What is the purpose of writing and reading about the Umbrella Movement when a new wave of protests has turned Hong Kong's state–society relations and its geopolitical position upside down? Pang Laikwan's The Appearing Demos takes this question in hand and offers an alternative lens through which to view the democratic potential of the spectacular occupation of 2014. Unlike many early publications on the event, which were mainly focused on the macro environments and movement strategies, her book brings the protesters with their arenas and practices back in. The book offers rich participant observation, often accompanied by discursive interpretation and philosophical reflection.
Pang traces the autonomy and ethos in the occupied space and shows that the search for cohabitation among the range of different actors and forces was always difficult, but nonetheless essential to building the foundations of democracy. This treatise helps bridge the somewhat fragmented disciplines of social movement studies, which emphasize movement origins and mobilization mechanisms, and of democratization studies, which relegate mass mobilization to a backdrop for institutional weaknesses and societal changes.
It is always difficult to articulate the transition from cognitive liberation to collective action and to measure social movement consequences. The main challenge is to establish the causality between a movement's claims and the subsequent socio-political changes. Another challenge is to distinguish intended from unintended consequences. The Appearing Demos draws on two original datasets to fruitfully examine the process of socio-cultural production during the Umbrella Movement and its impact at a biographical level. The first four chapters provide a thorough, dialectical and penetrating account of how individual actors appear in “a space of wilfulness and autonomy” (p. 37). These chapters help to unpack how a leaderless and peaceful civil disobedience dissolved collectives and constructed a liberalized zone. Voluntary actions nurtured affective bonds, thereby enabling autonomous participants to reconsider the instrumental rationality that was deeply embedded in Hong Kong's political culture and means of economic production. At the same time, social media afforded a pluralistic platform that mediated private emotions and public ideals. This account demonstrates the connectivity of social media to align personalized frames and collective identities, which reasoned with the anti-hierarchical tendency as the movement came to a standstill.
Pang goes on to show how these online and offline interactions inspired the creation of countless artworks at the protest sites and every corner of the city, which constituted and transformed the participants’ intersubjectivity. This process of negotiation, deliberation and participation between equal political actors in an open space brought the cultural-political into being. Revisiting Hannah Arendt's politics of appearance and the Foucauldian conceptualization of power, Pang argues that these plebeian experiences, though fragile, spontaneous and sometimes intangible, did bring the demos into view. These accounts make for a powerful intervention on how and why freedom is the raison d’être of politics.
In the following chapters, Pang also articulates the post-movement trajectories of 30 protest participants for more than five years. Many of these individuals continued to exercise their freedoms and reflect upon their evolving identities and visions with an innovative repertoire. For instance, artists contested the boundaries of the law by performing illegal acts out of the jurisdiction. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens spontaneously attended or routinely recorded the trials of movement activists. The interdependence between private and public life is laid bare, and the movement participants are not merely role-bearing persons subjected to certain orthodox ideologies or a normalized social order.
From this perspective, the occupation and its aftermath motivated the activists to reroute their everyday lives and reconsider their political ideals. From these real-life experiences the abstract narratives were contested and reproduced, and the participants rediscovered new possibilities that realized the subject of their contention as two-sided: the authoritarian perception of absolute sovereignty and the neoliberal myth of incessant development. Through this account, Pang proposes the concept of multiple sovereignties, under which the participants were constantly seeking their rights to the city and making sense of the entitlements of citizenship.
My only point of contention with Pang's work concerns the ramifications of social media. The author effectively identifies the parallels between the on-the-ground communities and online networks, and explains the activists’ learning curve in adopting various social media tools from 2014 to 2019. However, the affordances of various social media differ. While some platforms tend to facilitate consensus building and action coordination, others often produce echo chambers and deepen political polarization. In contrast to the bodily resistance on the ground, the degree of anonymity and the cost of entrance and retreat seem qualitatively different on social media. Can we assume that street politics and digital activism follow similar logics and have similar impacts?
Nevertheless, this book powerfully refines the meanings of the Umbrella Movement and makes a valuable contribution to the study of spatial practices and prefigurative politics. It presents an alternative lens through which to view social changes that many believed to be authentic but perhaps dared not touch because of our positivist training or data-driven approach. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the unfinished cultural-political transitions of this semi-autonomous city along with the biographical consequences for a new generation of political actors who emerged from a spectacular protest event.
