Global to Village| Research as Communicative Praxis: Crossing the Urban–Rural Divide in Understanding Hong Kong’s Occupy Central Movement

Abstract

Nothing appears far removed from each other between the 2014 Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong as a global city and the concerns and aspirations of the residents of Heyang, an ancient village in the hinterland of Zhejiang province, China. However, through a journey of research as communicative praxis that starts with an analysis of the framing of the Occupy Central Movement by China’s People’s Daily and ends with my active engagement with residents in Heyang, both in terms of their understanding of the Movement and their own local situations, this study arrived at moments of unexpected empathy. When lived experiences of the economically alienated were connected, rural citizens in Mainland China could relate their own ongoing struggles with that of protesters at the Occupy Central Movement in profound ways translocally, despite the chasms between the urban and the rural, the global city and the rural hinterland in today’s China.