Virginia Review of Asian Studies
Volume 18 (2016): 1-20
Chen: Hong Kong
CULTURAL FRAMING IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: EXPLAINING THE EMERGENCE OF THE OCCUPY CENTRAL MOVEMENT IN HONG KONG
Xinran Andy Chen[1]
Rhodes College
Abstract
This paper endeavors to investigate the causes behind the formation of the Occupy Central Movement that took place in Hong Kong between September and December 2014. In doing so, this paper identifies common factors that contribute to the emergence of social movements in general, and ascertains whether some existing explanations can travel to the Hong Kong case in particular. By assessing the political opportunity, resource mobilization, and cultural framing of this movement, the paper concludes that Occupy Central emerged because of effective diagnostic and motivational framing, respected leadership, and the right timing, but failed to achieve intended political objectives due to the lack of moral and cultural resources and the absence of prognostic framing.
“[Chinese] government declared that the ‘Sino-British Joint Declaration’ is no longer valid. That means China is now illegal[ly] occupying Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. We urge the British government to re-activate the ‘Treaty of Nanking’ and the ‘The First Convention of Peking’ [and] re-claim the ownership of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Island.”[2]
“Mainland Chinese tourists are flocking into Hong Kong, occupying Hong Kong’s limited resources. Last year, among the more than 50 million tourists to Hong Kong, more than 40 million came from the mainland, largely surpassing other countries, deeply affecting local commercial conditions and people’s daily lives. It is predicted that mainland tourists will reach 70 million by 2017, and break through the 100 million point by 2023.”[3]
Introduction
In 1842, the British Empire defeated the Qing government of China in the First Opium War, imposing the unequal Treaty of Nanking, forcing the opening of ports and the cession of Hong Kong Island, and marking the beginning of China’s “century of humiliation.” In 1997, People’s Republic of China retrieved the sovereignty of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula from British colonial occupation, under an arrangement known as “once country, two systems.” Beginning in the 1980s and intensified after 1997, some segments of Hong Kong’s civil and political societies have continued their pursuit for electoral democracy. On August 31st, 2014, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress’s (NPC) in Beijing, nominally China’s highest legislative body, announced its decision for Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s (HKSAR) political reforms. The NPC advised the Chief Executive for HKSAR to be selected by universal suffrage in 2017 for the first time in the city’s history. NPC’s decision is regarded by many as a step forward in the territory’s democratic development, but by opposition forces as authoritarian and “democratic show without democratic substance.”
Under Beijing’s proposal, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive will be popularly elected with universal suffrage by eligible voters from a pool of two or three candidates, preselected by a 1,200-member local nomination committee, which opponents accuse of being pro-Beijing. As a result, the “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” civil disobedience campaign, first proposed in 2013, officially began on September 28th, 2014 in the middle of a week-long class strike initiated by Hong Kong’s university and high school students. Occupy Central lasted for 79 days but ended in December 2014 with little concrete results for pro-democracy activists and a divided city uncertain about its political future.
Research Question
This paper seeks to explain the causes behind the formation of Occupy Central, identify common factors that contribute to the emergence of social movements in general, and ascertain whether some existing explanations can travel to the Hong Kong case in particular.
Being both the largest, in terms of participating protesters, and the longest, in terms of duration, demonstration that has happened in the Greater China region since the 1989 protests on the Tiananmen Square, theOccupy Central movement offers several insights for the studies of social movement, public opinion, local autonomy versus national centralization, postcolonial legacies, and democracy.
The movement has major implications for the democratization of not only Hong Kong the city and China the overarching state, but also the entire region of Asia, where Asian values, Confucian teachings, the long tradition of collectivism, and people’s desire for security, stability, order, and continued economic growth, are often seen as incompatible with the Western notions of liberal democracy. For example, Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father and first Premier of Singapore, successfully transformed Singapore from an impoverished outpost into one of world’s wealthiest and least corrupt countries. He did so, however, with heavy-handedness, constant governmental intervention, and sometimes repression of dissent. Lee was famously quoted as saying, “the exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development” (Allison et al. 2012, 27).
In the early 2000s, after conducting the East Asia Barometer, a comparative public opinion survey investigating citizens’ attitudes toward politics, governance, and democracy, Larry Diamond and other prominent scholars of democracy have argued that the so-called “third-wave democracies” in East Asia are “in distress” (Chu et al. 2008, 1). They note that many are experiencing “inconclusive or disputed electoral outcomes, incessant political strife and partisan gridlock, and recurring political scandals,” and most importantly, the public’s “nostalgia” for the “seemingly effective pro-growth soft-authoritarian” past (Chu et al. 2008, 1). Diamond and his colleagues stated, “there has never been a mass democracy movement in Hong Kong” (Chu et al. 2008, 190). This perceived public indifference toward further democratization in Hong Kong was proven wrong when local students, academics, and law makers carried out the Occupy Central demonstration. Therefore, this “first-ever” democracy movement in Hong Kong provides a unique and invaluable case with which to test existing hypotheses and generate new explanations.
Literature Review
The European scholarship on social movements has been traditionally framed by “Marxist/Hegelian tradition of the philosophy of history” (Crossley 2002, 10). According to Marx, the “fundamental cleavages of capitalist society” are the structural cause of collective action because such socio-economic divides among different classes create the “mobilization potential” for social movements to emerge (Tarrow 1994, 13). As a result, much of European scholarship has since focused on investigating the “constitutive structure and type of society” in which social movements typically emerge (Crossley 2002, 10).
The North American approach, in contrast, has arguably taken a more “empirical, scientific and, to a degree, empiricist” approach (Crossley 2002, 10). In the United States before the 1970s, most social movements were studied as a subfield of “collective behavior” (Crossley 2002, 10) from a “psychofunctional perspective” (Snow et al. 1986, 465). Turner and Killian defined social movements as “collectivity acting with some continuity to promote…or resist a change in the society or group of which it is a part” (Turner and Killian 1957, 308). In other words, a social movement is a form of collective self-help intended to impose changes that would be difficult to achieve through individual action. Collective behavior theorists hold that “objective hardships” in the forms of grievances, deprivations, anomie, or structural strains and breakdown, often due to economic contractions, are not only a “necessary” but also “sufficient” cause of social movements’ formation (Crossley 2002, 11).
Central to the studies of collective behavior is the theory of relative deprivation. Relative deprivation refers to the perceived discrepancy between “value expectations” and “value capabilities” (Gurr 1970, 24). Relative deprivation theory argues it is the social comparisons between the objective inequality and the subjective experience of injustice that foster the emergence of collective action. When facing a gap between value expectation and value capability, one has three ways to address the sense of being deprived: to “exit,” to stay “loyal” by accepting the status-quo, and to “voice” concerns (Hirschman 1970). It is only when people choose to voice their concerns and articulate their grievances, collectively, that social movements begin to take shape. Therefore, “the potential for collective violence” increases when the “scope of relative deprivation among members of a collectivity” intensifies (Gurr 1970, 24).
However, social movements have not been formed in every society that has grievances. Relative deprivation and the subjective sense of disadvantage thus could not single-handedly explain the emergence of collective behavior or social movement. Thefree-rider problem or the rational actor model, in which individuals participate social movements only “when the potential benefits outweigh the anticipated costs” (Buechler 1993, 218), has to be taken into consideration. Since social movements seek the collective and public interest over individual and private interest, rational human beings tend to free-ride in the process of social movement but share the outcome with movement participants who actually sacrificed for their common cause.
Assuming socio-economic conflicts and political discontent exist inherently in every society, the strategy-oriented resource mobilization theorists argue for the necessity of a mobilizing force to uncover these unrealized potentials and incentivize mass participation. The superiority of resource mobilization theory over previous theories of collective behavior was revealed from the empirical evidence used to “account for the 1960s cycle of protest” (Buechler 1993, 217). As the dominant social movements paradigm in the 1970s, the resource mobilization approach stresses both “societal support” and the “constraint of social movement phenomena,” with dependence on “political sociological and economic theories” (McCarthy and Zald 1977, 1213) and proposes that social movements become “a force for social change primarily through the social movement organizations (SMOs) they spawned” (McAdam et al. 1996, 4). SMOs[4] have a number of “strategic tasks” in the social movement, including “mobilizing supporters, neutralizing and/or transforming mass and elite public into sympathizers, [and] achieving change in targets” (McCarthy and Zald 1977, 1217). In other words, SMOs always endeavor to mobilize resources and channel discontent “into organizational forms” (Edelman 2001, 289). The capacity of SMOs is measured by their efficiency and effectiveness to mobilize various types of resources. Resource mobilization therefore is the rational behavior of collective action by groups and individuals who share common interests in advancing their common goals. Under thisframework, collective behavior is viewed as “interest group politics” (Edelman 2001, 290) and strategic “political enterprise” instead of a “passionate response to felt injustices” (Zomeren et al. 2008, 506).
Synthesizing past work on resource mobilization, Edwards and McCarthy developed a fivefold typology of resources that could be used by SMOs and their leaders to minimize losses and maximize gains: “moral, cultural, social-organizational, human, and material resources” (Edwards and McCarthy 2004, 117)[5], arguing that the more access leadership has to the five different types of resources, the more likely SMOs will form, and the more likely social movement will emerge and succeed.
By investigating the women’s movement in the U.S., Buechler developed ten ways to challenge the dominance of resource mobilization theory in 1993,contending that resource mobilization theory only operates “on the meso-level of analysis to the relative exclusion of both macro-level and micro-level explorations of collective action” (1993, 224). The other two pillars of social movement theory address Buechler’s concern by providing a macro-level analysis of political opportunity and a micro-level explanation of cultural framing.
Recognizing that individual action takes place under conditions that cannot be molded to the actors’ preferences, political opportunity theory lends a structural perspective to social movement studies by asserting the “importance of the broader political system in structuring the opportunities for collective action” (McAdam et al. 1996, 2). Political opportunity theorists assume social movements’ rise, development, success or failure are conditioned by forces and structures beyond the control of even the most capable individuals. In this model, social movements emerge when “ordinary citizens, sometimes encouraged by leaders, respond to changes in opportunities that lower the costs of collective action, reveal potential allies and show where elites and authorities are vulnerable” (Tarrow 1994, 18). Thus timing becomes highly important to the emergence of social movements. When change in the underlying political structure occurs, it creates fresh openings that enable the mobilization of even the resource-poor actors into new movements. According to Kriesi, three general elements can be identified in the political opportunity structure: “the formal institutional structure of a political system,” the “informal procedures and prevailing strategies with regard to challengers,” and the “configuration of power relevant for the confrontation with the challengers” (1996, 160). It is argued that social movements are more likely to emerge and succeed in societies with relatively weak institutional setup, such as the U.S. system of separated powers, than in societies with stronger states, such as the U.K.’s system of fused powers. According to a “highly consensual list,” there are four dimensions of political opportunity (McAdam et al. 1996, 27):
- The relative openness or closure of the institutionalized political system;
- The stability or instability of that broad set of elite alignments that typically undergird a polity;
- The presence or absence of elite allies;
- The state’s capacity and propensity for repression.
Based on this list, scholars have argued that there is increased opportunity for social movements to form and succeed when there is increased access to the system by outside actors, when divide among ruling elites intensifies, or when the state is limited to repress dissidents.
The third pillar of political process theory, cultural framing, referred by some as “framing process”(Snow et al. 1986) and “cognitive liberation” (McAdam et al. 1996), offers a dynamic micro-level and ideational explanation to the cause of social movements. Framing is the process of people developing “a particular conceptualization of” or “reorient[ing] their thinking about” an issue (Chong and Druckman 2007, 104). In social movements, framing is the strategy used by social movement leaders to nurture shared understandings that “legitimate and motivate collective action” (McAdam et al. 1996, 6). The cultural framing model seeks to solve the puzzles of “who engages in collective action” and “how they view themselves and their allies in struggle” (Buechler 1993, 228). Underlying the model is the assumption that people always want to be part of something greater than themselves and part of a larger collective identity. Leaders thus communicate with and mobilize the masses by appealing to messages, images, and symbols. Some even argue that among all stages of the mobilization process, the most important component is the “social construction of a collective identity,” which is “symbolically meaningful” to participants of collective behaviors, and “logically” superior to any form of cost-benefit calculation in joining a movement (Buechler 1993, 228).
Through these frames, social movement activists “identify perceived injustices,” “articulate grievances,” “make rights-based claims,” and “interpret events and their own life experiences” (Risley 2014b, 709). Framing targets prospective participants, opponents, bystanders, and/or governing elites. Existing scholarship identifies three distinctive tasks of framing efforts. First, diagnostic framing “problematizes” (Cress and Snow 2000, 1071) an issue and “assigns blame” (Risley 2014a, 2) by identifying “who or what is culpable” (Cress and Snow 2000, 1071). Prognostic framing then offers tentative solution to the identified problem, and motivational framing shapes the rationale for joining the social movement primarily by “appealing to justice or morality” and/or emphasizing the problem’s “urgency and severity” (Risley 2011, 668; Cress and Snow 2000)[6].
By the 1990s, resource mobilization, political opportunity structure, and cultural framing were increasingly seen as elements of “a broader political process,” because none of them alone seems to suffice as a holistic explanation of social movements (Edelman 2001, 290). As a result, the powerful political process theory was born, taking all three explanations of political opportunity, mobilizing structures[7], and cultural farming into account when studying social movements.
Yet by the late 1990s and early 2000s, the hegemonic political process model is under attack by Goodwin and Jasper, who argue the theory contains an inherent structural bias that it only searches for invariant cases of social movements, neglecting the focusing events that fail to trigger social movements (2004). They also accuse the theory for ignoring the “diverse ways” that “culture and agency, including emotions and strategizing” help form and develop social movements (Goodwin and Jasper 1999, 27). As a result, a sophisticated psychological explanation based on early collective behavior theories but exceeds the limited grievances-centered approach begins to address “the emotions of social movements” (Goodwin et al. 2000, 65). These are all valid critiques on political process theory, and the evidence in this paper points to yet another possible weakness of political process theory, in its limited capacity to explain identity-based and anti-identity driven social and political actions.
Argument
The dependent variable of this project is the emergence or the absence of a social movement. The study’s independent variables are drawn from the three pillars of political process theory: political opportunity, mobilizing structures, and cultural framing. To stress the role different types of resources played in the movement formation, this paper substitute the mobilizing structures with earlier studies on resource mobilization. Political process theory endorses these three elements as absolutely crucial to the formation and development of any social movement. However, this paper will combine cultural framing with an identity-oriented analysis to reveal the important role Hong Kong’s unique identity played in mobilizing the movement. The argument of this paper is that the variable of cultural framing has the most explanatory power in identifying the causes of the Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong. By examining the empirical evidence regarding resource mobilization, this paper finds that multiple types of resources for the movement were either inadequate or mal-distributed. Some political opportunities were present and opened the window for the movement to emerge, but these opportunities were by no means new phenomena. The available political opportunities had been present for an extended period of time, and they were only mobilized recently by Occupy Central leaders to facilitate collective action. The leading activists managed to come up with effective diagnostic and motivational frames, primarily by manipulating the Hong Kong people’s sense of identity and creating an in-group versus out-group dynamic. However, they performed poorly on the constructive task of prognostic framing. The occupy leaders’ inability to erect a successful prognostic framework and to defend counter framing partially explained the failure of the movement in delivering intended results.