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Digital media have facilitated the growth of citizen self-initiated and self-directed protest campaigns that often lack an authoritative central organizer. One challenge facing such protest campaigns is how internal disagreements about key issues can be resolved or contained. To what extent can movement participants handle disagreements constructively through digital communication? This article addresses this question through a case study of online discussions surrounding the political consumerism campaign during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong. Qualitative content analysis illustrates the range of disagreements that could arise in a self-directed political consumerism campaign and uncovers the various types of engaging and disengaging communications that people practiced. Quantitative content analysis shows that disengaging communications were more common, yet people were more responsive to engaging communications. The latter was more obvious as the campaign proceeded. Implications of the findings on the capability of decentralized protests to resolve internal differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries where the news media and the society are under tight political control, media self-censorship cannot be understood in isolation from society-wide self-censorship. Based on this premise, this article examines the problematic of media self-censorship by focusing on journalist-source interaction and the media-and-civil-society nexus. The empirical study focuses on Hong Kong after the establishment of the National Security Law in 2020, which ushered in an era of legalization of political and press control. Drawing on 47 in-depth interviews with journalists, this article illustrates how the political environment led to the disappearance of news sources and how media and societal self-censorship were intertwined, creating the friction and frustration that hampered the publication and circulation of critical information and viewpoints. The analysis also noted the unevenness of societal self-censorship and its implications, as well as journalistic responses to the situation. General theoretical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a concern with legal repression of protests and based on the premise that judges inevitably draw upon common sense ideas in judicial decision-making, this article examines how understandings of protests, protesters and protest policing are embedded in verdicts in protest-related court cases. A textual analysis was conducted on judgements in 21 cases about rioting and incitement associated with three prominent protest events in Hong Kong between 2014 and 2019. The analysis shows that the assumptions of risk aversion and perceptiveness were applied to the protesters and onlookers, whereas the assumption of professionalism was applied to the police. How police actions might influence protesters was ignored. The emergence of protest violence was typically understood in terms of emotional contagion within the crowd. Overall, such ideas and assumptions substantially constrain protests, though they sometimes benefitted the defendants in individual cases. The findings illustrate the cultural underpinnings of legal repression of protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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One distinctive feature of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong is the 'international front' on which both Hong-Kong-based activists and members of diaspora communities engaged in public diplomacy and foreign government lobbying. While the emergence of the international front can partly be explained by perceived political opportunities and protesters' identity change, this article focuses on the evolution of mobilizing structures. Of particular interest is how the mobilizing structures were activated, expanded, and transformed in a protest campaign marked by certain core features of networked social movements. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty activists, the analysis illustrates the co-presence of and complementarity between digitally enabled, citizen self-initiated actions and organization-based mobilization. The analysis also shows how tactical shifts, negotiation of differences among activists, and state response drove the transformation of activist network. General theoretical implications on understanding of diaspora mobilization and networked social movements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have noted that the Chinese government has been grooming a range of grass-roots social organizations in Hong Kong since the handover. Hometown associations (HTAs), in particular, are seen as an important cultural nexus capable of integrating patron--client relationships based on material benefits with social relationships rooted in common culture and identity. Few studies, however, have documented the mobilizing power of HTAs quantitatively. This article examines the mobilizing power of HTAs in the 2021 Legislative Council elections, where the state attempted to promote voter participation to protect the legitimacy of the "reformed" electoral system. Analysis at the level of District Council constituencies shows that the presence of HTAs was indeed related to higher voter turnout. I also test whether the impact of HTAs was conditioned by population characteristics. General implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]