Edmund W. Cheng - Böcker

The past few decades saw the transformation of Hong Kong from a liberal enclave to a revolutionary crucible at China's offshore. The Making of Leaderful Mobilization takes you through the evolution of protests in this restive city, where ordinary citizens gradually emerged as the protagonists of contention in place of social movement organizations. The book presents a theory of mediated threat that illuminates how threat perceptions fueled shifting forms of mobilization – from brokered mobilization where organizations played guiding roles to leaderful mobilization driven by peer collaboration among the masses. Bringing together event analysis, opinion polls, interviews, and social media data, this book provides a thorough and methodical anatomy of Hong Kong's contentious politics. It unveils the processes and mechanisms of collective action that likely prevailed in many contemporary social movements worldwide. Our temporal approach also uncovers the multiple pathways reshaping hybrid regimes, underscoring their resilience and fragility.

The past few decades saw the transformation of Hong Kong from a liberal enclave to a revolutionary crucible at China's offshore. The Making of Leaderful Mobilization takes you through the evolution of protests in this restive city, where ordinary citizens gradually emerged as the protagonists of contention in place of social movement organizations. The book presents a theory of mediated threat that illuminates how threat perceptions fueled shifting forms of mobilization – from brokered mobilization where organizations played guiding roles to leaderful mobilization driven by peer collaboration among the masses. Bringing together event analysis, opinion polls, interviews, and social media data, this book provides a thorough and methodical anatomy of Hong Kong's contentious politics. It unveils the processes and mechanisms of collective action that likely prevailed in many contemporary social movements worldwide. Our temporal approach also uncovers the multiple pathways reshaping hybrid regimes, underscoring their resilience and fragility.

This volume examines the most spectacular struggle for democracy in post-handover Hong Kong. Bringing together scholars with different disciplinary focuses and comparative perspectives from mainland China, Taiwan and Macau, one common thread that stitches the chapters is the use of first-hand data collected through on-site fieldwork. This study unearths how trajectories can create favourable conditions for the spontaneous civil resistance despite the absence of political opportunities and surveys the dynamics through which the protestors, the regime and the wider public responses differently to the prolonged contentious space. The Umbrella Movement: Civil Resistance and Contentious Space in Hong Kong offers an informed analysis of the political future of Hong Kong and its relations with the authoritarian sovereignty as well as sheds light on the methodological challenges and promises in studying modern-day protests.