ABSTRACT
On July 1, 2003, Hong Kong saw the staging of a spectacular street theater of “people power” with about 500,000 people alleged to be joining in a march to protest against the government. This episode, amidst a chain of mass mobilizations in 2002 to 2004, came to rejuvenate and reinvent a pro-democracy movement that had been in decline since the 1990s (Ku 2007). A sense of civic empowerment and solidarity was heightened in society giving rise to a selfcongratulatory discourse of a rising civil society. For a while, the idea of civil society not only appeared to carry new meanings, hopes, and possibilities regarding state-society relations but also held the promise of a participatory form of citizenship practice from below. Subsequent developments nonetheless also showed a society that was increasingly fragmented along class and ideological lines. In the process of reconstructing the meaning of the event, competing representations arose over who the chief protagonist was. The aim of this chapter, however, is not to examine the socioeconomic composition of the participants in the demonstration. Rather, it seeks to bring to light how the event, as it unfolded in the process, was endowed with particular social and political meanings in the way they were represented, contested, and developed in the public sphere(s).
