Slogans and Texts from Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement Author(S): SEBASTIAN VEG Source: the Journal of Asian Studies , AUGUST 2016, Vol
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Creating a Textual Public Space: Slogans and Texts from Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement Author(s): SEBASTIAN VEG Source: The Journal of Asian Studies , AUGUST 2016, Vol. 75, No. 3 (AUGUST 2016), pp. 673-702 Published by: Association for Asian Studies Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44166283 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Association for Asian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Asian Studies This content downloaded from 82.146.210.210 on Wed, 17 Feb 2021 08:47:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 75, No. 3 (August) 2016: 673-702. © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2016 doi: 10. 1017/S002191 1816000565 Creating a Textual Public Space: Slogans and Texts from Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement SEBASTIAN VEG Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement (September-December 2014) represented a watershed in Hong Kongs political culture and self-understanding. Based on over 1,000 slogans and other textual and visual material documented during the movement , this study provides an overview of claims , which are oriented towards an assertion of agency , articulated at different levels: in a universalistic mode ("democracy"), in relation with a political com- munity (Hong Kong autonomy and decolonization ), and through concrete policy aims. At the same time , slogans mobilize diverse cultural and historical repertoires that attest the hybrid quality of Hong Kong identity and underscore the diversity of sources of political legitimacy. Finally , it will be argued that by establishing a system of contending discours- es within the occupied public spaces , the movement strived to act out a type of discursive democracy. Despite the challenges that this discursive space encountered in interacting with the authorities and the public at large , it represented an unfinished attempt to build a new civic culture among Hong Kongs younger generation. The tear tear Umbrella gas first gas mobilized first mobilized masses of Movement democracy masses supporters, took placeuntil Decemberof democracy 15, 2014, in Hong Kong supporters, from September until December 28, 2014, 15, when 2014, when the last occupation site was cleared at Causeway Bay. Coming at the end of a long process to reform the mechanism for Hong Kongs next chief executive election in 2017, it began in response to a decision issued by the National Peoples Congress Standing Committee (NPC-SC) on August 31, 2014, setting a restrictive legal framework. This decision confirmed the fears that had led to the formation of the group Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) in 2013: initiated by two academics and a Baptist minister, this group advocated civil disobedience and occupation of public space as a last resort against a decision by Beijing disallowing significant universal suffrage in Hong Kong. In the event, the occupation of public space took place more spontane- ously, led by two student groups (Scholarism, which had established its credentials in the Anti-National Education campaign of 2012, and the Hong Kong Federation of Students or HKFS), and began in Admiralty (the site of Hong Kongs Central Government Offices) rather than Central (the business district), before spreading to Causeway Bay and Mongkok. It was fueled by the use of tear gas by the Hong Kong police on September 28, 2014, considered unusual, which mobilized several tens of thousands of people (pos- sibly 100,000 or more at its peak). The government dug in its heels against the movement, Sebastian Veg ([email protected]) is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary China, EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). This content downloaded from 82.146.210.210 on Wed, 17 Feb 2021 08:47:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 674 Sebastian Veg which it called "illegal," and encouraged transportation companies to take legal action; court injunctions were eventually used to clear the main occupation areas.1 The Umbrella Movement has defied easy characterizations, sharing aspects of differ- ent movements, as well as encapsulating some of the contradictions of Hong Kong itself. As a territory in which a society that is in some respects post-materialistic is governed by a political system that is not (yet) democratic (Ma 2011), Hong Kong presents an interest- ing theoretical paradox that had implications for the nature of the movement. The argu- ment developed below suggests that, contrary to much of the rhetoric developed in the 1989 democracy movement, for example, in which many participants articulated their role as making personal sacrifices in the name of the future of the Chinese nation, the Umbrella Movement mobilized a great diversity of cultural references, constructing a far more heterogeneous notion of China. These diverse frames nurtured an open debate on the nature of the democratic community itself, in the occupying zones, and more broadly in Hong Kong. In this sense, the movement s particular significance lies in its ability to represent an alternative model to many of the democratic movements that developed in mainland China over the twentieth century. The present essay is devoted to a specific aspect that has not yet been studied system- atically: over the seventy-nine-day occupation, the three occupied areas (Causeway Bay, Admiralty, and Mongkok) were colonized not only by artwork,2 but also by textual mate- rial in every size and form. Produced by diverse authors, some of them political groups, some of them unorganized participants, some of them just passersby, what do these texts express? How do they relate to the movement as a whole and help us to characterize it? There has not been much theoretical engagement with movement slogans as such. A chapter devoted to slogans in a classic work on social movements (Stewart, Smith, and Denton 2001, 171-98) proposes a typology based mainly on their "persuasive" function.3 Most discourse analysis on social movements, using the notions of strategic "framing" and discursive "repertoires," focuses either on manifestos and press statements by movement leaders or on how the movement and its claims are portrayed in the media or in subse- quent historiography.4 More recent studies in the field of cultural sociology have revived interest in slogans as speech acts within "performances" that cannot be reduced to stra- tegic framing.5 The present article adopts an interdisciplinary approach, based on a close contextual reading of the texts themselves. In order to consider different aspects of the slogans, the argument is structured following J. L. Austins (1973, 94-108) threefold analysis of speech acts. The first part discusses the illocutionary dimension of the slogans, or their "intended 1For a detailed chronological account of the movement and an initial attempt to characterize it, see Veg (2015). *To view some examples of artwork, music, and slogans, see Human Rights in China (2014) and This Is Our Moment (n.d.). For a more theoretical approach, see S. Wong (2015). ^he typology distinguishes three species (spontaneous, sanctioned, and advertising slogans) and five functions (transforming perceptions of reality, altering self-perceptions of protestors, legitimiz- ing the movement, prescribing courses of action, and mobilizing for action). ^his approach is adopted by Sidney Tarrow (2013), who analyzes the use of terms like "boycott," "sabotage," "terror," or "revolution" to characterize social movements. 5For example, Sveta Klimova (2009) argues that protest texts are mainly created to communicate normative disagreement. This content downloaded from 82.146.210.210 on Wed, 17 Feb 2021 08:47:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Creating a Textual Public Space 675 meaning." The second part looks at the textuality of the slogans themselves (locutionary dimension), paying specific attention to the repertoire of cultural and historical referenc- es they mobilize. Finally, the third section discusses their communicational effect (perluc- tionary dimension) within a communicational framework inspired by Habermass definition of the public sphere. The essay suggests that the movement represented an attempt to articulate a culturally hybrid democratic community, struggling to define deliberation as a political mechanism to regulate both its internal differences and its in- teraction with the broader polity of Hong Kong. Corpus and Methodology This study draws on over 1,000 slogans, texts, and other artifacts containing texts, which were photographed during several visits to the three sites of the Umbrella Move- ment between September 28 and December 11, 2014. Visits took place on twenty-one separate days to Admiralty, three separate days to Causeway Bay, and four separate days to Mongkok. The sample is limited to text-based occurrences. However, exploiting this corpus of material raises some significant challenges, in particular quantification. The textual ma- terial can be classified into three main categories: (1) handwritten (unique) posters in various formats ranging from A4 to huge banners; (2) computer-printed or photocopied posters (potentially mass-produced) mainly in A4 or A3 format; and (3) textual parts on graphically designed and color-printed posters, usually in A3 format or above. To these can be added some artifacts or installations with textual components (e.g., the scale model of Lions Rock with the slogan hanging on it). Material that is smaller than A4 format has been mainly excluded, with the exception of a few particularly significant objects. Documenting and exploiting the Post-it notes on which bystanders and partici- pants alike left words of encouragement or random thoughts is a whole separate project, which is currently being carried out by others.