Mandarin Forum

“Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow Taiwan” has been a popular slogan since two large-scale citizen disobedience campaigns resisted the growing encroachment from Beijing in 2014 (the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong), and emerged again in Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-extradition movement and Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election. This lecture will take a historical and geopolitical perspective to understand the contrasting results of prodemocracy movements in two territories. In particular, the lecture will focus on how civil society actors built and sustained a vibrant transboundary network in the past decade and how it facilitated broader change in identity and popular opinion.