For 79 days in 2014, the Umbrella Movement staged Hong Kong's most spectacular struggle for democracy and brought the city into the global spotlight. Sparked by disgruntlement over Beijing's denial of an unfettered, free chief executive election in 2017, the protest began with a class boycott and later morphed into a spontaneous, resilient street occupation of three centralized locations in the city. Roads and pavements were turned into protest sites and tent villages. The label “Umbrella Movement/Revolution” originated from a cover story in TIME Magazine, which showed protesters holding umbrellas aloft to fend off tear gas and pepper spray from the police. The protesters’ actions signified the peaceful and plebeian nature of the protest—a bottom-up and spontaneous campaign against top-down state control and power.

The Umbrella Movement was a significant episode for both new global activism and Hong Kong's political history. Even by international standards, it was a mass-scale civil disobedience movement spanning nearly three months. University polls showed that 18–20 percent of the city's population, or 1.3 to 1.45 million people, participated in the movement (CUHKCCPOS, 2014; HKUPOP, 2014). The number of protesters who participated in the Umbrella Movement is similar to other recent monumental events that brought about significant political changes, such as the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, in which 18 percent of Ukrainians participated, and the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia and Egypt, which comprised 8 and 12 percent of their respective populations (Beissinger, Jamal, and Mazur, 2012).