Ming-sho Ho's Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven is an important and timely monograph which compares the two occupation-style social movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ho is the foremost expert on social movements in Taiwan, relentlessly publishing ground-breaking works on the subject. His work sets out to answer a series of exciting research questions in a summary of six puzzles at the beginning of the book. Questions range from the impact of culture to the regional and the global impact of the movements. Yet the empirical richness is organized to theoretically reflect on the structure (reasons for creative participation) versus agency (the ability of leadership) debate.
The first two chapters pave the way for discussion of the two movements by providing comprehensive summaries of political developments in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and tracing the evolution of Hong Kong–China and Taiwan–China relations. Ho acknowledges that he is a newcomer to the study of Hong Kong politics. However, this is apparent only in rare moments, when key works on the United Front strategy by Sonny Shiu Hing Lo and Benson Wai-kwok Wong are missing. Instead, the author impresses with his in-depth knowledge of both movements and a systematic collection of data based on hundreds of interviews with activists, experts and witnesses, which is further supported by his ethnographic observation on the scene in Taipei.
Ho's study justifies and even mainstreams the comparison between Taiwan and Hong Kong, a field which gained traction only after the 2014 movements. Ho describes the Taiwan–Hong Kong nexus in a fascinating yet brief account. Unfortunately this account fails to adequately explain the absence of previous exchange, or the timing of the realization of their common interests vis-à-vis China. It might be linked to a sense of unfamiliarity, as until the Umbrella Movement triggered new interest in the territory, there had been little international attention paid to developments in post-1997 Hong Kong. This book provides an excellent momentum to explore the theoretical framework further and draw generalizable findings based on comparative studies between these two entities.
Ho's work goes beyond the limitations of excellent single case studies on Taiwan and Hong Kong. Moreover, he makes two important theoretical contributions to the literature on eventful protests and social movements. He highlights the limitations of the classic political opportunity structure framework in line with research that emphasizes protesters’ agency. He conceptualizes the issue of contingency and movement–government standoffs as “exceptional moments of movement–government confrontation” (p. 13), to shed new light on the fate of eventful protests. His introduction of improvisation, i.e. “strategic responses without prior planning” (p. 153), helps us to understand the types of protest participation that sustained both movements. The relevance of improvisation can be further observed in the 2019 anti-extradition law movement in Hong Kong, where the use of instant messaging services and social news forums guided high-profile actions such as the short-lived occupation of the legislature.
Ho outlines rates of support and mobilization of the movements well, but this could have been done more explicitly by highlighting the ontological differences between the movements. I would call the Sunflower Movement status-quo defending, while the Umbrella Movement is progressive. This distinction conditions threat perceptions which are linked to the role of (negative) emotions in the mobilization process, an explanatory factor of “success” or “failure” of social movements. Anger and fear are singled out as Ho depicts occasions of political leaders pushing through the free-trade deal in Taiwan, or instances of the police violence of the police against students storming the Civic Square and initial occupations on 28 September 2014 in Hong Kong, and the fear “that something worse was to come” (p. 128).
A closer look at the affective side of protests – Ho mentions only briefly the “emotional consequences” of movements (p. 181) – would reveal an additional level of explanation of the success and respective failure of the two movements. In Taiwan, the CSSTA triggered emotions largely due to the real-life impact on Taiwanese if further integrated with mainland China. The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong was, however, part of the struggle for universal suffrage, something the citizens of territory had never been granted. Therefore, negative emotions and uncertainty in Hong Kong were less universally experienced in comparison to Taiwan, and the sense of loss was felt by a smaller segment of the population. The associated emotions can also be observed in Hong Kong's 2019 anti-extradition law protests. As a status-quo defending movement, the anti-extradition law protests are motivated by widely shared fear, anger and despair, which mobilizes unprecedented numbers of demonstrators.
Overall, Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven should be a required reading for students and scholars of social movements, democratization, Taiwan and Hong Kong politics, and anyone interested in understanding what happened in Hong Kong in 2019.
