Introduction

This chapter examines how and why spontaneous events vividly transformed Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP), a planned, elitist civil disobedience campaign, into the spontaneous and popular Umbrella Movement. Mainstream literature regards spontaneity as either only important in the early stage of social movements, or impromptu, emotional, unplanned, and hence difficult to conceptualize. However, as Snow and Moss stipulate, spontaneity is “events, happenings, and lines of action, both verbal and nonverbal, which were not planned, intended, prearranged, or organized in advance of their occurrence” that routinely shape the occurrence, course, and character of protest events (2014: 1223). Flesher Fominaya (2015) also debunks this understanding of spontaneity by referring to how the evolution and maintenance of collective actions are path-dependent and conditioned by contingent events as much as by antecedent framing.

This chapter brings the idea of spontaneity to an examination of the dynamics of an occupation that is unparalleled both locally and globally. According to Snow and Moss (2014: 1122), the triggers of spontaneity involve: (1) an ambiguous moment; (2) emotional priming, (3) non-hierarchical organization; and (4) a specific ecological context—all intertwined in a movement. Unplanned and unintended contingent events are not an antithesis of rationality and organization. Instead, the Umbrella Movement shows that human beings can and do make conscious, on-the-spot decisions in the face of emotion and uncertainty. Spontaneity is thus pervasive and consequential in collective actions, and should be treated as a process rather than as a stage (Cheng and Chan, 2017).