The Religious Dimension of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Abstract

[The Umbrella Revolution] is a movement without a clear leader, one in which crowds of largely young people are organizing themselves and acting on their own, overtaking months of planning by veterans of the city’s pro-democracy camp.1 Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy, “Hong Kong Protests are Leaderless but Orderly,” New York Times, September 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/world/asia/in-hong-kong-clean-and-polite-but-a-protest-nonetheless.html?_r=0. The party-state is concerned by the fact that Protestants draw their moral compass from a transnationalized source outside its control. Prominent Christian involvement in Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, just across the border from the mainland, serves to exacerbate this sense of nervousness.2 Phil Entwistle, “Bypassing the Party-State? The Implications of Urban Protestant Growth in China,” China Monitor 30 (2015): 7, www.merics.org/en/redirect/pdf-china-monitor-nummer-30-en.html. The preceding statements by Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy and by Phil Entwistle are indicative of the highly diverging viewpoints about the organizational nature of Hong Kong’s Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) civil disobedience campaign, also known as the Umbrella Movement (UM). While Buckley and Ramzy described the OCLP/UM as secular and leaderless, Entwistle has pointed out that Christian leaders actually played a significant role in it. We agree that the aims of the movement were indeed secular, for its key demands included both universal suffrage for electing Hong Kong’s chief executive and constitutional reform aimed at making the territory’s parliament, the Legislative Council (LegCo), more representative. At the same time, the OCLP/UM’s most important leaders were religious people whose justifications for direct political action had religious origins. Despite differences among the various competing Christian religious groups—Catholic, Protestant, and Methodist—a significant ecumenical alliance of Hong Kong Christians supported the OCLP/UM. The movement thus had a religious dimension that needs to be acknowledged.