Take Back Our Future

An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

Ching Kwan Lee, Ming Sing, Ching Kwan Lee, Ming Sing

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501740923
• eBook ISBN: 9781501740947
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Social Sciences

In a comprehensive and theoretically novel analysis, Take Back Our Future unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The essays presented here by a team of experts with deep local knowledge ask: how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience?

Take Back Our Future argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The contributors outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, Take Back Our Future demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement
• 2. Prefigurative Politics of the Umbrella Movement: An Ethnography of Its Promise and Predicament
• 3. Transgressive Politics in Occupy Mongkok
• 4. The Spectrum of Frames and Disputes in the Umbrella Movement
• 5. Mediascape and Movement: The Dynamics of Political Communication, Public and Counterpublic
• 6. Where Have All the Workers Gone? Reflections on the Role of Trade Unions during the Umbrella Movement
• 7. How Students Took Leadership of the Umbrella Movement: Marginalization of Prodemocracy Parties
• 8. Hong Kong’s Hybrid Regime and Its Repertoires
• 9. Protest Art, Hong Kong Style: A Photo Essay
• 10. Taiwan’s Sunflower Occupy Movement as a Transformative Resistance to the “China Factor”
• Afterword. Hong Kong’s Turn toward Greater Authoritarianism
• List of Contributors
• Index