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Space plays a vital role in structuring and forming social movements into particular shapes—especially via its physical settings, the representation constructed through dominant and alternative discourses, and protesters' spatial practices therein. Geographers and urban theorists have long argued that public space is of paramount significance to collective actions. Yet we know less about how a sustainable, manageable, and iconic public space for continuous movement mobilization is created. This article uses Victoria Park, an iconic public space of contention in Hong Kong, as a case to examine how a contentious political space is made. Through archival research, we demonstrate how the Defend Diaoyutai Islands Movement of the 1970s transformed the park from an "empty" recreational space to a political space. People's political actions made this transformation of the spatial order possible. Nonetheless, the British colonial government re-policed the spatial norms of the space, which in turn regulated both the government and protesters. The study affords significant opportunities for thinking about the spatial constraints of contentious politics.

Social movements are voluntary events whose participants have the right to leave whenever they disagree with their leaders. For this reason, the legitimacy of social movements is often perceived as inherent and thus of only secondary importance. This article aims to repudiate this view by demonstrating that legitimacy issues can impose constraints and have significant impacts on the relationships and decisions of the leaders of social movements. In the case of the Umbrella Movement, bottom-up legitimacy challenges to movement leaders' authority not only forced the leaders to reform their decision-making structure and even implement direct democracy, but also intensified the relationships among the leaders of different factions, ultimately undermining the leadership's overall effectiveness. (China Perspect/GIGA)

Abstract. Background: A surveillance system for self-harm has not been established in Hong Kong. The existing data source has an unknown degree of underreporting, and therefore a capture–recapture method has been proposed to correct for the incompleteness. Aims: To assess the underestimation of the incidence of self-harm cases presenting to hospital in Hong Kong using a capture and recapture method. Method: Two different yet overlapping hospital administrative datasets of self-harm were obtained from all public hospitals in Hong Kong. From 2002 to 2011, 59,473 distinct episodes involving 36,411 patients were identified. A capture–recapture model considering heterogeneous capture probabilities was applied to estimate the number of self-harm episodes. Results: The estimated number of self-harm incidence was 79,923, equally shared by females and males. Cases of self-harm by females were more likely to be ascertained than those by males. The estimated annual incidence rate of self-harm in Hong Kong from 2002 to 2011 ranged from 96.4 in 2010 to 132.7 in 2002. Limitations: The proposed method does not include patients who required no medical attention and those where the patient consulted private doctors. Conclusion: The capture–recapture model is a useful method for adjusting the underestimation of self-harm cases from existing databases when surveillance system is not available and to reveal some hidden patterns.

published_or_final_version ; Public Administration ; Master ; Master of Public Administration