Beliefs, strategic interaction, and Hong Kong’s anti-extradition law movement: A game-theoretic analysis

Given the information and beliefs about the possibility of repression, when will the civil society organize protests against the government? Under what conditions will the government repress popular protests? In this paper, I employ a novel signaling game to model the strategic interaction between the regime and civil society during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Movement in Hong Kong. I illustrate how information and beliefs influence whether the civil society mobilizes mass protests. Specifically, I examine how government actions shape the civil society’s beliefs about the government type, which in turn determine the protest turnouts and the government’s decision to repress.