A Regime’s Learning Curve and Its Transformative Effect in Post-Occupy Hong Kong

The recent waves of global occupy protest have inspired a vast body of research on their organizational bases and mobilization structures from a long-term or cycle-of-protest perspective. However, only very few studies have attempted to understand the protests as singular “transformative events” (Sewell 2005; McAdam and Sewell 2001) and analyzed transformative effects derived from these protests. This article contends that the emergence of large protests does not necessarily bring about any positive reform, such as democratization, but rather causes demobilization, if there are irreconcilable cleavages within opposition camps that their opponents (i.e. the state) can exploit. It demonstrates that a government’s evolving strategies of dealing with protests can be the product of a transformative event, that authoritarian governments can quickly learn and employ tactics adept at containing protests during and in the aftermath of the events.

By examining the case of the 2012 Anti-Education Movement and the 2014 Umbrella Movement, the two largest occupation movements in post-1997 Hong Kong, this article finds that the government has learned from the experiences of interacting with the two protests and has therefore begun to employ what i call a “rule-of-law strategy” to demobilize them. Methodologically, the data used in this article were collected through in-depth interviews with activists and by reviewing government statements made during the occupations as well as news coverage in their aftermath.