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ABSTRACT
The extensive participation of secondary school students was one of the features that characterized Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement . Lacking the power and resources enjoyed by adults, how do these teenagers organize protest actions? While recent scholarship focuses on how recent youth activism is facilitated by the prevalent use of social media, this article argues that digitally-based, informal social movement groups formed by student activists played a crucial role in unleashing teenage youth’s social capital. By activating their schools’ alumni networks, school reputation and joint-school ties, these digitally-based groups initiated a wide array of collective actions that mobilized scores of teenagers. However, despite forming a decentralized structure, these groups were unequal in terms of their mobilization power. Reputable schools with strong alumni networks and joint-school linkages are more capable of shaping movement narratives and mobilizing territory-wide protest actions. In contrast, schools with weaker social capital are more likely to organize actions with neighbouring schools within local districts and rely on external help. Our findings contribute to social movement studies by demonstrating how teenage youth engage in protests and how informal, Internet-initiated protest organizations play a crucial role in shaping movement dynamics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Adolescents and Youth. https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/adolescents-youth/index.asp
2. Concern groups from band 1 schools are more responsive to interview requests, in part because they are more active on social media and are more systematic in respond to media or scholarly interviews.
3. Centre for Communication and Public Opinion Survey, Chinese University of Hong Kong, randomized opinion poll N = 1574, May 2020.
4. The respondents for the first column of were extracted from a survey conducted from April to May 2020 that targeted the Hong Kong citizens who participated in the Anti-ELAB protests.
5. It is important to note that this keyword search may not be exhaustive. However, it still helps to identify accounts that are relatively more identifiable on Instagram for the public.
6. We obtained the school banding data from a popular secondary school database: https://www.schooland.hk/ss/.
7. See their official website of Wah Yan College Hong Kong: https://web.wahyan.edu.hk/; and Ying Wah College: https://www.yingwa.edu.hk/default.aspx.
8. Interview 3.
9. Interview 5.
10. Interview 8.
11. Interview 4.
12. Interview 6.
13. Interview 12.
14. Interview 5.
15. Interview 12.
16. Participant observation on 29 October 2019.
17. Interview 6.
18. Interview 15.
19. Interview 11.
20. The network graph is a snapshot taken on 1 November 2019, during the height of the protests. For simplicity it only displays nodes with in-degree>30 (i.e., more than 30 accounts follow them within the given network). The size of each node is proportional to its in-degree, or its number of followers. The more followers it has, the bigger it is. Finally, the size of the label is proportional to the eigenvector centrality of each node, which is a measurement of its influence within the network. The colour of each node reflects its betweenness. The higher the betweenness, the darker a node is.
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Notes on contributors
Samson Yuen
Samson Yuen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He researches contentious politics, civil conflicts, public opinion, health and food politics, focusing particularly on East Asia. His articles are either published or forthcoming in Political Studies, Government and Opposition, Mobilization, Social Movement Studies, The China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China and Modern China. He holds a DPhil in Politics from Oxford University.
Gary Tang
Gary Tang is an assistant professor at the Department of Social Science and an associate director of the Centre for Public Policy Research at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. His research interests include political communication and social media. His articles are either published or forthcoming in Social Science Computer Review, The China Quarterly, and Social Indicators Research