Framing, social cleavages and social media in social movement: A frame analysis of the Tsoi Yuen Resistance Movement in Hong Kong

This study examines framing processes in social movements and argues that framing strategies work best when they exploit the social and political cleavages in the society. Transformation of framing strategies, with the aid of the social media in the digital era, can facilitate mobilizations across a variety of groups of targets when social cleavages are echoed. Inspired by the framing literature, there are three overlapping framing processes—discursive, contested and strategic. This study attempts to investigate how movement actors strategically articulate and transform movement discursive frames so as to gain legitimacy responding to social cleavages in a social movement. Moreover, the role of the social media in generating culturally resonant counter frames to contest with the dominant frames constructed by the government and the mainstream media will be explored and discussed. To investigate the framing process, this study investigates a case of a resistance movement in ‘Tsoi Yuen Village’, a rural community in Hong Kong. In this movement, people rallied against the demolition of their community to make way for a regional express railway connecting Hong Kong to China. With the prolonged duration of struggle from Dec 2008 to May 2011, the movement constitutes a very extensive and instructive case for frame analysis as it evolves from an anti-eviction movement to a post-materialistic lifestyle movement in the later phases. This study contends that the activists have strategically constructed and transformed their movement's ‘injustice’, ‘democracy’ and ‘choice’ frames in various phase of the movement, so as to exploit the prominent social cleavages created through the unique colonial–postcolonial entangling situation in Hong Kong. The transformation of frames can successfully garner support from allies and the public by articulating post-materialistic values to challenge the dominant frames which uphold the discourse of capitalistic developmentalism established by the state. Moreover, the activists’ extensive use of the Internet has also turned this movement into an explicatory case for scrutinizing how frame contestations are affected in the digital era. This study will also look into media representations of various frames across the sampled mainstream media as well as its dynamics and negotiations of frames between the mainstream and online alternative media. In examining these framing strategies and contestations, content analysis, frame analysis, interviews and participant observations would employed in this study.