The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in China, history, art, sociology, political science, and related subjects.

Umbrella Uprising: A Visual Documentation of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests is edited by the Hong Kong designer, and artist Jeffrey Choy.

The 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests were a series of demonstrations against the Hong Kong government’s introduction of a bill to amend the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance in regard to extradition. It was the largest series of demonstrations in the history of Hong Kong.

They followed the 2014 Hong Kong protests, a series of sit-in street protests, often called the Umbrella Revolution and sometimes used interchangeably with Umbrella Movement, or Occupy Movement, occurred in Hong Kong from 26 September to 15 December 2014.

The protests began after the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) issued a decision regarding proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system. The decision was widely seen to be highly restrictive, and tantamount to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s pre-screening of the candidates for the Chief Executive of Hong Kong.

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the Hong Kong protests.

A Kickstarter page for the book project explained:

Umbrella Uprising an art project created by a team of London-based art lovers and activists. It aims to preserve and record artworks created throughout the Hong Kong Protests which started in June 2019. We have created an art book, ‘Umbrella Uprising: A Visual Documentation of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests’ to record this historical period through showcasing numerous artworks. […]

‘Umbrella Uprising: A Visual Documentation of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests’ is an archival project that collects posters, artworks and illustrations created in the event of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement since June 2019. The movement has witnessed a proliferation of creative energies during the protests for people in expressing their social and political concerns. This project collects over 500 pieces of artworks, and discloses the stories of Hong Kong protesters and their emotional struggles behind the movement, which are things that are not readily available from the traditional mass media. Through narrating the first 100 days of the movement with artworks and descriptions, the project aims to raise awareness on the current situation in Hong Kong, and to document how individual, smaller protests have evolved into a large-scale social movement that is still ongoing today.

The editors, designers, curators and artists engaged in this project are all volunteers, who do not obtain any financial gain from the project. After months of hard work and with you being part of our campaign, we would finally have the resources to further develop the project. The publication ‘Umbrella Uprising: A Visual Documentation of 2019 Hong Kong Protests’ is set to be released in Spring 2020. We are working with an anonymous publisher in the United Kingdom to publish the book, which will be distributed internationally. The money generated from book sales (after deducting the necessary operational costs) will be used to fund the remaining stages of this ongoing project, which includes: further developing the content of the book, printing more copies, and organising exhibitions in order to support Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. […]

This book is for audiences who are interested in exploring the role artists play in social movements. The book looks at the movement from a distance; it considers social movement as an arena in which one can observe what was previously neglected and invisible in motion.  Through such a process, the forgotten past can be rediscovered, multiple voices that were obscured in the political development can be revealed. We also target international audiences that have not had the chance to understand or participate in Hong Kong politics. We believe that the arts can be regarded as a cultural language that many people would like to learn. More importantly, it is a form of activism, which allows artworks or art objects to bring political and social issues to everyday life and continue the spirit of social movements. […]

Shipping certain rewards to mainland China may result in rewards being intercepted and not delivered. Further, the shipping information (both for the sender and recipient) may be discoverable by local authorities. If you’re living in mainland China, you are encouraged to not partake in this Kickstarter Campaign for your own safety.

An article posted in February 2024 on the website of the Foreign Policy Research Institute evaluated the results of how the protests were handled:

The reforms have returned Hong Kong to stability, but not to the vibrant job market it once enjoyed. The government issued about 2,600 work visas to overseas financial workers in 2021, down nearly 50 percent compared with 2019. According to the UN Population Fund, more than 140,000 residents of the Special Autonomous Region’s 7.5 million population emigrated from 2020 to 2022, mainly relocating in Britain, Canada, and Australia. Foreign professionals are among those who have departed, fearing for their safety, that of their clients, and their records under the National Security Law. In a three-month period, three British judges resigned from Hong Kong’s top court citing security law concerns. A fourth British citizen who was an ex-chief of the bar association left  after hearing he had been summoned by police. When the staff of a prominent human rights lawyer notified him that someone believed to be from state-backed media was waiting for him at his office he went straight to the airport, where a phalanx of people met him at the check-in counter asking questions like “are you leaving because you are a traitor?” The concern for personal safety is such that an American who served on the Manila government’s legal team in the suit against China over the nine-dash line will not even transit through Hong Kong’s airport.

There has been an exodus of foreign capital as well, exacerbated by the declining mainland economy. January 2023 saw what London’s Financial Times called a punishing sell-off by international investors. Foreign investors, who by the end of 2023 had sold about 90 percent of the $33 billion of Chinese stocks they had purchased earlier in the year, have continued selling this year.

Foreign tourism has decreased markedly. Tourism as a whole is still not up to pre-pandemic level, and in 2023 78.7 percent of those who visited came from mainland China. This is despite the government initiating a worldwide “Hello Hong Kong” campaign that year that included 500,000 free airline tickets and consumption vouchers.

Ignoring these metrics, Beijing and Hong Kong governments declare that the new National Security Law has made the Special Autonomous Region a safer place to do business. The city’s luster as the “Pearl of the Orient” has only been enhanced and any statements to the contrary are “sour grapes” by the West.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)