The last few years have seen an explosion in research on Hong Kong, with much of this work focused on the rise and fall of the city’s spectacular social movements. Building on more than two decades of research on Hong Kong’s media and politics, Francis L.F. Lee has produced a valuable new contribution to this literature. Drawing his conceptual inspiration largely from social movement studies, Lee treats the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-ELAB (Extradition Law Amendment Bill) as “two moments of the same movement” (p. 4) in the struggle for democracy. This periodization is critical for the study, as his overarching question is to understand how this single movement evolved over these five years.

This approach allows Lee to unravel some surprising features of the movement’s trajectory. He wants to understand how, despite the crushing defeat of the Umbrella Movement, pro-democracy resistance emerged on an even larger and more militant scale in 2019, with even wider public support. A related but equally important question is how “localism” (a complex term that Lee subjects to sustained analysis, but which refers broadly to prioritizing Hong Kong’s autonomy from Beijing) moved from the margins into a political force in just a few years.

Lee deploys an array of methods and sources of data to present a multi-dimensional account of the transformation of the movement. This includes original on-site surveys, interviews and focus groups with movement participants, and media and legal analyses. In just a few instances, Lee also provides reflections on his personal experiences. This rich data reflects his long-standing attention to social movements and media in the city, and allows him to tackle the object of analysis from a variety of perspectives.

Drawing on social movement theory, Lee focuses on movement “abeyance,” i.e. the lull in overt public activity between public eruptions of resistance. In seeking to explain how the movement both sustained and transformed, he uses a relational approach to analyse interactions within the movement, between the state and movement, and between the public and the movement. While the scale and ferocity of the 2019 protests shocked many, Lee’s careful excavation of the interregnum shows how various social and political currents laid the foundation for expanding and intensifying the earlier round of contention.

Given the empirical richness of this book, a comprehensive overview of the chapters is impossible. I would, however, like to draw attention to Lee’s argument about the consolidation of localist politics, as it is a thread that runs through the chapters. Chapter three presents a fascinating and extremely detailed account of the Mongkok unrest of 2016. Lee’s retelling of the “fishball revolution” reveals how a seemingly spontaneous riot grew out of a gradual accretion of political dynamics following the failure of the Umbrella Movement. While these protestors’ willingness to employ violence was widely denounced at the time, Lee argues that the uprising played a key role in legitimating increasingly aggressive tactics and localist politics.

In the years after the Mongkok riot, a series of political dynamics would lay the foundation for revolt on a much larger scale. Hong Kong Indigenous’s Edward Leung shocked the city with a losing but still strong showing in a Legislative Council by-election just a few weeks after the unrest. While most of the public still opposed militant tactics and Hong Kong independence, Leung would moderate his rhetoric while engaging the public. Equally important, Lee shows in chapter five how other symbolic interventions served to mainstream localist politics. Utilizing the concept of “bridge brokers,” Lee reveals how film and media portrayals of localism made the once toxic views more acceptable. Clearly, such views could not be accepted by the state or pro-Beijing parties. But by framing increased militancy as a response to the multi-decade failures of the pan-democrats, these brokers brought the localists and their willingness to escalate into the mainstream of the pro-democracy movement. Parties such as Demosisto articulated softer versions of localism by advocating for self-determination and a referendum on Hong Kong’s future. While a minority openly advocated for independence, such positions moved within the bounds of accepted debate, and Hong Kongers increasingly rejected full political integration into the PRC. Finally, as Lee argues in chapter six, the state treated the pan-democrat, pro-self-determination parties, such as Demosisto, and radical pro-independence groups such as HKI as all beyond the pale. The consequence of this strategic error was in fact to push the whole spectrum of pro-democracy groups into a coalition that would form the basis of the 2019 movement – a movement that was now willing to overlook tactical and political differences to advance their shared aims of reigning in police violence and realizing genuine universal suffrage.

Pro-Democracy Contention in Hong Kong is based on exquisite empirical work and anyone interested in Hong Kong’s political situation will find much of value. Lee’s argument that we can only understand the growing reach of localism via a relational analysis of political dynamics during the mid-late 2010s is well substantiated. It would of course be unfair to fault the author for things he did not do; nonetheless, I could not help but wonder what a comparative glance might have revealed. After all, the 2010s witnessed the rapid expansion of strident nationalism in many sites around the world. What might be gained by situating Hong Kong’s version of nationalism within a comparative frame? One possible answer, implicit in Lee’s book, is that the Chinese state’s (relatively unique) ability to ensure that localist sentiments could not be expressed via political parties or in the state produced one of the, if not the most spectacular and sustained bouts of social insurgency in the 21st century. But perhaps the more noteworthy point of contrast is right there in the title of the book: Hong Kong’s was a movement for democracy. At a moment when nationalist movements are corroding democracy and civil society around the world, Hong Kong’s iteration focused on restraining the arbitrary power of police and expanding electoral democracy. This does not, in my view, absolve some elements in the movement from their xenophobic tendencies, but it does bring Hong Kong’s distinctive historical trajectory into even sharper relief.