In a comprehensive and theoretically novel analysis, Take Back Our Future unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The essays presented here by a team of experts with deep local knowledge ask: how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience?

Take Back Our Future argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The contributors outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, Take Back Our Future demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles. She is author of The Specter of Global China.

Ming Sing is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is author of Hong Kong's Tortuous Democratization.

Take Back Our Future marks a timely and necessary scholarly intervention that addresses both the internal movement dynamics and the wider structural contradictions that led to the rise and fall of the UM, allowing us to reflect on its theoretical and practical implications for Hong Kong and beyond. The volume's interrogation of the why and how of collective action in a hybrid regime marks a strong contribution to social movement studies.

Eli Friedman, Cornell University, author of Insurgency Trap:

Take Back Our Future is a wonderful collection of essays focused on 2014's Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. This collection will likely become a definitive statement on one of the 21st century's most spectacular moments of social unrest.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine, co-author of China in the 21st Century:

Take Back Our Future is an exceptionally strong and convincing edited volume that does an excellent job of situating the struggle in the literature on social movements and contributes to the development of theory.