Review of “Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Protests”

Abstract

In the rise of authoritarianism, what can ordinary people do to resist the seemingly irreversible tide of state autocratization? The story of Hong Kong provides a global case for this question. In 2019, I stayed in a Hong Kong hotel interviewing “active” participants of street protests. Characterized by the ethos of “no big organization,” participants saw themselves as autonomous, spontaneous citizens rather than followers of a particular leader organization. Their coordination was based on online communication technology grounded in a decade-long fear of authoritarian encroachment. Ming-sho Ho’s extraordinary new book, Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Protests, examines and analyzes the fluid coordination of this anti-authoritarian resistance, aptly captured by Bruce Lee’s famous maxim, “Be Water.” The phrase—popularized by the Hong Kong-born martial-arts legend and Hollywood star—came to symbolize the protesters’ ethos of flexibility and resilience in confronting state power. With the assistance of a rigorous research team, Ho collected and analyzed an extensive dataset of 1,770 protest events, printed materials, 189 interviews, and both online and offline observations. Drawing on this rich material, he develops the concept of collective improvisation to explain how decentralized yet highly coordinated activism emerged without formal leadership or organizational hierarchy. Moving beyond journalistic romanticized portrayals of spontaneity, Ho argues that Hong Kong’s protesters exhibited an improvised rationality—a capacity to adapt, invent, and synchronize tactics under extreme repression.