Mapping the Transnationalisation of Social Movements Through Online Media: The Case of the Milk Tea Alliance

Abstract

Social media plays important positive and negative roles in Southeast Asia’s ongoing struggle with autocratic trends. Political imagination, values, and norms are being transformed via online movements including the Milk Tea Alliance (MTA). Milk tea—a customary regional beverage—has become a reference for transnational youth activist culture. The MTA hashtag played a significant role in mass protests in 2020–2021, especially in Thailand and Myanmar, generating a 25 million hashtag count on Twitter. In this chapter it is argued that online transnationalism has affected protest norms, by promoting youthful activism, as well as a more inclusive ethno-geographic reach. While the MTA hashtag use may wax and wane, it will remain relevant for rights activists in the region, to voice political concerns in the face of state repression.

This chapter looks at online media’s role in protest in Southeast Asia through the Milk Tea Alliance (MTA), an online transnational social movement.¹ Protest in the digital age faces domestic pro-regime pressures, encouraged by the rise of China’s power in the region. By mapping the online Asian pro-democracy movement MTA via three case studies of street-cum-online protest events, this chapter offers insights on how the transnationalisation of social movements through online media has affected protest norms. The MTA hashtag (#milkteaalliance)² emerged in early 2020 and was dubbed a “Pan-Asia Alliance” by Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong. The hashtag “(was) used 11 million times in (its first twelve months), and on the first anniversary of its Twitter debut, the social media platform has given it an emoji… a white cup and straw on a tri-colour background, reflecting the regional shades of tea” (Kuang & Handley, 2021).

MTA could boast a 25 million hashtag count on Twitter over 2020–2021. Recent MTA activity on other channels includes around 2100 videos and 245 channels on Youtube; “639.000 people are posting about this” on Facebook, 74,530 posts on Instagram, and 6,9 million views on Tiktok.³ Despite statist repression and appropriation of cyberspace, MTA pages broadcast the Myanmar diaspora marching in Thailand on May Day and International Women’s Day in 2022, while events on the ground in Myanmar were grim with electricity and internet cut-offs, artillery shelling, and mass population displacement. Sympathy with Ukraine is at the time of writing displayed alongside reminders of China-related geopolitical issues such as Tibet. Twitter has been used to build and hone collective narratives, to share movement information, and to mobilise offline protest activities.

This empirical and comparative research blends quantitative and qualitative analysis, including insights from activists and close observers, supplemented by analysis of the content of MTA accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and other selected channels. Engaging with literature on the challenges of transnational movements in Asia, it adds to the small but growing body of literature on transnational social movements and social media in Southeast Asia with reference to Twitter hashtags, including Sinpeng (2021), Sombatpoonsiri (2021a, 2021b), and Phoborisut (2019) on Thailand, and Sastramidjaja and Rasidi (2021) and Sastramidjaja and Wijayanto (2022) on Indonesia’s Omnibus Law tussle.

The perspectives from a dozen Southeast Asia-based direct and close observers were gathered via semi-structured phone and online interviews between February and April 2022. The interviews took their starting point in MTA statistics compiled for this study, including those for three protest events: (i) Thailand’s anti-establishment protest of October 2020, (ii) Myanmar’s February/March 2021 anti-coup protest, and (iii) Malaysia’s July 2021 #Lawan protest. Several activists were also interviewed.⁴ They were asked how transnationalisation and the MTA have affected the norms of protests: their modus operandi or interaction with social media channels, use of the MTA and other hashtags, the demography and geography of protests segments, and how alliance networks transform demands and ideas.

#MilkTeaAlliance’s Evolution

Notable recent international hashtag campaigns include #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #FridaysForFuture. In Southeast Asia, #MilkTeaAlliance has garnered so much prominence that Twitter created a special emoji for it. Starting with a Thai versus Chinese nationalist “tweet off,” it built on already brewing discontent towards the Thai government. The MTA movement was launched, with linkages to a sweep of pro-democracy initiatives in the region. Chan (2020), a Hong Kong democracy activist, argues that the MTA “also indicated an ongoing frustration in the region regarding China’s influence and actions that affected less powerful countries on the ground level,” and the need for an alliance to strengthen their position.

Literature on the #MilkTeaAlliance campaign highlights its popularity in Thailand and Myanmar. The hashtag emerged in April 2020 after Chinese nationalists attacked Thai actor Vachirawit “Bright” Chivaaree for “liking” an image that referred to Hong Kong as a country, a vitriol that later spread to target Thai model and Chivaaree’s partner Weeraya “Nnevvy” Sukaram, who had implied Taiwan’s sovereignty about three years beforehand, in a 2017 Instagram post. Thai netizens defended the duo, engaging in a meme war which divided netizens into two broad groups: pro- and anti-Chinese authoritarianism (Temby, 2021). #Nnevvy surged to 3.7 million mentions in late March 2020 and also triggered Chinese sensitivities on speculation about Covid-19 (Khor & Sharif, 2020). China’s Global Times reported that on its Twitter-like Weibo, hashtags related to a call for a boycott of Thailand and its products were used 1.4 million times with more than 4.6 billion views (Yuqiao, 2020). Chinese netizens reacted against Hong Kong pro-democracy protests (Shih, 2019), and engaged in counterproductive taunting of Thais, described in detail by Schaffar and Wongratanawin (2021). Were some even arguing for Thai cultural identification above ethnic Chinese ties by hashtagging that “#Milk Tea is thicker than blood”? The Chinese Embassy in Thailand (2020) statement on 14 April 2020, referring to the One China principle, “no sin” in the Covid-19 virus origin, and recognising the long and special kinship of “China and Thailand as one family,” triggered inordinate attention (20,000 comments and 12,000 shares on Facebook).

During the April–May 2020 genesis of the MTA movement, the count for #Milkteaalliance came to about 0.8 million. From April 2020 to November 2021, the hashtag garnered over 25.2 million mentions globally (Fig. 7.2), including 9.1 million mentions in seven countries: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Thailand and Myanmar recorded 2.5 million and 4.5 million mentions, respectively. With attention having shifted to other struggles, MTA at the time of writing, in September 2022, seems to toil on with a basic level of grassroot support, particularly in Thailand. The count of Twitter and Facebook followers for selected geographies stood at at least 250,000 (global, Thailand, Myanmar and Malaysia pages totalled, from Table 7.1), in early 2022.

Table 7.1 Selected indicators for the Milk Tea Alliance (MTA) by country/region, May 2022

From its inception, the MTA hashtag became a “catch all” for direct and indirect regional gripes about China. For example, early on, MTA was hashtagged in the context of worries about the Mekong Dam impacts and territorial water disputes (Chan, 2020). The hashtag has since come to take on further meanings. Figure 7.1 provides a snapshot of related hashtags topics in May 2022. Table 7.1 then overviews recent and past usage of Twitter and Facebook MTA pages. In summary, the Myanmar MTA pages focus on domestic issues of Junta rule; the Thailand MTA pages have anti-China undertones and champions solidarity with other MTA allies, whereas the Malaysian MTA pages were found to focus on a wide range of issues. The global MTA pages support pro-democracy movements in many places, including in countries outside the region, such as Cuba and Iran.

Fig. 7.1

Related hashtag topics for MTA, the first week of May 2022 (Data Mostly Twitter, online news, and blogs, accessed via Talkwalker. Note Related hashtag topics are not edited, including some misspellings and seemingly unrelated links arising from actual online user errors)

Fig. 7.2

#MilkTeaAlliance weekly mentions (mostly Twitter) by country, Apr 2020–Nov 2021 (Data Twitter, online news, and blogs, accessed via Talkwalker)

State Repression and Transnational Activism

The MTA  movement has transformed into a social phenomenon of protest-sharing in Asia, especially amongst youth in Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Myanmar. Noteworthily, given that its original purpose was to defend a Thai celebrity couple from Chinese cyberattacks, protesters rally to express support for pro-democracy campaigns also regarding countries other than their own (Potkin & Tanakasempipat, 2021; Nguyen, 2021; Leong, 2020). The MTA movement provides an illustration of the drastically changing landscape of political activism spearheaded by youth, particularly the use of social media and pop culture references, to express dissent. This is a far cry from past protests during similar political polarisation, such as Thailand’s Red Shirt Movement, which was primarily led by older cohorts (Lee, 2021a, 2021b; Schaffar & Wongratanawim, 2021).

“Cross-group cooperation in social movements ranges from loosely organised and temporary to highly formal and long-lived,” writes Wiest (2010), pointing out that coalitions are hard to build and that those that are transnational have added complexity. Impediments to transnational social movements include cultural and political diversity, distance, economic barriers (to the easy flow of people, goods, and information), and varying political contexts. For Wiest, regionalism (with an institutional framework as a common ground for activism) is an integrating force, while “variation in political contexts may present the toughest challenge... not only for domestic movements acting locally or nationally, but also for those seeking transnational affiliation. In authoritarian state contexts, the obstacles to mobilisation are immense. At the same time, state antagonism may provide the greatest impetus for transnational collaboration as activists seek allies in the international arena.” Ford (2013) notes that regardless of whether activists and organisations operate locally, nationally, or are embedded in transnational activist networks, “almost all imagine themselves to be engaged in a struggle against the state, which is simultaneously seen as enemy and potential ally in the struggle for social change.”

Social activism in Southeast Asia is often a struggle against the autocratic state (Ford, 2013). Bünte (2020) points out that democracy has been an exception in Southeast Asia, where authoritarian systems of government have been dominant. Furthermore, authoritarian regimes have learnt to use social networking platforms for their own ends, so that “social media is furthering polarization and distrust in Southeast Asian societies, often based on disinformation campaigns and growing sectarianism” (Bünte, 2020). Khoo (2017) asserts: “Despite the differences in their political structures, the Southeast Asian countries share one common trait, that is, the existence of state repression, in which it brings threat to the civic space in the region.”

It is in this context that the MTA campaign has taken shape, as a form of transnational protest against repressive Southeast Asian autocratic states understood to share Chinese support as a commonality. In a typical statement, a regional political economist interviewed towards this research (Interview D, personal communication, February 24, 2022) thus remarked that China and authoritarian regimes in ASEAN are working together. “On the ground, protests in Hong Kong and Myanmar have caused elites in these places to coordinate. It is a contestation of state versus society and very dominant states are in collusion with each other. What happens on the ground now? How does society find alliances to challenge states allied against them? The Chinese government knows how to control the web and curb grassroots and societal alliances, which are becoming more transnational due to the rise of the web.”

Myanmar Leads, Thailand Supports, and Malaysia Lags with MTA Hashtags in Protests

I will now turn to examine the transnational impact on protest norms at three key events: (1) the October 2020 Thai anti-establishment protests; (2) the February/March 2021 Myanmar anti-coup protests; and (3) the July 2021 anti-government #Lawan protest in Malaysia.

The top-line hashtags from aggregate statistics (daily hashtag count, mostly from Twitter) are summarised in Table 7.2. These show that both the Thai and Myanmar protests made large-scale transnational outreach efforts with #WhatisHappeningin[country] the top hashtag for each, while the Malaysia protest remained domestically oriented. Internet and social media populations and user rates are also shown in Table 7.2. The Thai and Malaysia cases had sharp narrow spikes: the Thai top hashtag peaked at over 6 million mentions per day, while Malaysia had a 120,000 per day peak which was sizable in its context.⁵ Myanmar had a long tail of hashtag activities, reflective of its string of crackdowns.

Table 7.2 Social media indicators for case study countries, Jan 2022

The 2020 protest event was led from Thailand, but enjoyed notable support from Hong Kong. Schaffar and Wongratanawim (2021) note that the MTA debates in 2020 “were muted from two sides. On Sina Weibo, inside the Great Fire Wall, a free debate on the issues discussed under the #MilkTeaAlliance never unfolded,” and in June 2020, Twitter deleted about 23,750 accounts that were highly active. According to Twitter, this was a core network of pro-Chinese Communist Party influencers, with 150,000 amplifier accounts, which were also deleted (Twitter Safety, 2020). Thus, we can only speculate what a fuller-scale Twitter tussle might have looked like.

In 2021, the MTA phenomenon was dominated by Myanmar, at the same time as MTA’s global reach skyrocketed. Hashtag statistics for February to December 2021 record almost 22 mn mentions (see Fig. 7.3).

Fig. 7.3

#MilkTeaAlliance’s mentions by country (Data Twitter, online news, and blogs, Feb–Dec 2021, accessed via Talkwalker. Notes (i) VPN tagging to US and Singapore likely clouds true origins. (ii) Light-grey wedges for the US [12.8 mn mentions] and Europe [UK, Germany, France; 1.2 mn mentions], dark grey for North Asia [Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan; 600 k mentions], and mid-grey for Southeast Asia [6.4 mn mentions, of which 4.9 mn in Myanmar]. Total: 21.8 mn mentions)

Myanmar represented a quarter of the count, Thailand merely 3%, while the share of other countries in the region was even lower. Interestingly, during the first quarter of 2021, MTA Singapore weakly but significantly echoed Myanmar’s protest of February/March 2021. Just as the mentions marked as originating from the US, UK, and elsewhere, this comprised Myanmar’s diaspora, Myanmar netizens whose locations are masked, as well as international sympathisers: what is unknown is the respective share of each group. Mentions originating from EU member states, UK, US, Canada, and Australia are unsurprising given the sanctions and restrictions they imposed on Myanmar, and active civil societies in these countries. Examining granular Twitter data, Wang (2021) found important US influencers following the MTA closely.

The long tail of events in Myanmar following the 1 February coup meant that the global MTA hashtag count grew during the first half of 2021: in February to March it came to just over 7 mn mentions, and in April–June it reached nearly 14 mn. Mentions then dropped. The peak number of mentions for #MilkTeaAlliance dropped during the July 2021 protests that took place in both Thailand and Myanmar, and MTA hashtag activity nosedived thereafter. This coincides with changes in the political scene in Hong Kong, including national security prosecutions, an exodus from the Legislative Council (Legco), district councils and political parties, and restrictions on the media. The Hong Kong SAR government demanded that society should stand up against unauthorised protest, and not collude “with foreign forces” (Human Rights in China, 2022), arguments also rehearsed by Southeast Asian governments. Unsurprisingly, these efforts of authoritarian camaraderie poured cold water on the MTA movement regionally. At the same time, a large wave of Covid-19 infections hit. Indeed, a Myanmar activist (Interview D, personal communication, February 24, 2022) pointed out that this period saw a raging wave of Covid-19, affecting many households who were left without public medical support, while the Junta’s repression turned more deadly.

State controls, including soaring telecommunication charges, coupled with the raging Covid-19 pandemic, made online and offline protest more difficult from mid-2021 onwards. Myanmar citizens shifted to other modes of nationwide civil disobedience, including silent strikes, flash protest, and mass non-attendance of schools. A youth activist (Interview C, personal communication, February 24, 2022) spoke of their plight, explaining how the 2021 coup had created a shared sense of struggle between disparate groups, that had also found expression in the MTA:

We are in a war. There is armed conflict across the entire country… There are unlawful military actions. People are arrested without warrant. Our ethnic areas faced 17 years of this kind of horror and war crimes. But we didn’t even know it. The junta’s psychological war put the plain and urban people against the ethnic people…. People believed they [the ethnic minorities] were terrorists; and we could not see their struggle. The February 2021 coup unified our people.

A Thai activist interviewed in March 2022 (Interview H, personal communication, March 2, 2022) commented that despite the relative quiet, political dissent remained strong, just not overtly expressed on the streets as people were similarly coping with the arrest of activists, inflation, and the Covid-19 pandemic. The MTA hashtag was also used by pro-regime activists to propagate pro-regime and pro-China perspectives on issues such as China’s presence in Thailand and the relationship between the Thai and Chinese militaries (Interview H, March 15, 2022, personal communication).

In contrast to the transnational references of MTA protests in Thailand and Myanmar, in Malaysia, such transnational references were played down in connection with the July 2021 #Lawan protest. The organisers turned to the Hong Kong 2019–2020 protest for guidance on how to run rallies during a pandemic. However, there was apprehension that drawing too much inspiration would result in the #Lawan protest being politically linked to the youth arm of the opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP). Indonesia was seen as a more appropriate model than Hong Kong (Interview B, personal communication, February 24, 2022). Indonesian human rights activists generally do not use the MTA hashtag for domestic issues—though some use the three finger salute. Rather, the use of MTA in Indonesia tends to be a sign of internationally oriented solidarity, including for Myanmar and Ukraine (Interview K, personal communication, April 1, 2022). Another observer noted that Malaysian youth are ambivalent towards the MTA, with some believing it to be pushing too far by calling for regime change (Interview E, personal communication, March 1, 2022). Overall, the youth informants seemed to agree that transnational references would detract from Malaysia’s domestic protest agendas.

Changing Protest Norms

MTA, as a hashtag movement, is hard challenged to maintain momentum. Several factors may plausibly account for the decline in mentions since mid-2021. These include (1) domestic turmoil exacerbated by the coronavirus; (2) exhaustion following a year of mobilisation efforts; and (3) more recent demonstrations targeting local political issues and not framing these around China (Schaffar & Wongratanawim, 2021; Wang, 2021). There are also concerns that the movement, to a large extent driven by resentment towards China, is hampered by pro-China elites, including in Thailand (Chia & Scott, 2020; McDevitt, 2020). Moreover, the movement seems to lack concrete offline tools to facilitate demonstrations and further the agenda beyond the virtual realm (Sombatpoonsiri, 2021a).

However, even as the use of #MilkTeaAlliance as a hashtag has waned, there is still some optimism that the pro-democracy spirit of the movement remains—and is expressed via other hashtags—until a future event may prompt supporters to unify under the MTA again (Schaffer, 2020). Activists also note that MTA remains a convenor for transnational activism. Wang, examining Twitter data, argued in 2021 that: “… the #MilkTeaAlliance movement is far from over. It is not just an emoji on Twitter but remains an important symbol and hashtag for mobilising a cross-national democratic movement in 2020 and beyond… the alliance now emphasises more a call for liberal democracy rather than geopolitics.” Thus, an activist interviewed in February 2022 (Interview C, personal communication, February 24, 2022) asserted that the #MilkTeaAlliance movement was still alive and well in Myanmar. The activist stated: “I don’t use #MTA every day, but whenever there is a protest or strike or events in an alliance country. I expect MTA members will stay in solidarity until we are all free. MTA will keep against the Chinese Communist Party regime’s authoritarian actions in alliance countries. Our future depends on how we act to liberate and help each other in times of need.”

Others agree that MTA has had a lasting impact in terms of placing domestic struggles in a transnational frame. In the words of one activist in early 2022, “Things have gone more local for a few months, but the youth movements will cross-pollinate and the Myanmar issue is compelling and resonates across ASEAN” (Interview L, personal communication, March 7, 2022). Similarly, in an interview, Thai youth leader Netiwit (Chotiphatphaisal, 2022) spoke of MTA as a cross-promotion of causes, with Thais able to protest in front of the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok on behalf of others. Thanks to the MTA, Thais now feel that they are living in the same community, and share the same aspirations, as those facing state oppression elsewhere.

Transnationalisation has impacted the norms of recent protests in Southeast Asia. While the MTA hashtag online campaign has energised and linked regional protest activists, it has a different level of reach in each country: ranging from minimal in the case of Malaysia’s domestically focused protest movement (Khor & Sharif, 2021) to extensive in Myanmar. Where MTA has been particularly active, notably in Thailand, it has successfully influenced public perception to the degree that the state has sought to appropriate the hashtag with pro-China narratives. The MTA campaign is led by youth who seek to be less divisive than the older generation of pro-democracy activists. They target a more inclusive cross-ethnic demography, in particular, in Myanmar where the urban population and plain-dwellers have identified with rural ethnic minority populations. MTA has been hugely successful in engaging Asian youth on serious political issues. It is hard to predict what might trigger the next pan-Asian tweet off or cyber tussle, but the ongoing organisation of MTA groups suggests that they will be ready to participate.