ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes student and youth activism by using the examples of anti-national education policy movement in 2012, the Occupy Central Movement in 2014, and the rise of localist interest groups since 2015. It aims at exploring the ways that student and youth activism has developed and how they affected the governance of the HKSAR. Student and youth movements target public policies, constitutional issues, protecting the local interests, and questioning the future of Hong Kong. This rising tide of youth activism has been led by student and youth groups which have several characteristics, such as the popular use of social media in mobilization over political issues. In 2011, the formation of a new youth group, Scholarism, caught the media’s attention. Together with the Hong Kong Federation of Students, they had successfully forced a withdrawal of the government’s moral and national education curriculum in 2012. The Occupy Central Movement in 2014 further witnessed the mobilization of both Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students through social media. But a rising force of localist interest, and even pro-independence, groups has taken root and exerted tremendous pressure on the Hong Kong government. This has changed the political landscape of Hong Kong.
