Since 2003, Hong Kong has witnessed a series of large-scale protests which have constituted the core of a reinvigorated pro-democracy movement. What drove tens of thousands of citizens to the street on a yearly basis to protest? What were the social and organizational bases of the protest movement? How did media and public discourses affect the protests’ formation and mobilization? How did the protesters understand their own actions and the political environment? This book tackles such questions by using a wide range of methods, including population and protest onsite surveys, media content analysis, and in-depth interviews with activists, politicians, and protest participants. It provides an account of the "self-mobilization processes" behind the historic July 1, 2003 protest, and how the protest kick-started new political dynamics and discursive contestations in the public arena which not only turned a single protest into a series of collective actions constituting a movement, but also continually shaped the movement’s characteristics and influence. The book is highly pertinent to readers interested in political development in Hong Kong, and as a case study on "the power of critical events," the book also has broad implications on the study of both media politics and social movements in general.

Since 2003, Hong Kong has witnessed a series of large-scale protests which have constituted the core of a reinvigorated pro-democracy movement. What drove tens of thousands of citizens to the street on a yearly basis to protest? What were the social and organizational bases of the protest movement? How did media and public discourses affect the protests' formation and mobilization? How did the protesters understand their own actions and the political environment? This book tackles such questions by using a wide range of methods, including population and protest onsite surveys, media content.

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.

A close-up look at the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong. Hong Kong in the Shadow of China is a reflection on the recent political turmoil in Hong Kong during which the Chinese government insisted on gradual movement toward electoral democracy and hundreds of thousands of protesters occupied major thoroughfares to push for full democracy now. Fueling this struggle is deep public resentment over growing inequality and how the political system—established by China and dominated by the local business community—reinforces the divide been those who have profited immensely and those who struggle for basics such as housing. Richard Bush, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on East Asia Policy Studies, takes us inside the demonstrations and the demands of the demonstrators and then pulls back to critically explore what Hong Kong and China must do to ensure both economic competitiveness and good governance and the implications of Hong Kong developments for United States policy.

The study of Chinese media is a field that is growing and evolving at an exponential rate. Not only are the Chinese media a fascinating subject for analysis in their own right, but they also offer scholars and students a window to observe multi-directional flows of information, culture and communications within the contexts of globalization and regionalization. Moreover, the study of Chinese media provides an invaluable opportunity to test and refine the variety of communications theories that researchers have used to describe, analyse, compare and contrast systems of communications. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media is a prestigious reference work providing an overview of the study of Chinese media. Gary and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley bring together an interdisciplinary perspective with contributions by an international team of renowned scholars on subjects such as television, journalism and the internet and social media. Locating Chinese media within a regional setting by focusing on ‘Greater China’, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese communities; the chapters highlight the convergence of media and platforms in the region; and emphasise the multi-directional and trans-national character of media/information flows in East Asia. Contributing to the growing de-westernization of media and communications studies; this handbook is an essential and comprehensive reference work for students of all levels and scholars in the fields of Chinese Studies and Media Studies.

Het uitgangspunt van dit boek is dat Chinese individuen van hun eigen inzet uit moeten kunnen gaan, ongeacht de beperkingen die hen door de staat worden opgelegd. Om hun belangen beter te kunnen verdedigen sluiten sommige individuen zich aan bij sociale bewegingen, die tot sociale protesten kunnen leiden.

This book brings together writing from activists and scholars that examine leftist and decolonial forms of resistance that have emerged from Hong Kong’s contemporary era of protests. Practices such as labor unionism, police abolition, land justice struggles, and other radical expressions of self-governance may not explicitly operate under the banners of leftism and decoloniality. Nevertheless, examining them within these frameworks uncovers historical, transnational, and prefigurative sightlines that can help to contextualize and interpret their impact for Hong Kong’s political future. This collection offers insights not only into Hong Kong's local struggles, but their interconnectedness with global movements as the city remains on the frontlines of international politics.

In the third edition of Contemporary Hong Kong Government and Politics, Lam Wai-man, Percy Luen-tim Lui, Wilson Wong, and various contributors provide the latest analyses in many aspects of Hong Kong’s government and politics, such as political institutions, mediating institutions, and political actors. They also discuss specific policy areas such as political parties and elections, civil society, political identity and political culture, the mass media, and public opinions after the Umbrella Movement in 2014. The book also evaluates the latest developments in Hong Kong’s relationship with Mainland China and the international community. This new edition offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the main continuities and changes in the above aspects since 2014. This volume will help its readers grasp a basic understanding of Hong Kong’s political developments in the last ten years.

This book argues that ubiquitous media and user-created content establish a new perception of the world that can be called ‘particulate vision’, involving a different relation to reality that better represents the atomization of contemporary experience especially apparent in social media. Drawing on extensive original research including detailed ethnographic investigation of camera phone practices in Hong Kong, as well as visual analysis identifying the patterns, regularities and genres of such work, it shows how new distributed forms of creativity and subjectivity now work to shift our perceptions of the everyday. The book analyses the specific features of these new developments – the components of what can be called a ‘general aesthesia’ – and it focuses on the originality and innovation of amateur practices, developing a model for making sense of the huge proliferation of images in contemporary culture, discovering rhythms and tempo in this work and showing why it matters.

This book describes and analyses the role of the public sector in the often-charged political atmosphere of post-1997 Hong Kong. In this second edition, Ian Scott explores public sector accountability in terms of Hong Kong’s constitutional framework and the structure, functions, and personnel policies of its civil service system. He examines critical issues facing the administration of the public sector and the formulation and implementation of public policy with particular attention to the political challenges confronting the Hong Kong government over the past decade. A concluding chapter assesses how contested values in a changing political environment have affected the public sector in recent years. This edition has been fully updated to incorporate the latest statistics and research, including Scott’s work in such areas as integrity management, corruption prevention, and policing. This book is an essential resource for scholars and students of public administration and public policy in Hong Kong and more broadly for those who are interested in how a particular jurisdiction deals with common administrative problems such as centralisation, the role of statutory bodies, corruption prevention, and the redress of citizens’ grievances. ‘Professor Ian Scott’s book, The Public Sector in Hong Kong, now in a second much-expanded and up-to-date edition, offers a thorough and rigorous analysis of contemporary governance in Hong Kong, focusing on all the key stakeholders. The book is essential reading for government officials, politicians, journalists, academics, students, and the general public.’ —John P. Burns, The University of Hong Kong ‘The second edition not only updates the development in the public sector of Hong Kong, but also provides an important perspective to help readers understand the contexts that navigate its latest developments. This edition, along with Ian Scott’s earlier work, will be judged by many in the field to be among the best books on Hong Kong politics.’ —Hon S. Chan, City University of Hong Kong