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).

Introduction

The outbreak of the Umbrella Movement in September 2014 was a result of the futility of decades of democratic struggle in Hong Kong. It also marked a major turning point in the direction of social movements in Hong Kong, as large numbers of activists opted to undertake direct action and civil disobedience in defiance of police power and possible prosecution. This followed the rise of a new political identity among the younger generation, who were determined to have more say in their political future, as well as a more general trend towards radicalization in local movements.

This chapter discusses the social and democracy movements in Hong Kong over the last 40 years to put the Umbrella Movement into perspective. Decades of fruitless struggles for democracy drove Hong Kong's people onto the road of civil disobedience. The Umbrella Movement was also sparked by a new generation of activists who are more efficacious and empowered. This chapter provides a background for readers unfamiliar with the political history of Hong Kong, to help in understanding the 2014 Umbrella Movement.

Politics in Postwar Hong Kong

The dominant narrative concerning the political situation of early postwar Hong Kong describes an apolitical population facing a non-interventionist government. Siu-kai Lau's famous “minimally-integrated socio-political system” formulation posited that postwar Hong Kong was a refugee society, with most inhabitants settling in Hong Kong after fleeing communist rule (1984).

The Umbrella Movement—Chronology of Major Events

Introduction

The Umbrella Movement of 2014 was special in more ways than one. Despite the detailed planning and dragged-out deliberations surrounding the original Occupying Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) movement, the occupation movement broke out in a somewhat unexpected manner. The occupation movement did not take place at the originally scheduled time and site, but in a mostly spontaneous manner in reaction to police and government actions. This spontaneity meant that a large number of participants were not originally OCLP followers, although they might be largely sympathetic toward the democratic cause.

This paper, based on interviews in November 2014 with more than 50 committed occupiers at the three different occupation sites, seeks to explore and analyze the backgrounds and views of the participants of the Umbrella Movement. It shows that many committed occupiers had no prior plans to join the OCLP movement, and were not frequent participants in past pro-democracy activities. Police brutality was the chief provocation for their choice to join the movement. This more or less explained some of their behaviors and predispositions during the occupation: many of them were NOT followers of traditional or mainstream pro-democracy parties, so the appeals of party politicians had little influence on them or on the course of the movement. Many were relative newcomers to the democracy movement, which partly explained their mode of action and political inclinations. Despite their bold action of civil disobedience, they showed a fair degree of optimism about how the movement would end.