Solidarity and Implications of a Leaderless Movement in Hong Kong

Abstract

In 2019, what began in Hong Kong as a series of rallies against a proposal to permit extraditions to mainland China grew into a raft of anti-authoritarian protests and challenges to Beijing’s grip on the city. Given the gravest political crisis confronting Hong Kong in decades, this research investigates why the protests have lacked centralized leaders and why the solidarity among the peaceful and militant protesters has been immense. This article also examines the strengths and limitations of this leaderless movement with different case studies. The authors argue that serious threats to the commonly cherished values in Hong Kong, amid the absence of stable and legitimate leaders in its democracy movement, underpinned the formation of a multitude of decentralized decision-making platforms that orchestrated the protests in 2019. Those platforms involved both well-known movement leaders organizing conventional peaceful protests and anonymous activists crafting a diversity of tactics in ingenious ways, ranging from economic boycotts, human chains around the city, artistic protests via Lennon Walls, to the occupying of the international airport. The decentralized decision-making platforms, while having generated a boon to the movement with their beneficial tactical division of labor, also produced risks to the campaign. The risks include the lack of legitimate representatives for conflict-deescalating negotiations, rise in legitimacy-sapping violence, and susceptibility to underestimating the risks of various tactics stemming from a dearth of thorough political communication among anonymous participants who had different goals and degrees of risk tolerance. In short, Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement in 2019 sheds light on the basis of leaderless movements, and on both the strengths and risks of such movements.

Organizing an “organizationless” protest campaign in the WeChatsphere

“…slogans, emojis, and memes); through liking and reposting, activists’ identification with such symbols may bypass collective identity building, such as in the Anonymous and Occupy movement (Carty, 2018). Finally, during the Hong Kong anti-extradition movement in 2019, encrypted apps, such as Telegram and the LIHKG online, afforded anonymity to protesters, which helped the latter launch diverse tactics without centralized coordination by SMOs (Lai and Sing, 2020). In all these instances, SMOs, leadership, hierarchical decision-making, and collective identity formation typical in traditional movements disappear or fade into the background, giving rise to the so-called “organization-less organizing” in digital activism (Bimber et al, 2012: 10).…”

Securitisation or Autocratisation? Hong Kong’s Rule of Law under the Shadow of China’s Authoritarian Governance

“…In early 2019, the local government proposed an amendment to the existing extradition law, which would allow Hong Kong citizens to be sent to the mainland for criminal trial upon the CE’s approval. The proposal caused massive resistance from the public, eventually leading to the citywide protests that lasted for 6 months and a landslide victory of the opposition camp in local elections (Lai and Sing, 2020; Shum, 2021). The sustained protests received massive attention from foreign media and encouraged the US Congress to pass a sanction bill against government officials of Hong Kong.…”

Advertising activism and social resistance: a case study of a bottom-up advertising campaign in Hong Kong

“…The discussion of advertising activism hits the nail of scholarly dialogue surrounding the interaction between politics and culture in social movement studies, especially for the formation of movement identity, media frames of movement and their appeal to the public. Advertising activism also echoes to recent shifting research focus of social movement studies from resource mobilization by SMOs and other established organizations to the audience-driven connective action, networked mobilization and leaderless resistance (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012;Lai and Sing, 2020;Liang and Lee, 2021;Parsloe and Holton, 2018).…”