Occupying three urban districts for 79 days in 2014, Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement was not only one of the largest social movements in contemporary Chinese history but was also a spectacular world event. Journalists, scholars and officials have different perceptions of the movement and have hotly debated its emergence and dynamics. On the one hand, some observers relate the Umbrella Movement to the “occupy” events that spread across the globe over the last two decades. W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segeberg theorize these events as “crowd-enabled connective actions” in which digital networks enable spontaneous mobilization and decentralized protest structure. On the other hand, local and international media designated several young protest leaders as the new faces of democracy, who seemingly processed the legitimacy, if not authority, to coordinate collective actions. The authorities also favoured that narrative of a highly organized movement, first to identify partners for negotiation, and later on to justify prosecution of the protest leaders.

In Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era, Francis Lee and Joseph Chan contend that the above observations are only partially valid, as both collective and connective actions were presented in the Umbrella Movement. Although digital media facilitated mass mobilization, diffusion and coordination, and subsequently helped to check state repression, they did not do this alone or as spontaneously as some observers have suggested. Instead, they were assisted by mass media institutions and mediated by on-the-ground organizational networks. The actions were often spontaneous, but they were also informed. Authority was fragmented, but the protestors remained connected. By revealing the “collision of old and new protest logics” (p. 10) in the Umbrella Movement, Lee and Chan's study provides a vivid and nuanced account of the relationship between media and movements in the digital age. Their informed analysis also unearths the conditions in which historical trajectories and local contexts can create favourable conditions for mobilisation and at times shape individuals’ responses to contingencies.

The first half of the book traces how this hybrid mode of protest logics has manifested in post-handover Hong Kong. The authors consider whether the 1 July 2003 rally constituted citizens’ self-mobilization and how it shaped the repertoires of protesters until 2014. They then closely examine how the Occupy Central leaders spread the discourse of civil disobedience to prepare the public to accept such actions when they appeared. Colliding with the post-material turn of the new generation, these historical trajectories regenerated the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, in which young activists served as the main protest agency. Hence, although the political opportunity structure remained more or less constant, peaceful protests were normalized and became cognitively and behaviourally acceptable to the majority. Similarly, despite the presence of many contingent incidents during the lengthy occupation, these historical trajectories mediated the actions’ logics, making the Umbrella Movement one of the most civil and peaceful social protests by international standards. These background chapters perform the vital task of unpacking the wider political ecology through which mass mobilization has become possible, despite limited opportunities.

The next three chapters of the book focus on the dynamics and outcomes of the Umbrella Movement. Chapter four introduces the concept of a “partially censored public monitor” (pp. 77–8) to explain how traditional and digital media interacted to produce contradictory public opinions. Although Hong Kong's mainstream media is increasingly self-censored, the live broadcasting of police brutality and the extensive circulation of such images on the Internet caused moral indignation and increased the scale of mobilization. The authors supplement their argument with data from population surveys that illustrate the size of the media's public monitor function: they show a positive correlation between exposure to mainstream media and negative perceptions of the occupation. In chapter five, Lee and Chan use data from onsite surveys and Facebook pages to show how connective actions reduced the cost for mass participation and produced a decentralized protest ecology. For instance, although the protestors almost unanimously agreed that striving for genuine democracy was the movement's goal, the protest leaders, who were subjected to spatially and digitally divided constituencies, could not convince their respective supporters that strategic retreat can be a means to achieve that long-term goal. This tension between organization and decentralization illustrates the contradiction between sustained occupation and deepening polarization among the protest camps, which is evident in the post-Occupy era. Another contribution of the book is its analysis of the regime's protest responses, which successfully undermined the movement without making any concessions. The authors argue that the Beijing and Hong Kong authorities adopted multifaceted strategies not only to erode the strength of the protestors, but also to reconnect with their conservative audience. In this respect, digital media is a double-edged sword that can facilitate both mass mobilization and counter-mobilization. Students of authoritarian politics will find instruction manuals in chapter six.

The analysis, however, would have benefited from an extended appraisal of the conflicts and emotions within and beyond the protest sites, as those are the defining features of the long occupation; they were magnified by the hybrid protest logics and themselves magnifying the aftermath of the movement, both subjects of this study. Such appraisal would have helped to relate the hybrid protest logics to the cultural turn of social movement studies. From this perspective, the book's understanding of protest ecology seems to be slightly rigid. It discounts how the agencies possess with collective identity or cognitive liberation can generate solidarity incentive to appropriate the spatial constraints.

There is much to applaud in this book. First, the book's systematic collection of different data sources, including in-depth interviews, population surveys and onsite surveys, provides methodological lessons for future research. Its appendix, which uses onsite surveys to build profiles of protest agents, will help students of contentious politics to meet the challenges of studying modern-day protests by understanding the when, what and how. Second, Lee and Chan offer a vivid account of the trajectory and repercussions of an important social protest of our time. Their use of a theoretically informed case study mediating the ideal type of connective/collective actions will help to bridge the widening gap between disciplinary and area studies. In this respect, Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era deserves a wider audience than the title suggests. The book should be read by humanities scholars and social scientists in and beyond the fields of China and Hong Kong studies.