“Do You Hear the People Sing” “Lift Your Umbrella”?

Abstract

Around the world, music serves as an important element of mobilisation for social movements. Singing songs is not only a peaceful protest technique but also helps to construct a protest identity locating and relating the social movement to its political and social environment. Most importantly, a social movement is to a significant extent remembered through its music, and this determines its future impact on local (contentious) politics. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to understand Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement through four YouTube music videos, analysing the lyrics, music, and video imagery in order to carve out core elements and values of the Umbrella Movement. Especially given the importance of Hong Kong's identity as a "global" city with a cosmopolitan culture and past, the peaceful nature of the movement and the rise of a xenophobic localism in the shape of sarcasm are emphasised.

Online counter‐mobilisation via social media: Exploration of pro‐regime opinion leaders in Hong Kong under Chinese sovereignty

“…Traditionally, texts are the most common material for coding, but with the use of social media, videos are more important platforms for politicians to share their ideology and mobilise people. Thus, more and more researchers are adopting video content coding and analysis for comparative analysis and forecasting (Abrahms et al, 2017;Rühlig, 2016). Video content analysis is adopted in this study to analyse YouTube videos.…”