Umbrella Movement and everyday Utopianism: Hong Kong as a site of theoretical production

Abstract

The grand narrative of politics explains the immediate catalyst of the Umbrella Movement: Beijing’s denial of democratization in Hong Kong. But it does not provide contextualization for the actual cultural-discursive politics, habits and creative content of the occupy participants on a daily basis. Nor does it explain why the original Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) movement led and designed by the democratic old guards was not acted out as planned by the students and the ordinary people, who took the Umbrella Movement towards a different form and direction when they chose their preferred sites of action (the districts of Admiralty, Mongkok and Causeway Bay rather than Central) and took things into their own hands. Neither does it explain the cultural distance between the performative, leaderless, non-hierarchical, participatory and creative cultural politics of the Umbrella occupied zones, and the oppositional, bureaucratic politics of the student governments and the five-parties movement “leadership,” the spokespeople and coordinators of the movement – with Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism leading, and OCLP, democratic Legislative Councilors and civil society alliances in supportive roles. o fill this gap, this paper generates out of the context the thinking tools to help figure out: What kind of perceptions of reality and cultural logic do we actually see in the Umbrella Movement? In what contexts have these perceptions, cultural logic and habits emerged and developed over the years that are now brought on site? Why did the occupy phase of the movement end with the consensus that the next phase of the movement should “go back into the communities”? Based on long-term frontline participatory observation and analysis of Hong Kong social movements, this paper will contextualize the Umbrella Movement as Hong Kong people’s resistance to a dual set of biopolitics of control (by localizing Foucaultian concepts to a neo-colonial context): the indiscernable biopolitics of neoliberalization on the one hand, and the in-your-face biopolitics of mainlandization (China is called the Mainland in local parlance) on the other.