In the autumn of 2014, thousands of people, young and educated in their majority, occupied the chief business district and seat of the government in Hong Kong. The protest, known as the Umbrella Movement, called for ‘genuine democracy’, as well as a fairer social and economic system. The book aims to provide a dynamic framework to explain why socioeconomic forces converged to produce such a situation. Examining increasing inequality, rising prices and stagnating incomes, it stresses the role of economic and social factors, as opposed to the domestic political and constitutional issues often assumed to be the root cause behind the protests. It first argues that globalization and the increasing influence of China’s economy in Hong Kong has weighted on salaries. Second, it shows that the oligopolistic nature of the local economy has generated rents, which have reinforced inequality. The book demonstrates that the younger generation, which is still finding its place in society, has been particularly affected by these phenomena, especially with social mobility at a low point. Offering a new approach to studying the Umbrella Movement, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in Hong Kong's political landscape, as well Chinese politics more broadly.

This volume examines the most spectacular struggle for democracy in post-handover Hong Kong. Bringing together scholars with different disciplinary focuses and comparative perspectives from mainland China, Taiwan and Macau, one common thread that stitches the chapters is the use of first-hand data collected through on-site fieldwork. This study unearths how trajectories can create favourable conditions for the spontaneous civil resistance despite the absence of political opportunities and surveys the dynamics through which the protestors, the regime and the wider public responses differently to the prolonged contentious space. *The Umbrella Movement: Civil Resistance and Contentious Space in Hong Kong* offers an informed analysis of the political future of Hong Kong and its relations with the authoritarian sovereignty as well as sheds light on the methodological challenges and promises in studying modern-day protests.

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 Hong Kong protests that began in the second half of 2019 captured the world’s attention as demonstrations against an extradition bill grew into a larger civil liberties movement. While protests began as peaceful demonstrations, the disproportionate police force with which the government responded escalated the situation to an international crisis. Kwok Pui-lan and Francis Ching-wah Yip bring together an international cohort to discuss the relation between Christianity and Communism and the neoliberal economy, as well as civil disobedience, religion and social movements, and the roles of the churches in social conflict. This interdisciplinary volume showcases theological reflections by many scholars and activists in Hong Kong.

In late 2014, the prodemocracy demonstrations that were called the "Umbrella Movement" revealed to the world that Hong Kong was not the moneyobsessed society it had often been portrayed as. Hong Kong Soft Power is a description of the complex relationship the artists and activists of this city have had with the country it has been part of since 1997. Trying to understand all the varied forms of art practices possible in the Special Administrative Region by locating them within a relational model, and situating them within the dynamic and changing art ecosystem that has developed over the last decade, Hong Kong Soft Power describes the local art field as a site of struggle where the connections with Chinese Mainland institutions and art practices play a fundamental role. This is not to say that this influence has entirely dominated the local art field, and this book also emphasizes how the artists of the city have engaged in practices ranging from the most personal to the most sociallyoriented. With the analysis of the works of about fifty local art practitioners and a representative range of art institutions, Hong Kong Soft Power is the portrait of a culture going through the trials and tribulations of rapid political and economic changes in both its negative and positive effects.

For decades, Hong Kong has maintained precarious freedom at the edge of competing world powers. In City on the Edge, Ho-fung Hung offers a timely and engaging account of Hong Kong's development from precolonial times to the present, with particular focus on the post 1997 handover period. Through careful analysis of vast economic data, a myriad of political events, and intricate networks of actors and ideas, Hung offers readers insight into the fraught economic, political, and social forces that led to the 2019 uprising, while situating the protests in the context of global finance and the geopolitics of the US-China rivalry. A provocative contribution to the discussion on Hong Kong's position in today's world, City on the Edge demonstrates that the resistance and repression of 2019-2020 does not spell the end of Hong Kong but the beginning of a long conflict with global repercussions.

Since the late 1970s, China has undergone perhaps the most sweeping process of urbanization ever witnessed. This is typically understood as a story of growth, encompassing rapid development and economic dynamism alongside environmental degradation and social dislocation. However, over the past decade, China’s leaders have claimed that the country’s urbanization has entered a new stage that prioritizes “quality.” What does China’s new urban vision entail, and what does the future hold in store? Richard Hu unpacks recent trends in urban planning and development to explore the making and imagining of the contemporary Chinese city. He focuses on three key concepts—the “green revolution,” “smart city movement,” and “great innovation leap forward”—that have become increasingly influential. Through case studies of Beijing, Hangzhou, and Hefei, Hu analyzes how attempts to achieve greater sustainability, promote data-driven governance, and foster innovation have fared on the ground. He also considers the experimental city Xiong’an in terms of China’s idealized vision of the urban future and investigates how the recent experiences of Hong Kong relate to regional and national development projects. Reinventing the Chinese City provides a careful accounting of the ideas that have dominated urban policy in China since 2010, emphasizing key continuities underlying claims of novelty. Shedding light on the transformations of the Chinese city, this book offers a new perspective on the factors that will shape the trajectory of urbanization in the coming decades.

This insightful Handbook offers a comprehensive exploration of the third generation of gender and federalism studies. In this timely and authoritative examination, feminist scholars in both the West and the global south debate the impact of state architectures on women’s movements, partisan organizations and policy advocacy using innovative discursive, institutional and intersectional approaches.

This book explores the interplay between politics, managerialism, and higher education, and the complex linkages between politics and public universities in Hong Kong. Since the mid-20th century, literature on the state, market, and higher education has focused on the state’s shifting role from the direct administration to the supervision of higher education, and its increased use of market and managerial principles and techniques to regulate public universities. However, very few studies have addressed the political influences on university governance produced by changing state-university-market relationships, the chancellorship of public universities, or students’ and academics’ civic engagement with regard to sensitive political issues. The book examines both the positive and problematic outcomes of using market principles and managerialism to reform public higher education; questions the longstanding tradition of university chancellorship; explores the issue of external members holding the majority on university governing boards; probes into the dilemma of either relying on the system or a good chancellor and external members to preserve universities’ autonomy and academic freedom; and assesses the cost of students’ and academics’ civic engagement with regard to politically sensitive issues.