Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and the promotion of deviance

ABSTRACT

As a social movement demanding universal suffrage, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement mobilized thousands of young protesters and fomented radical views stridently subversive of mainland China’s political interference. The social movement continues to promote further forms of deviance in the form of calling for independence. As the city and former British colony lacks the sovereignty of statehood and democracy, the movement’s non-conformity to law needs to be contextualized as a form of deviance. In contributing to the deviancy of social movements, we utilize data obtained from interviews with participants of the movement alongside those who opposed the protest to understand the East Asian cultural setting of the Umbrella Movement’s promotion of deviance.

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Notes on contributors

John Lowe

JOHN LOWE is Senior Research Associate in the City University of Hong Kong. He has published in the area of masculinities and gender (with Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood), race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in Patterns of Prejudice, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, Asian Journal of Social Science, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. E-mail: [email protected]/[email protected].

Eileen Yuk-Ha Tsang

EILEEN YUK-HA TSANG is Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. She completed her doctorate in sociology from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Her research interests include the sociology of the middle class, the sociology of gender and sexualities, globalization, and cultural sociology. She is the author of The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics and the Market Economy (Palgrave 2014) and Understanding Chinese Society: Changes and Transformations (World Scientific Press 2015). She has also published in The China Quarterly, Higher Education, Deviant Behavior, Psychology of Violence, Asian Journal of Social Science, China: An International Journal, and Sociological Research Online. E-mail: [email protected]/[email protected]