ABSTRACT
The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is the most radical political movement to have taken place in the former British colony since 1967 anti-colonial demonstrations. Using empirical evidence obtained from activists who participated in the Umbrella Movement, this paper explains how Hong Kong’s youth are looking simultaneously to both the past and future to secure their identity in the colonial past even as some hope to achieve ultimate secession from Mainland rule. Racism and anti-Mainland hostilities in Hong Kong are the result of nostalgia and the insurrectionary impulse akin to the millenarianism of social movements founded on suffering and loss that continually seek the recovery of pasts of which they are now deprived. We illuminate how, to young activists, the Umbrella Movement presents hope for a future embedded in the past that remains one the territory and former colony may still aspire toward.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
John Lowe is Senior Research Associate in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at City University of Hong Kong. He has recently published about Hong Kong and the Umbrella Movement in the journals Deviant Behavior and Patterns of Prejudice.
Eileen Yuk-Ha Tsang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at City University of Hong Kong. Here research interests are in the area of sexuality, gender, class and criminology. Her work has been published in The China Quarterly, Deviant Behavior, The Prison Journal, and Higher Education.
Notes
44 Centre for Communication and Public Opinion Survey Citation2017, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
46 Abbas is the author of Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance (Citation1997). Published in the year of Hong Kong’s handover to China, Abbas argued in his book that the colony’s culture would die because most residents thought of themselves as transients, on their way from China to somewhere else.
53 The Lion Rock is a geographical landmark in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The colonial government used this landmark to bolster a Hong Kong identity, promoting it as symbolic of the traditional values of hard work and community spirit that were necessary for the Hong Kong economy’s dazzling success in the 1970s. See Lam Citation2007, 70.
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