resources to social movements have assigned a pivotal role to organizations. McCarthy and Zald define a social movement organization as “a complex, or formal, organization that identifies its goals with the preferences of a social movement or a countermovement and attempts to implement those goals.”¹⁷ They point out that social movement organizations must possess resources, however few and of whatever type, to work toward goal achievement. These organizations “compete for resources with entertainment, voluntary associations, and organized religion and politics.”¹⁸

Second, organizations and leaders are important because they can coordinate collective action. As McLaughlin explains, “Over its life span the movement must develop an organizational structure. Diverse elements within the movement must be coordinated; principles must be surrendered to expediency.”¹⁹ Organizations can also facilitate collective action by overcoming the ever-present collective action problem because an organization can provide incentives or sanctions to enforce compliance and facilitate consensus building.²⁰ Therefore, Oberschall indicates that without organizations, aggrieved people could only stage “short-term, localized, ephemeral outbursts and movements of protest such as riots. For sustained resistance or protest an organizational base and continuity of leadership are also necessary.”²¹

Third, organizations facilitate movement because they help recruit participants and provide incentive for participation. Organizations are often viewed as the infrastructure that provides an organizational base and is used to link members of the angry population into an organized movement.²² McAdam identifies four factors that reflect indigenous organizational strength, namely, members, established structure or solidary incentives, communication network, and leaders.²³ To a large extent, organizational strength is pertinent to an organization’s capacity to mobilize participants. Indigenous organizations are suggested as the primary source of participants. The solidary incentives provide the motivating force for participation, whereas the communication network is also meant to facilitate participation by, for example, strengthening the integration of people into the movement. Thus, Tarrow asserts that “the most effective forms of organization are based on autonomous and interdependent social networks linked by loosely coordinated mobilizing structure.”²⁴

The role of leaders in sustaining movement is self-evident in that the leadership helps formulate movement strategies, coordinate action, and deal with movement targets. Popkin suggests that “the importance of the leader as a political entrepreneur – someone willing to invest his own time and resources to coordinate the inputs of others in order to produce collective action o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1 Sustaining social movements
• 2 Background of the Occupy Movement
• 3 Movement legitimacy and government response
• 4 Determined participants and movement sustainability
• 5 Leadership of the movement
• 6 Tactical escalation and its limitations
• 7 Sustained movement and the consequences
• Appendix: Data collection
• Selected bibliography
• Index