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The Anti-Extradition Bill protests in 2019 culminated in an unprecedented level of violence that departed from the established peaceful social struggles in Hong Kong. This paper examines the evolution of protest repertoires by analysing the interactions between protesters and state actors on a local and global scale. A dataset is presented to show the type, frequency and distribution of tactics. This paper reveals that structural and cultural changes as well as activists' cognitive, affective and relational transformations at the micro- and meso-levels were pertinent to tactical radicalization. Cognitively, militant tactics were pragmatic responses to state-sponsored violence and police violence. They were also the affective outcomes of grief and anger. These processes were intertwined with the relational dynamics that advocated horizontal mobilization and that shaped, and were shaped by, the political-economic interactions between China and the West. The result was an extensive use of violent tactics alongside innovations in non-violent tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the diffusion of activism in post-colonial Hong Kong through the lens of the political regime and eventful analysis. It first reveals the institutional foundations of the hybrid regime that allowed the creation of a nascent movement society. It then explains how the historic 1 July rally in 2003 and a series of critical events since 2006 have led to a shift in scale and the public staging of street politics. A time-series analysis and onsite survey further capture the dynamics that spawned the collective recognition of grievances and reduced participation costs, leading to the Umbrella Movement. While the spontaneous, voluntary and decentralized organizational structure sustained protest momentum, the regime has adopted hybrid strategies to counter-mobilize bottom-up activism. The result is widening contention between the state and civil society and within civil society, or the coexistence of regime instability and regime longevity, a trend that is increasingly common in hybrid regimes encountering mass protests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This article examines the origins and dynamics of an extraordinary wave of protests in Hong Kong in 2019–2020. Despite lacking visible political opportunities and organizational resources, the protest movement drew resilient, mass participation unparalleled in the city's history and much of the world. Drawing from original on-site surveys and online datasets, we conceptualize the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as a form of "total mobilization from below." The totality of the mobilization depended on a set of interactive mechanisms: abeyant civil society networks concealed after the 2014 Umbrella Movement were activated by threats over extradition and institutional decay, whereas affective ties developed through conflicts and mutual assistance were amplified by digital communication. The movement's characteristics in terms of protest scale, mobilizing structure, use of alternative spaces, and group solidarity are examined. The spasmodic moments of mobilization are explained by a nexus of network building that took place in an unreceptive environment and at a critical juncture. The roles of threats and emotions in mass mobilizations are also analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]