Sheyun niandai: Xianggang zhengzhi kangzheng de guiji ed. by Edmund W. Cheng and Samson Wai-hei Yuen (review)

The 2014 Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong, marked by 79 days of occupation in some of the busiest streets in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island in quest of genuine democracy and autonomy of the territory under Chinese sovereignty, shocked the world and put Hong Kong back in the headlines of international news. In the years that followed immediately, books, academic articles, and documentary films about the event flourished. But as French historian Fernand Braudel once remarked, "events are dust." After they are eventually blown away, only the underlying structure and slow long-term process remain. After the excitement and expectation unleashed by the movement faded away with Beijing being back in control and tightening its screw over Hong Kong, it is about time to revisit the movement by contextualizing it from the perspective of the long-term development of Hong Kong's social movements and their interaction with Hong Kong's political establishment.

An Epoch of Social Movements: The Trajectory of Contentious Politics in Hong Kong (社運年代：香港政治抗爭的軌跡) is a laudable and successful attempt to fill this gap in the scholarly discussion surrounding the Umbrella Movement. The book, composed of 17 individual chapters by some of the most representative young Hong Kong scholars specialized in the field of social movements and political development, is not about the Umbrella Movement per se. The Umbrella Movement is not even in the title of the book. To be exact, the book is meant to take stock of the development of social movements in Hong Kong since the sovereignty handover in 1997. Not surprisingly, all chapters do converge on the Umbrella Movement as a focal point, by pointing out either how diverse social movements contribute to the making of the Umbrella moment or how the movement shaped the terrain on which these movements will continue to evolve.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first part, chapters deal with the larger political and ideological transformation of Hong Kong's opposition movement since the late colonial period. Ma Ngok characterizes the political establishment of Hong Kong from late colonial to the SAR (Special Administrative Region) times as a "liberal autocracy," which restricted political decision to an exclusionary elite but warranted room for freedom of expression and political organizing. In the late colonial period and early SAR times, the democratic opposition sought democratic reform that opened up the regime. But in more recent years, when Beijing's hardline intervention into Hong Kong advanced and eroded Hong Kong's liberty, the opposition movement has been shifting to a more defensive agenda, resisting the elite's attack of Hong Kong citizens' remaining freedom. Law Wing Sang fretted that the old agenda of "democratization through reunion with China" by the democrats in late colonial Hong Kong has failed and "returned to zero," given that Beijing showed no intention of allowing genuine democratization of Hong Kong. He is uncertain what new agenda of democratic movement would emerge after this collapse of the old one.

Edmund Cheng draws on his meticulously collected and analyzed data to show the changing pattern of movement events over the years, pointing out that from the 2003 anti-subversion legislation protest, all the conservationist movements thereafter, to the anti-national education mobilization in 2012, Hong Kong's opposition movement saw the increasing significance of nonpartisan young activists and their sustained, decentralized mobilization. This departed from the political-party-centered mobilization in the past. The Umbrella Movement is indeed a culmination of this new style of social movements in post-handover Hong Kong.

Kwong Kin Ming turns to the contentious issue of Hong Kong identity and localism as expressed in the Umbrella Movement and its aftermath. He shows that a Hong Kong identity that is independent of a Chinese nationalist identity germinated in the 1970s and 1980s, and sharpened...