Throughout a 79-day occupation, the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong signified a collective self-defence by the people against what was considered to be Beijing's recolonization of the city after 1997. It roused deep political and academic interest and inspired scholarly research on social movements, youth politics and regime strategies. Take Back Our Future, edited by Ching Kwan Lee and Ming Sing and published five years after the movement, is an outstanding collection of fine-grained essays by ten authors seeking to address enduring questions and formulate new ones pertaining to the movement itself and its broader theoretical, empirical and comparative significance.

Lee's introductory chapter uses William Sewell's notion of “event” as a theoretical lens to anchor the main thrust of the book. It purports to show how the movement was a self-limiting yet awe-inspiring and transformative event. Events set in motion social processes that are, in Sewell's words, “inherently contingent, discontinuous and open ended” (quoted on p. 2). Events, rather than civil society, are used as the theoretical category for analysing Hong Kong's political development on two grounds. First, Hong Kong had a weak civil society with a reformist orientation and limited mobilization capacity. Second, the structural bind between the city's liberal and cosmopolitan legacy from its colonial past and its current nationalistic authoritarian sovereign was likely to generate episodic eruptions of massive political action. These features gave rise to the duality of the Umbrella Movement in terms of its eventful nature and reformist demands. The chapter thus sets the scene for the essays to follow, which shed light on the historical and structural conditions of Hong Kong politics and the process of mobilizing street contention.

Each of the essays discerns certain salient features of mobilization and countermobilization during the occupation, adding to our understanding of both the movement and Hong Kong's civil society. Chapter two by Alex Chow is particularly noteworthy as it presents an intimately grounded ethnography of the movement through the eye of a movement leader – Chow himself having been a student leader. Drawing on the idea of prefigurative politics, he highlights two dynamics that propelled and fractured the movement: the occupiers’ efforts to build an “alternative urban commons” and the predicament of ambivalent and fragmented leadership. The five chapters that follow further show how the movement became internally decentralized or fragmented, focusing variously on spatiality and strategy (Samson Yuen), ideology and frames (Wing Sang Law), the media-movement nexus (Francis Lee), the weak link with trade unions (Chris Chan), and the marginalization of the democratic parties (Ming Sing). These informative chapters enable readers to develop a thick understanding of the event under study and the larger socio-political context, both locally and in comparative light. Their nuanced analyses encompass the participation of various grassroots groups in transgressive politics in local spaces, the spectrum of political discourse and meaning construction, the role of support groups in the prodemocracy struggle (compared to Taiwan and Korea), the differentiated mediascape overlaid with power, capital and smaller counter-publics, and the tensions between social movement groups and political parties. The photo essay by Oscar Ho makes a wonderful addition to the book. Highlighting the movement's creative expression, it vividly depicts Chow's notion of “alternative urban commons.” The photographs are powerful testimony to the aspirations and struggle of the many young people who took part in the movement.

The two final chapters, by Edmund Cheng and Jieh-min Wu, aptly shift the focus from the internal dynamics of the movement to the impact of the so-called “China factor” in Hong Kong and Taiwan, respectively. Cheng's essay documents in illuminating detail the various strategies used by the hybrid regime to absorb, erode and suppress political dissent during and after the Umbrella Movement. These approaches nonetheless reveal a contradiction in Beijing's ruling strategies. Wu's essay on Taiwan's Sunflower Movement makes a strong contribution both on its own and in comparative terms. It explains how the Sunflower Movement as an event transformed the structure of political forces in Taiwan and across the Strait through changing the longstanding China-centric cultural hegemony and precipitating the cause of independence among the young generation. This final essay succinctly illustrates the theoretical notion of “event” as espoused in Lee's opening chapter.

The essays collected in the book are all excellent works. Taken together, this edited volume does a superb job of examining the Umbrella Movement through very in-depth and engaging analyses. Without doubt, it will be of tremendous value to scholars and students in the fields of social movement, state–society relations and Hong Kong politics. Furthermore, the idea of event is a welcome theoretical initiative that directs our focus to the contingent and transformative relations in and through collective action. Yet, there is certainly room for further conceptualization and clarification of the relations between event and structure, between civil society and eventful protests, and between enduring and more fluid forms of power.