Patterns of ‘Disorder’ During the 2019 Protests in Hong Kong: Policing, Social Identity, Intergroup Dynamics, and Radicalization

Abstract

Across the latter half of 2019, Hong Kong became the focus of world attention as it was rocked by a wave of increasingly violent confrontations between police and protesters. Both inside and outside the Territory, several powerful political actors have argued that the paramilitary-style police interventions used to manage the protests were necessary because the disorder was being fermented by agitators. In contrast, this article explores the utility of the Elaborated Social Identity Model of crowd behaviour to help explore and explain some of the social psychological dynamics through which the 2019 protests became ‘radicalised’. The article explores three key phases of their evolution to draw out the patterns of collective action and variations in policing approaches. We show that early demonstrations were focused predominantly on preventing the implementation of controversial legislation but spread and changed in form as a function of the use of crowd dispersal tactics by police. Moreover, we show how police inaction at other critical moments helped amplify perceptions of police illegitimacy that further radicalized protesters. Drawing upon a body of primary interview and secondary survey data, we also provide a social psychological analysis. We argue the observed patterns of collective action were underpinned by identity change and empowerment processes brought about as a consequence of both the structural context and the intergroup dynamics created in part by coercive policing practices.

Affective solidarity: how guilt enables cross-generational support for political radicalization in Hong Kong

“…Third, as most of the quantitative research about emotions and social movement tends to discuss the impact of a single emotion, some scholars attempt to examine each emotion's respective strength within a movement (Asún et al, 2020). Although this paper focuses on the role of guilt, this does not entail ignoring the impact of other emotions, such as anger, on the Anti-ELAB Movement (Scott et al, 2020). Instead, it gives more attention to an underresearched emotion and surveys the intercohort differences among different ingroup members during a traumatic event.…”

“…The experiential basis of solidarity that Lee (2020) proposes is echoed by other studies as well. Focusing on the police's tactics in handling the movement, Scott et al (2020) argue that the continuous escalation of the movement through persistent public support was because the police continuously made errors in handling the movement. Furthermore, studying radicalization from a relational perspective, Lee et al (2021a) argue that the radicalization of the Anti-ELAB Movement was legitimized by several contextual factors that led the protesters to recognize the need for a radical response.…”

“…In numerous circumstances, a heavy-handed state's repression has led to a more radical response from protesters and wider support for protesters from the public (Hess and Martin, 2006;O'Brian and Deng, 2015;Yuen and Cheng, 2017). This was also what happened in the Anti-ELAB Movement (Scott et al, 2020). Although elderly protesters were less likely to initially have a radical response, the experience of encountering the state's repression could strengthen their feelings of guilt.…”

Does repression undermine opposition demands? The case of the Hong Kong National Security Law

“…For example, the earlier version of the five demands included the resignation of Chief Executive (CE) Carrie Lam and principal officials, but was later replaced by a broader demand for dual universal suffrage, because protesters soon readjusted their preferences to seek a lasting representative political system over a quick political solution (Lee et al ., 2019). Following a series of incidents of alleged police brutality and collusion with the triads during the Yuen Long incident on 21st July 2019, protesters also began to tolerate and justify radicalization as ‘necessary self-defense’ because they registered a salient deterioration in the status quo , stating that ‘but up to that day [July 21st] I feel that all these means [i.e., traditional forms of protest or seeking to use mainstream politics] have come to an end and they no longer achieve anything’ (Stott et al ., 2020: 15).…”

How riots spread between cities: Introducing the ‘police pathway’

“…Through uniting the crowd around a new norm of conflict against the police, the police intervention thereby creates the hostile crowd and public disorder that they feared (Stott & Drury, 2000). ESIM dynamics are not restricted to U.K. contexts, with evidence now from four different continents in addition to the United Kingdom: North America (Maguire, Barak, et al, 2020), mainland Europe (Brechbuhl et al, 2020;Jetten et al, 2020), Asia (Stott et al, 2020), and Australia (Baker, 2020).…”