The Milk Tea Alliance as Internationalizing Protest

Abstract

The Milk Tea Alliance movement acted as a tacit alliance linking pro-democracy advocates uniting citizens across Asia. The loose collective is a reaction to authoritarianism, whether internal, as in the case of Myanmar’s civil war, or regional, as with the relationship between China and its neighbors. This loose ideological association uses social media to promote their message and collaborate with other democratic activists, transcending international borders. This analysis seeks to uncover whether the movement internationalized domestic protest movements’ solidarism to promote democratic values through mobilizing attention, amplifying popular cross-border opposition. Combing through Facebook’s corpus to temporally track participation behavior, this research questions whether the internationalization of domestic democratization movements represents instrumentalized exploitation of the popularity of trending hashtags, or rather represents a more integrative form of nonreciprocal solidaristic participation, potentially symbolizing the inculcation of universalist democratic values in an international protest movement that could outlive domestic opposition. The findings suggest that the majority of international participatory behavior occurred irrespective of the domestic state political situations of participants, and was therefore largely nonreciprocal. Thus, the Milk-Tea Alliance apparently represents a case of effective transnational solidarity.