In 2019, the Hong Kong government proposed an amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance (Cap. 503), which introduced a new “special surrender arrangement” between Hong Kong and mainland China. The legislation has led to a months-long citywide collective action, namely the ANTI-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (or in short ANTIELAB) social movement. In early September 2019, the government withdrew the bill, but widespread discontent towards both the local and central governments and the Hong Kong Police Force persisted, with protests and assemblies continuing throughout 2019. The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 largely put an end to public demonstrations.
The 2019 Hong Kong movement has drawn global attention and continues to do so. Researchers around the world, ranging from political scientists, sociologists, communication studies to even public health scholars, are interested in a variety of aspects of the movement. They seek reliable data resources to support their work and prefer citing original and academic sources. With this demand in mind, the ANTIELAB Research Data Archive was established by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong to provide an open access repository of reliable research data related to the ANTIELAB social movement.
As of 1 May 2020, the archive offers the following data:
Timeline
Timeline provides bilingual versions of the event timeline: Chinese Timeline and English Timeline. It traces the origin of the legislative amendment since 2018, the whole debate of the amendment bill in the first half of 2019, and the social movement in the second half of 2019. Our research team referenced and consolidated different timelines produced by the media and other parties. On top of these, we added additional information to the Timeline by searching local news reports related to the movement via the WiseNews search engine. All major events are recorded and categorized, including responses of various stakeholders in the local and international communities, reactions of the Hong Kong and Chinese Central governments, protests, and assemblies. Original documents, such as public statements, official letters and voting records, are also linked to the related events.
Mobilization Map
The Mobilization Map shows locations of 1,097 events promoted on four Telegram channels: 反送中文宣谷, 777文宣傳播稿件大合集, 香港人日程表整合頻道 and 民間人權陣線資訊頻道 from 16 June 2019 to 27 April 2020. Using text mining techniques, events were identified by extracting text containing date, time, and locational information from messages in these channels. The locational text was converted into WSG84 coordinates using the Google Geocoding API and Places API. For marches and human chain-forming events, the approximate path was generated using the Google Directions API and displayed on the map. For other events, locations that were within 200 meters apart are represented as one circle on the map.
Teargas Map
The Teargas Map shows locations where teargas was fired as reported on the official Telegram channels of eight media organizations and 84 other Telegram channels operated by protesters or political organizations from 12 June 2019 to 21 March 2020 (full channel list here). Using text mining techniques to extract locational text, published date and time from messages mentioning the firing of teargas, 2,523 instances of teargas being fired were identified. The locational text was then converted into WSG84 coordinates using the Google Geocoding API and Places API. Locations that were within 200 meters apart are represented as one circle on the map.
Poster Search Engine
The Poster Search Engine allows for text inside the movement posters to be searchable. In total, 23,366 posters were collected from two major movement publicity Telegram channels: 777文宣傳播稿件大合集 and 反送中文宣谷 until 23 January and 18 January 2020, respectively. The text inside the posters were OCR-extracted by Google Docs, tokenized, and indexed. OCR errors were corrected by a team of Cantonese-speaking human editors who understand the context. Key movement-related terms (listed in Glossary) were added below each poster as hashtags to facilitate user navigation from one to a large set of related posters.
Glossary
The Glossary consists of a list of Chinese terms or short phrases extracted from the Telegram channels related to the social movement. It includes frequent use of hashtags and those the research team considers to give contextual background for researchers who have little knowledge about the movement and the local language. These terms are translated into English and categorized according to their nature (editing of English translations ongoing).
Statistics
The Statistics page contains charts showing the demographics and law enforcement information (including sex, age, occupation, legal status, charges etc.) of arrested and charged persons in the movement. Most of the figures are collected from the Hong Kong Police Force via the Code of Access to Information.
Research Team
Gary Fong
Dr. King-wa Fu (Email: kwfu@hku.hk)
Elgar Teo
Acknowledgement
With generous support from
To cite us in publications:
ANTIELAB Research Data Archive. (2020). Retrieved from https://antielabdata.jmsc.hku.hk/