ABSTRACT
Social movements are sustained by the continual participation of protestors, be they organized or otherwise. Determined participants are particularly important in decentralized or spontaneous movements. For example, Calhoun suggests that Occupy Wall Street did not have a natural end point. “Determined protestors can prolong it indefinitely, with new arrivals compensating for the loss of some exhausted participants.” 1 Determined protestors carry on with their activities for a simple reason – they have not achieved their movement’s goal. In the case of the Occupy Movement in Hong Kong, 40 days after the occupation in Admiralty, Wong Chifung, the convener of Scholarism, said that protestors had not expected to stay for very long during the first week when things happened so quickly. But by the second week, he was prepared to stay for more than a month. He admitted that protestors indeed wished to retreat because of the exhaustion of passion and physical energy. They chose to stay because of the reality that the Hong Kong government had no intention to solve the social conflict and to address popular grievances. He claimed that whether the protestors would retreat depended on whether they could come up with alternatives that would give them bargaining power after a retreat. 2 In other words, at least some protestors would not retreat if they were unable to find such alternatives.
