Uphill Fight Ahead for Hong Kong’s Democracy Movement
HONG KONG — A pro-democracy march held Tuesday by a huge crowd of mostly young demonstrators underlined the determination of many of this autonomous Chinese city’s residents to preserve and expand the freedoms that they inherited from British rule. But it also brought to light more challenges that may lie ahead.
The protesters remained peaceful and did not resort to violence, which would have given the local government a pretext to respond much more firmly and probably would have hurt broader public support for the demonstration. But at an overnight sit-in that followed the march, the police also showed that they could efficiently remove and arrest 511 protesters in less than four hours — a brisk pace suggesting that they may be ready to respond to larger sit-ins that some democracy advocates are contemplating for later this year.
The calm and poise of the demonstrators Tuesday seemed to help reassure the business community that future protests would not severely disrupt commerce, resulting in a 1.55 percent rise in the Hong Kong stock market on Wednesday. But while the protesters disproved government warnings that their activities would lead to chaos, their civil behavior could also lead to an impression that they are manageable, which could limit the pressure they are able to bring to bear on the government for changes.
Hong Kong Challenges Beijing
On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people held one of the largest marches in Hong Kong’s history to demand democracy.
By Jonah M. Kessel, Alan Wong on July 1, 2014. Image by
The preponderance of young people among the demonstrators may also make it much harder, rather than easier, to reach any compromise with the local government and its backers in Beijing. The key question is who may run to become the territory’s chief executive in the next elections, in 2017. That issue was front and center for Tuesday’s march, as well as the subject of an informal vote last month in which nearly 800,000 Hong Kong residents participated, and which Beijing dismissed as illegal.
Students and people in their 20s have overwhelmingly supported a plan calling for the general public to be allowed to nominate candidates for chief executive — so-called civil nomination, an idea completely dismissed by Beijing and its allies.
By contrast, older Hong Kong residents have tended to support a compromise that would retain the nominating committee mandated by the Basic Law, the territory’s mini-constitution, but make that nominating committee more diverse and open to a wider range of candidates than Beijing wants.
Asked after a speech on Wednesday afternoon whether the political center was eroding in Hong Kong, Anson Chan, the second-highest official in the Hong Kong government in the years immediately before and after the British returned the territory to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, bluntly replied, “I have to say that I agree.”
Mrs. Chan, one of the most influential advocates of democracy here, noted that a key pro-democracy member of the city’s legislature, Ronny Tong, had even withdrawn his own plan for reconstituting the nomination committee, after concluding that support in the democratic camp for civil nomination was overwhelming. She said that she still favored a nominating committee with broad rules that would make it possible for a full array of candidates to appear on the ballot, not just those approved by Beijing.
She contended that such a procedural compromise would still make it possible to achieve full democratic goals.
“Hong Kong people have demonstrated that we want the whole loaf, not half a loaf, and we certainly don’t want a loaf rotten through and through,” she said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
Mrs. Chan noted that foreign countries and their citizens and companies in Hong Kong had a large stake in the issue as well. If the many individual and political liberties that define Hong Kong are eroded, then the city could eventually lose its separate, preferential status from mainland China for the purpose of many international agreements, covering everything from airline routes and international trade to taxes, cross-border investments and visa requirements, she said.
Michael DeGolyer, the director of the Hong Kong Transition Project, a 26-year-old coalition of academics who have been studying the territory’s political evolution from a British colony to a Chinese territory, expressed caution about whether Tuesday’s march had been large enough to change political calculations in Hong Kong’s government and in Beijing.
“It wasn’t this enormous, overwhelming turnout that everyone would be stunned by — it was big,” Mr. DeGolyer said.
Organizers estimated that 510,000 people joined the march, while the police calculated that the largest number of people simultaneously participating at any one time during the eight-hour march was 98,600. The police did not attempt to estimate the total number of participants.
The Hong Kong University Public Opinion Program estimated that 154,000 to 172,000 people had taken part in the march. Since 2003, a sizable pro-democracy march has been held every year in Hong Kong on July 1, the anniversary of its return to Chinese sovereignty; the turnout Tuesday came closest to rivaling that of the enormous 2003 march.
One lingering question Wednesday, after the police had removed and arrested participants in the sit-in, was whether future sit-ins would be as peaceful. A small but noticeable number of elderly residents and people in wheelchairs chose to participate; one of the many subthemes of the march had been a call for better social benefits for the elderly and the disabled.
The young protesters treated the elderly and wheelchair-bound protesters among them with respect and even deference, resulting in a calmer tone to the sit-in than most had expected. The police also treated those protesters with great caution, and reluctantly arrested them while showing a clear awareness that every move was being followed by numerous television cameras and cellphone cameras.
“Nobody wants to be a granny beater,” Mr. DeGolyer said later.
But the participation of elderly and disabled protesters at future protests is uncertain. At the same time, the police showed Wednesday morning a new willingness to formally arrest large numbers of people, not just carry them out of the downtown road they were blocking.
“This was not an illegal assembly; it was a peaceful and legitimate protest under international law,” said Mabel Au, the director of Amnesty International Hong Kong. “The police action was hasty and unnecessary and sets a disturbing precedent.”
The backdrop for the protest was an increasingly repressive political environment in mainland China, where detentions of human rights advocates and others have increased as President Xi Jinping has rapidly consolidated power. Some demonstrators in Hong Kong, particularly the limited number of older demonstrators, voiced an awareness that they were seeking a greater political voice at a time when the political climate, if anything, may be darkening.
“I just try my best by marching even though it may not be of much use,” Gary Fong, a 45-year-old metalworker, said during the march on Tuesday. “Who knows, this may be the last year that we will be allowed to march.”
No comments:
Post a Comment