ABOUT THIS BOOK

During the eventful summer of 2019 in Hong Kong, the Be Water Revolution formed to resist the proposed extradition of fugitives to mainland China’s courts. With its name derived from martial arts master Bruce Lee’s adage to be “formless and shapeless like water,” the movement turned out to be the city’s largest episode of contentious politics and was unique for using impromptu communication among participants and the absence of central leadership.

In Be Water, Ming-sho Ho examines the dynamics of the city-wide uprising from the perspective of agency power. He seeks to understand how numerous and anonymous Hongkongers contributed to this epoch-making campaign as well as how they responded to the full-scale state repression that enveloped them. Ho praises and questions the durability of the inventive Be Water Revolution and how the activists encouraged protests spontaneously, through interpersonal networks and by voluntarily collaborating with strangers at great personal risk.

Ho posits a new concept of “collective improvisation” to make sense of such a decentralized yet creative way of protesting. Be Water seeks to understand the rise and long afterlife of this movement and illustrate its efficacy. As Ho shows, these dynamics of collective improvisation have implications for contemporary protest movements around the world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ming-sho Ho is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and a Researcher at the Taiwan Social Resilience Center at National Taiwan University. He is the author of Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan's Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement (Temple) and Working Class Formation in Taiwan: Fractured Solidarity in State-Owned Enterprises, 1945–2012.

REVIEWS

“Ho’s extraordinary new book, Be Water, examines and analyzes the fluid coordination of...anti-authoritarian resistance.... Ho argues that Hong Kong’s protesters exhibited an improvised rationality—a capacity to adapt, invent, and synchronize tactics under extreme repression.... Be Water stands as both a rich empirical study and a conceptual advance in the sociology of collective actions. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in social movements, authoritarianism, digital mobilization, and East Asian politics.”—Social Forces

"Be Water is both a powerful chronicle of Hong Kong’s largest protest movement and a sobering meditation on the limits of leaderless resistance.... [Ho] asks whether collective improvisation is the ultimate form of modern protest or merely the most beautiful way to lose.... Be Water thus becomes not only a history of Hong Kong’s uprising but also a field manual for activists elsewhere, and a warning about the limits of decentralized protest in a digital panopticon. This duality is what makes the book so compelling.... Ho has done more than analyze a protest. He has illuminated the paradox at the heart of modern movements: that the same tactics that make resistance possible may also foreclose its future."—Ethnic and Racial Studies

"The author takes us fluidly through a journey in which the data either challenge or complement existing perspectives on emotions and moral outrage, high-risk activism, leaderless movements and spontaneity, performances and repertoires, diaspora mobilization, and post-mobilization trajectories. In this way, the book is as fluid as the movement it aspires to capture…. Be Water remains an impressive account of the fluid and complex characteristics of the anti-ELAB protest wave."—Mobilization

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

A Note on Romanization

Introduction

1. Evolving Protesters

2. The Logistics of Networked Militancy

3. Flowers Blossoming Everywhere

4. Performing a New Community

5. Global Fronts

6. Postmobilization Activism

Conclusion

Appendix: Research Methods and Data

A Glossary of Protest Phrases

Notes

References

Index

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