Social movement as civic education: communication activities and understanding of civil disobedience in the Umbrella Movement

Abstract

Occupy Central, which would later evolve into the Umbrella Movement, was conceived as a civil disobedience campaign when it was first proposed in early 2013. Although the history of civil disobedience in Hong Kong arguably spans decades, the concept was seldom discussed in the public arena, and the practice was not well established in the society's repertoire of contentious actions. The years 2013 and 2014 thus constituted a “critical discourse moment” in which the concept of civil disobedience was intensively discussed and debated. This study seeks to determine whether the Occupy Central campaign and the Umbrella Movement had an educational function that led to increased levels of the public's understanding of civil disobedience. The analysis of the responses to two surveys conducted in September 2013 and October 2014 showed that the public's understanding of civil disobedience increased substantially over the year. After the Umbrella Movement started, attitudinal support for and actual participation in the movement, the political use of social media, and discussions with disagreeing others significantly predicted the understanding of civil disobedience. The theoretical and social implications of the findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• social movement
• civil disobedience
• oppositional political knowledge
• social media
• political discussion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. The international media created the label “Umbrella Revolution” based on the image of protesters using umbrellas to protect themselves against tear gas. However, local academics and commentators emphasized that the movement did not aim at overthrowing the Hong Kong and Chinese governments and thus preferred the term Umbrella Movement.

^2. For consistency, unless otherwise indicated, the term “Occupy Central” refers to the discursive campaign surrounding the proposal of Occupy Central between January 2013 and late September 2014, whereas the “Umbrella Movement” refers to the actual collective action campaign that started on 28 September 2014.

^3. The search was limited to eight newspapers because the number of newspapers in the city varied over time. The limit was needed to make the figures more comparable. The eight newspapers are Apple Daily, Oriental Daily, Sing Tao Daily, Ming Pao, Hong Kong Economic Times, Hong Kong Economic Journal, Wen Wei Pao, and Ta Kung Pao.

^4. “Learning” was indeed emphasized as part of the movement experience. Specifically, many local academics organized “civic classes” in “mobile classrooms” in the occupied areas.

^5. Details of sample characteristics are omitted because of limited space. Suffice it to say that the discrepancies are by no means extreme. Income was not weighted because of the lack of detailed information about the education X income distribution and the propriety of employing the same weighting procedure for the two samples. The sample – population difference in income should not have affected the substantive findings in this study because income was not a significant predictor of knowledge after controlling for education, and further analyses found that the core relationships tested in this study were not significantly moderated by income.

^6. A few answers given by some respondents were definitely incorrect. The examples included “civil disobedience is legal” and “the right to civil disobedience is established in the law.” In addition, several respondents simply claimed that there was no difference between civil disobedience and typical law breaking. While individual respondents could hold this belief, it did not constitute a valid answer to the question.

^7. The model includes a relatively large number of control variables because many of the controls are theoretically plausible predictors of political knowledge. The model thus provides a rigorous test of the possible impact of media and communication activities. Notably, despite the inclusion of many controls, multicollinearity was not a serious issue. The independent variables with the highest variance inflation factor (VIF) are time spent using social media and political use of social media, with VIFs of 2.39 and 2.87, respectively. However, these values are still much lower than the value of 8 to 10, which is regarded as problematic in social science studies (Stevens, 1996).

^8. The statement is available at: http://www.hkba.org/whatsnew/misc/20141028 - Statement of Hong Kong Bar Association Relating to Mass Defiance of Court Orders (Eng) - FINAL1.pdf. Last accessed on March 22, 2015.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francis L.F. Lee

Francis L. F. Lee is Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the lead author of Media, Social Mobilization, and Mass Protests in Post-colonial Hong Kong (Routledge, 2011) and author of Talk Radio, the Mainstream Press, and Public Opinion in Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2014).