As I write this review in April 2019, the nine leaders of Hong Kong's 2014 Umbrella Movement have been found guilty of public nuisance, with several of them sentenced to more than a year in prison. This is just one reason why, five years on, reaching a greater understanding of the Umbrella Movement and Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, which broke out just before and helped inspire the Hong Kong protests, has never been more critical. Ming-sho Ho's Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan's Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement offers much-needed data on where, why, and how these movements transpired.
The book's title and subtitle undersell the value of its contents. Ho does far more than just recount the story of the two movements; he also contextualizes them within Taiwan's and Hong Kong's political histories, explains the role that China has played in galvanizing them, and connects the movements to the two polities’ rich historical networks and traditions of social movement activity. It is not until the second half of the book that Ho analyzes the two movements themselves.
Chapter 1, “A Tale of Two Societies,” details the political development of these two former colonies, focusing on the 1970s through today. Ho emphasizes the variation between Taiwan's and Hong Kong's pathways to democratization, describing them as “successful” and “stalled,” respectively.
Chapter 2, “China's Impact,” tackles a difficult question with which scholars of each locale struggle: what exactly is the “China factor?” Ho conceptualizes, first, how we might study China's various impacts on Taiwan and Hong Kong and, second, why they function differently in each place. Even more important is his discussion of how Taiwan and Hong Kong resist forces of “mainlandization.” This discussion, like most studies of Taiwan and Hong Kong, includes an extended explanation of how localized identities have become increasingly salient of late. Although Ho's data on identity is not new, the way he frames the shift in identity as a form of resistance against mainlandization adds an important layer of context too often left out of discussions of Taiwan and Hong Kong identity.
Chapter 3, “Movement Networks,” focuses on the history of social protest in each polity. One of Ho's points, though a familiar one to scholars of social movements, is useful to those less familiar with the history of Taiwan and Hong Kong's social protest: “It is not entirely accurate to describe these two movements as originating from the spontaneous reactions of previously uninvolved citizens, because a group of core activists had been schooled and nurtured in a widening movement community” (p. 93). In other words, these two movements did not occur in a vacuum, but rather are better conceived as moments in long local histories of protest.
The book's focus then shifts to 2014 events. Chapters 5 and 6, covering the Sunflower and Umbrella movements, respectively, build on Ho's earlier work. Ho, a practitioner of political opportunity structure theory, explores the variation in openings and threats throughout and between these two movements, both in terms of regime openness and openness of the ruling government. His data comes from nearly 150 in-depth interviews and participatory observations of the movements, offering novel insights into the struggles. His discussion of the differences between them regarding leadership is especially compelling. The movements had radically contrasting leadership structures, one cohesive and one scattered. The effectiveness of movement leaders, Ho notes, is “the most unpredictable variable, since it is largely determined by a plethora of circumstantial factors” (p. 148).
Chapter 6 contains Ho's most novel theoretical contribution. He asks how and why so many citizens supported these movements for such sustained periods of time. His answer lies in the chapter's title: “Improvisation.” Ho suggests that these movements “would have been nipped in the bud if there had been no unsolicited and instant input from anonymous citizens” (p. 153). He stresses that the movements were not leaderless. However, their ability to last was due more to participants’ ability to “generate creative responses to new situations” than to existing leadership or organizational structures (p. 152). Although the concept of social movement improvisation is not new, Ho's insistence that these movements cannot be understood in the same way as traditional social movements because of the high degree of improvisation that occurred during them helps us better understand what made them unique.
Ho ends his final analytical chapter, “The Morning After,” by neatly summarizing outcomes, such as subsequent movements and new political organizations that sprouted out of the Sunflower and Umbrella movements.
Although Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven is empirically rich and contains intriguing theoretical moves and modifications of extant models, I found myself wishing at times that Ho would go further in making a comprehensive argument. He opens the book by proposing six analytical puzzles, but most are not brought up again until the conclusion. Despite these small shortcomings, Ho's book deserves to become part of the canons of both Taiwan and Hong Kong studies, and should be read widely by scholars focusing on the Chinese mainland as well. No scholar can understand contemporary cross-strait relations or Hong Kong–mainland dynamics without first studying these two 2014 events, and Ho's book serves as a critical primer on Taiwanese and Hong Kongese social movements.
