ABSTRACT
The dispute over the Public Order Ordinance in 2000, which involved a campaign of civil disobedience against the law, represented the first major conflict over civil rights in the aftermath of the right of abode saga in post-handover Hong Kong. This chapter analyses the conflict from a discursive-dramaturgical perspective, highlighting the relative fluidity within the field of possibilities and constraints. It takes the Public Order Ordinance dispute in 2000 as the first major test case of civil conflict in the shadow of the right-of-abode struggle. In analytical terms, the dispute constituted an instance whereby the boundary of civil autonomy was tested through the interplay between state power and citizenship practice and between discourse and dramaturgy. In the first stage of the Ordinance dispute, the government defined the protesters as non-law-abiding citizens, but the opposition discourse managed to gain sway, and it soon developed into the successful performance of civil disobedience.
