Researching China’s Visual Securitization of Color Revolution, Peaceful Evolution and the Hong Kong Democracy and Independence Movements

Drawing on the Copenhagen School’s Securitization Theory and others’ foundational work in developing Visual Securitization studies, this paper discusses interdisciplinary methodologies employed and developed and challenges encountered in interrogating the political aesthetics and culture of communist China’s visual securitization of dissident Hong Kong, Hongkongers and “One Country, Two Systems” (OCTS) as manifested through an integrated process of pictorial enemification, moral panic and political warfare. This ocular dimension of a OCTS Securitization process, as briefly proffered and described by the author in his recent doctoral dissertation, draws on the author’s five-year multi-sited, on- and off-line ethnographic visual studies of the China-Hong Kong conflict. Taking key hegemonic visual claims of color revolution, peaceful evolution, democracy and Hong Kong identity and independence threats as Chinese national security crises, scares and warfare, it discusses multimodal methodologies and sources for collecting, analyzing and triangulating physical and virtual visual artefacts and visual culture connected to state and non-state actor United Front (denunciation) and Three Warfare (public opinion, legal and psychological warfare) operations against dissident Hong Kong and Hongkongers and the Hongkonger identity.