Anti-extradition law and beyond: the role of media and communication in the crisis of Hong Kong—introduction to the special issue

The year 2019 witnessed an unprecedented paradigm shift to post-handover Hong Kong. On a political level, massive, enduring, and violent street conflicts surrounding the unpopular extradition law that enables transferring fugitives from Hong Kong to jurisdictions with no extradition agreements with the city, including mainland China, followed by the demand for political reforms and disbanding the Hong Kong police, triggered powerful responses from the state power of China. China introduced the National Security Law to Hong Kong in June 2020, which effectively keeps defiant voices out of the media and renders civil society silent. The election methods for the Chief Executive and Legislative Council were also modified to ensure that the government of Hong Kong would remain safely in the hands of “patriots.” Socially, Hong Kong has witnessed multiple waves of emigration since those eventful days in 2019. For those who remain, prosecutions of those arrested in the protests and related activities have slowly unfolded, capturing citywide and even global attention. Internationally, exchanges of unpleasant diplomatic rhetoric between China and other nations over Hong Kong have become frequent. Overseas media commentaries have discussed the future of the city as its once well-known social freedoms are curbed (see, e.g., McLaughlin, 2021; Yip, 2021). State-society relations and the political economy of Hong Kong are unequivocally facing a highly unpredictable process of change.

While it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the paradigm shift in post-handover Hong Kong, the anti-extradition law amendment bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in 2019 deserve a proper review. The most pressing question is also the most basic: what happened? Millions of people packed the streets, clashed with the police, used a wide range of social media channels for mobilization purposes, and launched international campaigns to promote the social movement in Hong Kong. The scope and scale of social mobilization during the Anti-ELAB protests exceeded not only the expectations but also the imagination of Hong Kong people, China, and the wider world. Since 2019, the Anti-ELAB protests have drawn scholarly attention seeking to answer a number of research questions surrounding what had happened in and to Hong Kong. Among them, Cheng et al. (2022) asked a simple yet vital question: what led to the total mobilization seen during the Anti-ELAB protests? Citing two citywide polls in August 2019 and May 2020, the authors estimated that 36.4% and 45.6%, respectively, of the seven million people in Hong Kong had participated in Anti-ELAB protests and related activities, proportions that are much greater than social movements in other countries, which have typically attracted 3%–25% of the local population. According to their research, Hong Kong people perceived systematic and repressive threats to the city’s social freedom, which triggered strong affective ties among various social networks and resulted in “total mobilization from below” during the Anti-ELAB protests (Cheng et al., 2022). In addition to the unprecedented scale and scope of social mobilization, the Anti-ELAB protests also exhibited an intriguing pattern—the radical and moderate ranks of protesters, which often differ and sometimes engage in active opposition, showed an extraordinary level of solidarity, even in times of movement radicalization and street violence. Lee (2020) employed both onsite and online survey data to document shifting public sentiments about the Anti-ELAB protests from summer to autumn 2019, which indicated that both radicals and moderates tended to suppress criticisms and cynical discourses while codifying solidarity with the movement as the unquestionably highest ethical priority during the protests. However, he observed that this unity was conditioned by the dominance of radicals over moderates and a tendency to suspend open and critical discussion (Lee, 2020, pp. 28–31). Nevertheless, the striking solidarity between radicals and moderates paves the way for another question: given that large-scale rallies and social movements in post-handover Hong Kong had once been characterized by social norms of peaceful, civic, cooperative, and non-violent protocols (Ku, 2007), why did the Hong Kong public appear to tolerate—if not embrace—the radicalization that emerged during the Anti-ELAB protests? Lee et al. (2022) conceptualized this radicalization process as a movement tactic in response to various contingencies that arose in the course of protest activities: rampant violence during protester-police interactions, counter-mobilization against the protests and related violence, and feelings of guilt among protest supporters during intra-movement interactions. The authors highlighted a significant political context for such tactical responses; the post-handover social movement had been radicalizing during the 2010s. For example, the movement repertoire of peaceful non-violence shifted to civil disobedience during the Occupy Movement in 2014; also known as the Umbrella Movement, this involved massive sit-ins in Hong Kong’s central business district calling for unfettered universal suffrage (Lee, 2015a).

The scholarly dialogues surrounding the Anti-ELAB protests cited above began the intellectual journey to review what happened to Hong Kong in 2019 and its critical impact on the fate of the city. Against the backdrop of the 2014 Occupy Movement, Lee (2019) extended the lens of eventful sociology to examine social movements in Hong Kong. The Anti-ELAB protests and related consequences, especially the reaction from China, constitute a critical event that is remapping the political and sociocultural order of post-handover Hong Kong. Although we have alluded above to current academic dialogues, there are still many unanswered questions that await further investigation and deliberation. After the outbreak of the Occupy Movement, this journal organized a special issue that discussed how the massive sit-ins served as a critical event that altered what we thought of as possible in media-society relations and their effects on social mobilization (Lee, 2015b). In view of another unexpected social crisis that has been an even greater and more thought-provoking shock, this special issue undertakes three intellectual inquiries to illuminate scholarly and social analyses of the Anti-ELAB protests.

The first significant unanswered question arising from the Anti-ELAB protests involves organizational and operational analyses of this mass movement. These 2019 protests were described as “leaderless” and a “water” movement, metaphors that delineate a “flat” organization, flexible coordination, geographical mobility, and swift reactions among movement participants in terms of action, decision making, and mobilization. Scholarly dialogues surrounding connective actions (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013) and networked power and movements (Anduiza et al., 2014; Castells, 2012) explicated how such bottom-up mass self-mobilization proliferates in the age of digital communication, which is characterized by decentered ties of affect and empathy that go beyond the management of social movement organizations, political parties, and social institutions alike. With due respect to such intellectual insights, the Anti-ELAB protests exhibited a “total mobilization from below” (Cheng et al., 2022) that lasted from mid-2019 through at least early 2020. Its tenacity and strength are rarely seen in social movements around the world, including previous critical events in Hong Kong like the 2014 Occupy Movement, which involved 79 days of massive sit-ins. While digital communication platforms were crucial to sustaining the affective and mobilizing networks, their modus operandi and actual coordination work at both the individual and organizational levels during the Anti-ELAB protests require further examination and illustration. Examples include the dynamics and formation of online opinion and its impact on protest activities, onsite propaganda and space making for movement discourses, and the impact of protest mobilization at the interpersonal level.

In addition to the sustained total mobilization from below, the Anti-ELAB protests also shone a spotlight on the communicative power of digital media platforms. The significance of digital communication in social mobilization has been widely examined, yet researchers frequently refer to the different channels and platforms that comprise digital and social media as a monolith, often juxtaposed with “mainstream media.” A closer scrutiny of either “social media” or “digital media,” however, unravels rich and sometimes vast differences across the various platforms and channels and in their roles in and effects on social mobilization. For instance, YouTube focuses on video and visual experiences, Telegram features covertness and in-group bonding, Twitter prefers short and quick ideas coupled with global exposure, and the LIHKG bulletin board forum—which has been called a Cantonese version of Reddit —had served as a key platform for the formation of movement discourses during the Anti-ELAB protests. Furthermore, live streaming on social media platforms is popular in journalism and other communication activities during protests and other major social events. Some reporters from the Stand News, which was closed in December 2021 amid an investigation by the national security division of the Hong Kong police, became famous for onsite live streaming during the Anti-ELAB protests. The diversity in terms of channels, platforms, and ways of communication could enrich our understanding of social media and digital communication and their role in social mobilization and other formation processes.

Lastly, the long-term consequences of the Anti-ELAB protests, especially the reactions from state power and the resulting paradigm shift in post-handover Hong Kong, deserve intensive academic and social attention. Although it is too early to conclude how that paradigm shift will settle after the eventful moments of 2019 and 2020, there are already significant social changes that can offer valuable information to both scholarly and social communities. In journalism and communication, local and overseas news workers and media commentators have acknowledged the rapid shifts in the media political economy and social freedom in Hong Kong. Documenting such changes and assessing their social impact are important to understanding the Anti-ELAB protests as a critical event in the post-handover trajectory of the city.

This special issue contains three research articles and five special commentaries. While we do not aim to provide exhaustive answers to the intellectual inquiries detailed above, the authors of the pieces in this issue do respond to many of the pressing questions raised by the Anti-ELAB protests. The issue begins with a cyber-network analysis conducted by Hai Liang and Francis Lee. Their article is premised on a research question arising from networked social movements—why was social mobilization of the Anti-ELAB protests effective and swift amid the absence of central leadership? They focus on Hong Kong’s LIHKG bulletin board forum, which was widely perceived as the core digital platform generating key movement discourses pertinent to protest strategies from the middle of 2019 through the end of that year. While the messages on LIHKG and their interactions with onsite protestors appeared to be messy, the computational models constructed by Liang and Lee found that the unequal popularity of different message threads and whether LIHKG users demonstrated concentrated attention on those popular threads could be signs of actions that materialized in onsite protests. Their findings shed light on two research directions relating to academic dialogues about social mobilization, networked movements, and digital communication. First, the ostensibly leaderless pattern of the Anti-ELAB protests and other social movements may still exhibit some kinds of surrogate or quasi-leadership coordination. Equally important are the dynamics between online deliberation and offline action during the process of social mobilization, which is a subject that sorely needs examination in movement studies, media, and mobilization research.

While networked analyses of cyber movement discourses show a salient presence in communication and movement studies, we should pay due attention to onsite space-making of movement discourses during protests and related activities. After all, the affective networks and empathy of participants are the core energy that sustains any movement. Here, Sara Liao’s documentation of the “Lennon Walls”—graffiti and artwork in public places that displayed movement discourses—explicates textual and ethnographic observations on how the protest activities and citizens were connected through the formation of affective networks manifested in the (re)making of public space. The colorful sticky notes became cultural icons that generated a common experience for people who were physically present at the Lennon Walls. Liao’s ethnographic documentation illustrated the bodily reactions and affective responses to movement discourses through onsite collective activities. Her article fills in a missing piece in the intellectual picture of the Anti-ELAB protests—the making of public space and its articulation in people’s lifeworlds are the emotive nexus between movement activists and the general public.

The Anti-ELAB protests lasted for an unanticipated length of time and gradually became part of everyday life in Hong Kong during the eventful months of 2019–2020. People started facing interpersonal pressure regardless of whether they joined the protest activities: being asked to take sides, confronting oppositional views, and risking friendships, working relations, and even intimate partnerships because of their political stances (or lack thereof). Kobayashi Tetsuro and Chun Hong Tse conducted a survey about people’s family gatherings during the 2020 Lunar New Year to investigate whether and to what extent the bulwark of family ties—which are theoretically the strongest bastion of interpersonal intimacy and should be least affected by conflicting political views—could withstand the “empirical test” of the Anti-ELAB protests. Their research question is based on an important axiom: familial ties are said to be the bonding social capital that serves as a significant social base for deliberation across political conflicts. Their findings, however, refute this view, which is widely accepted by political science scholars, and suggest that political polarization arising from the Anti-ELAB protests reduced political discussion, general communication, and even gatherings among family members. Tetsuro and Tse illuminate the dramatic, entrenched political polarization at an interpersonal level that can result from a prolonged protest movement. Their results will be highly informative to studies scrutinizing traumatic collective and personal experiences stemming from large-scale social conflicts.

In addition to social mobilization and its impact, this special issue also revisits the media effects of digital communication in social movements. To journalists and the news media in general, the Anti-ELAB protests served as another significant lesson in how journalistic operations have been affected by the ever-advancing social media skillset. Kecheng Fang and Calvin Cheng offer a commentary on how the practice of live streaming on Facebook contested and reshaped the modus operandi and journalistic values of news workers. They found that such streaming substantially enhanced the interactivity between journalists and the news audience, encouraged and even entailed instant and dramatic performances during the live coverage of news incidents, and fostered an affective network between journalistic practices and movement discourses that challenged the conventional news ethics of detached neutrality and objectivity. Their study enriches our understanding of the “emotional turn” that occurs when journalists situate themselves in the midst of critical events in social movements. In addition to journalists, the Anti-ELAB protests were also a lesson to the pro-government political forces in Hong Kong. The commentary by Hiu Fung Chung and Edmund Cheng illustrates how pro-government YouTube influencers adopted this video-driven digital platform to construct their own counter-publics in view of the social mobilization and movement discourses arising from the Anti-ELAB protests. Tracing the history of the social media context in Hong Kong, Chung and Cheng show that the rise of pro-government YouTube influencers took advantage of the city’s fragmented and polarized social media landscape while articulating their Chinese nationalistic discourses using amateur and grassroots angles. Apart from empirically documenting the upsurge of pro-government counter-campaigns during the Anti-ELAB protests, Chung and Cheng increased the conceptual significance of networked authoritarianism, which informs the learning curve of non-democratic authorities in the age of digital communication and their strategic responses to online public opinion.

In addition to Facebook live streaming and YouTube influencers, other social media channels also provide valuable insights into the Anti-ELAB protests. Further to scholarly discussion of networked social movements, Chris Su, Michael Chan, and Sejin Paik conducted a computer-assisted content analysis of two million messages from the public channels in Telegram, one of the communication methods that was popular during the Anti-ELAB protests. They found that the channel subscription model and geolocation hashtags of Telegram channels were crucial for arousing users’ attention to and the overall momentum of discussion about protest activities. While such symbolic mobilization may not be equivalent to actual participation, the study enhances our empirical understanding of ostensibly leaderless social mobilization at the operational level and its relevance to the features of Telegram channels. Apart from movement mobilization in a leaderless condition, the Anti-ELAB protests were also characterized by significant international exposure. While the news value of the protests themselves was certainly sufficient to merit the attention of international media organizations, widespread social media messages about protest activities, especially tweets, were indispensable to the global profile of this social movement. The commentary by Cheryl Shea and Francis Lee explicates how movement supporters appealed to international community via Twitter. Drawing on the literature of public diplomacy, they review the common narratives and main targets of these movement-related tweets, and more importantly, how these bottom-up networked campaigns created both opportunities for and challenges to the actual lobbying work overseas. Despite focusing on different social media platforms, both the above commentaries address research questions arising from networked social movements. Su, Chan and Paik scrutinize the cohesiveness and operational coordination of movement networks among anonymous participants, while Shea and Lee explore the formation of transborder movement networks via social media discourses.

As this introduction noted at the outset, Hong Kong has been experiencing an unprecedented paradigm shift since the Anti-ELAB protests began in 2019. While this special issue does not pretend to draw any conclusions about what will ultimately happen in the wake of these epochal events, capturing the significant changes to journalism and communication in Hong Kong is a major service to both scholarship and society. The article by Chi Kit Chan constitutes an interim attempt to compare the media political economy before and after the Anti-ELAB protests. He conceptualizes post-handover Hong Kong before this critical event as a liberal enclave that enjoyed significantly greater political and press freedom than what could be found in mainland China. This political exemption has become increasingly uncertain as China remaps the political order, the state-society relationship, and the state-press relationship in Hong Kong after the Anti-ELAB protests.

A paradigm shift may take years or even decades to study properly. The political consequences and social impacts of the Anti-ELAB protests are far from over. This special issue seeks to offer a scholarly record of this historical juncture of Hong Kong’s story. The articles and essays we have collected not only advance our understanding of the Anti-ELAB protests but also foster reflections on several intellectual fronts, including networked social mobilization, the role of affect in collective actions, digital communication and its social influences, the media political economy, features of different social media platforms, and studies of China. We humbly hope that this special issue will speak to these scholarly communities and pave the way for further studies and continued academic dialogue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chi Kit Chan

Chi Kit Chan is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication, Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He is the lead author of Hong Kong Media: Interaction between Media, State and Civil Society (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). His research interests include journalism, mass communication, media sociology, and cultural identity.