State reactions towards street protests in Hong Kong: a glance of the year of 2012

Abstract

Hong Kong is a city of protest (Ng 2008).By empirical data, this paper suggests the state tended to ignore most street protests occurred in 2012 in Hong Kong, making the majority of these demonstrations ‘fruitless’ in outcomes. While in some rare cases, the state did respond positively to protesters. With inabilities of existing literatures as well as protest nature and participant number of protests in explaining such patterns, this paper turns to a political regime approach as an alternative, arguing liberal authoritarianism operating in Hong Kong is the main reason for both low state responses and its responsiveness, and, to certain cases, positive reactions. Elements of liberal authoritarianism like absence of electoral competitiveness, a politics/administration dichotomy and a political culture created by existence of civil liberties in Hong Kong help to explain the complicated phenomenon. By doing so, the research aims to contribute to studies of governmental responses to protests with a different and new light.