By Keith Bradsher
HONG KONG —
Hundreds of thousands of people held one of the largest marches in Hong Kong’s
history on Tuesday to demand greater democracy, defying intermittent tropical
downpours and Beijing’s dwindling tolerance for challenges to its control.
A nearly solid river of protesters — most of them young —
poured out of Victoria Park through the afternoon and into the evening, heading
for the heart of the city. The sea of protesters showed their determination by
waiting unflinchingly and with barely a complaint for hours under a succession
of deluges just for their chance to walk through the skyscraper-lined canyons
of downtown Hong Kong , carrying banners calling for the introduction of full
democracy and “Say No to Communist China.”
The march came days after nearly 800,000 residents
participated in an informal vote on making the selection of the city’s top
official more democratic, a vote that Beijing dismissed as illegal. Tuesday’s demonstration also
follows the release three weeks ago by China ’s cabinet of a so-called white paper that asserted broad
central government authority over Hong
Kong , angering many residents
Tuesday’s march appeared to rival in size the largest
democracy march in Hong Kong ’s history, held in 2003 when the combination of the
outbreak of the deadly SARS virus and a six-year decline in the housing market
produced widespread discontent. The 2003 protest drew at least 500,000 people,
according to organizers, while the police estimated that 350,000 were on the
streets at the peak of that seven-hour march.
The organizers of Tuesday’s march initially said that
their gathering had exceeded the crowd in 2003, and later said that a million
of Hong Kong ’s 7 million people had participated. There was no
immediate estimate from the police.
The march stayed peaceful through the afternoon, but
tempers began to fray by early evening. The police accused the organizers of
not letting the front of the march move fast enough, but limited the march to
half of a six-lane artery through the middle of the city, trying to keep the
other side open for traffic and emergency vehicles. A rancorous crowd formed
after sunset near the Sogo department store in the retail heart of Hong Kong
island, demanding that the police open the other half of the road; the police
resisted and reinforced their ranks with three rows of officers.
July 1 is a public holiday in Hong Kong ,
and large-scale protests on the date have become an annual tradition ever since
the giant march in 2003, when hundreds of thousands marched to protest plans by
the local government to introduce stringent internal security regulations at Beijing ’s request. Those
In addition to rivaling the 2003 march, Tuesday’s event
was visibly larger than a vigil held June 4 to mark the 25th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square crackdown, which drew 99,500 people, according to the police,
and “over 180,000,” by organizers’ estimate.
Democracy protesters and Beijing-appointed government
officials alike have become more confrontational here recently. That has led
many to predict that some kind of a showdown is inevitable, if not in the
protest unfolding into the evening on Tuesday then in the coming months.
Demonstrators are younger and less interested in legal
compromises than Hong Kong protesters have been in the past. At the same time, Beijing ’s local allies have also taken a harder line. They have
echoed a shift in mainland China , where President Xi Jinping has ratcheted up detentions
and prosecutions of human rights advocates and other activists, as well as
allegedly corrupt officials, since assuming power in November 2012.
Any public suggestion that the People’s Liberation Army might
intervene here was politically unacceptable until very recently, but it is now
raised as a possibility by some of Beijing ’s advisers. “A showdown is getting more and more
inevitable by the day, and some degree of violence is imminent,” said Lau Nai-keung,
one of Beijing ’s most prominent allies in Hong Kong .
“If worst comes to worst, the P.L.A. will come out of its barracks.”
Mr. Lau is one of the six Hong Kong
members of the Basic Law Committee, a group under the National People’s
Congress Standing Committee in Beijing that sets policies relating to Hong Kong ’s
mini-constitution, the Basic Law.
Anson Chan, a prominent democracy advocate who was the
second-highest official in the Hong
Kong government in the years
immediately before and after Britain returned it to Chinese sovereignty, said it was
conceivable that a few radicals might cause violence during the demonstration
on Tuesday. But she voiced more concern that the government might plant
provocateurs in the crowd to stage violent incidents in the hope of turning
public opinion against democracy demands.
“I don’t put it beyond the pro-Beijing forces to plant
troublemakers,” she said.
As the march got underway, the crowds of people surging
toward Victoria Park threatened to clog the nearby Tin Hau and Causeway
Bay
Several people said they had made a special effort to
come to this year’s march, despite having stayed away in past years. “It’s because
of the actions done by the Chinese government,” said Ian Tseng, an office
worker in his 20s. “The white paper, everything, makes us all feel unhappy,” he
said.
As the protest began, the Tsuen Wan Line subway line
carried groups of families, everyone with a backpack, heading to Victoria Park.
Among them was May Hui, 41, who was taking her two
daughters, ages 15 and 10, to join the march, along with members of two other
families. She said the so-called white paper was motivating her to come out
this year to teach her children about peaceful demonstrations.
“It is our right,”
said Ms. Hui, a secondary school teacher. “I want to teach the kids to know
what a march is.”
“A lot of people are not satisfied,” she said.
The crowd joining the march from Victoria Park was a
sweating, sometimes cacophonous distillation of the complaints that many Hong Kong
people direct at their city government and its overseers in Beijing . Many held banners and shouted slogans demanding true
choice in elections. Occasionally, a flag of colonial Hong Kong
- a gesture of rejection of mainland authority — bobbed up above the crowd.
One member of the crowd, a
teacher who gave only his surname, Chin, said people understood the need to
defy Beijing by coming out in large numbers. “They say they won’t
listen no matter how many, but we think the more Hong Kong
people are on the street, the more the Chinese government will come around.
It’s a numbers game.”
He and four friends were busy assembling a banner
accusing Hong Kong officials of corruption. He said he did not want to give
his full name because he was a teacher and feared his school would be unhappy.
Moderate groups, including demonstrators like Mrs. Chan,
were among the first to march to the center of the city, and had said in
advance that they planned to go home upon arriving there. By contrast, radical
groups like the one known as People Power, with histories of scuffles with the
police, were hanging back in the park so as to arrive at the center of
government later in the evening.
The police here have a global reputation for managing
large crowds peacefully. A former director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III ,
said during his tenure that the United States had learned from Hong Kong ’s
crowd-control methods.
In an incident Tuesday morning that highlighted the
police department’s diplomacy in handling protests, a demonstrator who leapt
atop a rickety steel barrier to hang a small banner from a street sign was
stabilized there by a female police officer and several colleagues. They braced
the protester’s legs to make sure she did not fall, then cheerfully persuaded
her to climb down after several minutes, and helped her do so.
The 2003 protest was notable in that no one was arrested,
and there were no reported incidents of vandalism or other crimes — an outcome
that very few other cities could match if a similar-size crowd of dissatisfied
people took to the streets.
The peaceful nature of that demonstration was dictated,
to a considerable extent, by the participation of people of all ages. Many of
the 2003 protesters — like Paul Chan, then a 45-year-old construction worker,
and Sarah Ng, a 67-year-old seamstress — had never attended a demonstration
before, not even the large Hong
Kong protest in 1989 in
response to the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
By contrast, Hong
Kong ’s democracy movement now
is being steered much more by the young, and sometimes by the very young.
“We believe to change society, we need not our words to
appeal to politicians but to use activism to pressure them,” said Joshua Wong,
the 17-year-old leader of Scholarism, a student activist group.
Most luxury retailers in
downtown Hong Kong lowered steel shutters over entrances and windows ahead
of Tuesday’s march, while the Sogo department store sealed an exit from the Causeway
Bay
High inequality in income and wealth and a lack of
economic opportunities for the young appear to have increased discontent here,
leaders across the political spectrum agree. Government statistics show that
unemployment stood this spring at 10.9 percent for residents aged 15 to 19, and
4.6 percent for those aged 20 to 29. But many critics contend that the real
rate is much higher.
A local newspaper documented last year that census
officers were rewarded based on the number of interviews they conducted and
that they may have tried to persuade people not to say that they were
unemployed, because it would prolong the interview. The government began a
review of its methods.
The protests Tuesday began early in the morning, during a
flag-raising ceremony to mark the seventeenth anniversary of the return to
Chinese rule. A small crowd on a nearby road carried a black coffin, labeled to
signify the death of the “one country, two systems” approach that symbolizes Hong Kong ’s
high degree of autonomy.
Democracy advocates are divided on how far to go in
challenging this. Groups like Scholarism are calling for “civil nomination,” in
which the broader public would be able to nominate essentially anyone. Others,
like Mrs. Chan, the former Hong
Kong official, call for closely
following the Basic Law, which specifies that a nomination committee control
access to the ballot, but they want that committee structured in such a way
that no one is excluded from seeking office.
A 1,200-member elections committee dominated by Beijing loyalists currently chooses the chief executive, who is
then appointed to a five-year term by Beijing .
Occupy Central With Love and Peace, another pro-democracy
group, has been threatening to fill the streets of Hong Kong ’s
downtown later this year and engage in a campaign of civil disobedience until
the government issues a broadly acceptable plan for greater democracy. The
group held a vote last month in which nearly a quarter of Hong Kong ’s
registered voters chose to participate, selecting among three different
options, all of which included civil nomination.
“Not all of them
would join the civil disobedience action, but I would say that all of them, at
least they are sympathetic with the movement, with the civil disobedience
action,” said Benny Tai, the leader of Occupy Central. “If the government
refused to seriously consider the demand, this group of people, more of them
will change from sympathetic to active support, and the sympathetic people may
also start all kinds of noncooperative actions — and just think about how can a
government govern if the whole society refuses to cooperate with you?”
The informal vote was held partly online, and it became
the target of a large-scale attack, an Internet denial-of-service assault
organized by a still-unknown entity. Mark Simon, the commercial director of
Next Media, a pro-democracy conglomerate of newspaper, television and Internet
businesses in Hong Kong and Taiwan , said that the company came under heavy online attack on
Tuesday.
Business groups have been caught in the middle of the
political dispute, facing heavy pressure from the Hong Kong government to issue
statements denouncing protesters, but also calls from the public to stand up
for political rights.
The local offices of the so-called Big Four accounting
firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers — took out a paid ad on
Friday in local newspapers warning that the Occupy Central protest could
disrupt the city’s financial sector. Each of the four declined to comment on
Monday.
Another ad appeared on Monday in the newspaper Apple
Daily, which is published by Next Media. The ad was signed by “a group of Big 4
staff who love Hong Kong ” and said that “the bosses’ statement” did not represent
their views.
Michael
Forsythe, Chris Buckley, Jonah Kessel, Hilda Wang and Alan Wong contributed
reporting.
