Lasting 79 days and straddling three urban centers, the Umbrella Movement created an unprecedented protest spectacle and brought Hong Kong worldwide attention. While scholars studying this movement tend to focus on its causes, claims, and dynamics, few have examined how Hong Kong’s regime responded to the protracted protest and to what extent the government’s response played a role in ending it. In this chapter, I focus on the regime apparatus and show how it adaptively switched its response from repression to waiting out the protests after police repression backfired and catalyzed heightened mobilization. This strategy of waiting, which I refer to as “attrition,” entails an array of defensive and offensive tactics that extend far beyond ignoring the protests. Hong Kong's hybrid regime, backed by its authoritarian sovereign, actively sought to maintain the cohesion of the elites to block political opportunities while at the same time leveraging counter-movements and legal interventions to both increase the cost of protest participation and mobilize public discontent. Despite protesters’ resistance, the apparent success of this “attrition” suggests its potential as an effective regime response and a flexible holder for different tactics.

The Study of Regime Responses

In social movement literature, scholars generally follow two approaches toward studying regime responses. The first is to regard regime response as a dependent variable, inquiring how regimes choose between various strategies.