[The protests had no tangible success in forcing China to allow a more open election for Hong Kong’s next chief executive. But neither did China have any clear success in persuading the rising new generation in its wealthiest and most westernized enclave that they should passively accept China’s vision of what is best, as many of their elders have done.]
By Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher
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Police dismantled the remains
of the pro-democracy protest camp in the Admiralty
district of Hong Kong on Thursday. Credit Pedro Ugarte/Agence
France-Presse
— Getty Images
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HONG KONG — Constance So, a
slightly built university student, wept as she looked for a way past the
tightening ring of police officers closing in on the last of the sizable
protest camps in Hong
Kong.
With friends
urging her to avoid an arrest record, Ms. So, like many others, decided to give
up voluntarily. There was no violence, only a few defiant final stands and many
tearful goodbyes, as the nearly three-month Umbrella Movement disbanded.
“It was like my
home,” Ms. So said. “I’m leaving my friends behind. I feel like I’m betraying
them.”
For the Hong
Kong authorities and their superiors in Beijing, the peaceful
end to the protest is likely to be seen as a major victory. They repeatedly
rebuffed demands for a greater degree of democracy in this former British
colony, and defused the longest sustained political uprising on Chinese
territory in many years without a bloody crackdown.
Yet even in their
defeat, the protesters, most of them college students, left with a new sense of
political identity, a willingness to challenge the almighty power holders in
Beijing, and a slogan from a science-fiction film that many of them repeated as
they cleared out of the encampment in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district: “We’ll be
back.” (A sliver of a protest camp remains in Causeway Bay, a busy shopping
area.)
“We have learned
we have power when we are together and have enough people,” said Cat Tang, a
tall youth who showed up for the scripted final act wearing a menacing helmet
and gas mask, with safety pads on his limbs and a plastic shield on his right
arm. “Today, we don’t have enough people. But tomorrow, sometime, we can.”
The protests had
no tangible success in forcing China to
allow a more open election for Hong Kong’s next chief executive. But neither
did China have any clear success in persuading the rising new generation in its
wealthiest and most westernized enclave that they should passively accept
China’s vision of what is best, as many of their elders have done.
The intransigent
positions on both sides seem likely to last. Hong Kong, if subdued for now,
could well offer a continuing reminder, in an uncensored environment, of
thwarted hopes for greater rights in greater China. The protests have also left
the territory deeply polarized and trickier to govern.
“It means the
soldiers and generals of the future movement are there,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, a
longtime labor leader and pro-democracy lawmaker. “The young people have
awakened. This is really the gain of the movement.”
Solidarity with
the movement was on display as it ended. The police were forced to detain
dozens of the city’s pro-democracy A-list on Thursday afternoon, hauling
wealthy lawyers, prominent lawmakers, student leaders and a media mogul through
a phalanx of officers and onto waiting buses with barred windows.
The sight of
peaceful, sober-minded pro-democracy leaders among the 209 people arrested
during the clearance of the camp embodied a volatile new current in Hong Kong
politics, said Fernando Cheung, a democracy supporter who is a member of the
city’s Legislative Council. Many of those arrested, such as Martin Lee, the
founding chairman of the city’s Democratic Party and a Queen’s Counsel of the
British bar, were neither radicals nor given to confronting the police, he
said.
“It shows the
growing divisiveness,” said Mr. Cheung, seated under a canopy surrounded by
empty bottles, plastic sheets and other debris as the police cleared the site.
“Society in general will have to pay a large and growing price for that.”
A little later,
Mr. Cheung was arrested after refusing to leave the area of the encampment, on
a major road past the headquarters of the Hong Kong government.
For more than a
quarter-century, many of the same men, and a handful of women, have led
countless demonstrations with limited visible effect.
But the Umbrella
Movement did not only mobilize youth who had previously kept out of politics.
The long standoff also garnered an audience for more truculent groups,
including raucous online communities, who argued that escalating confrontation
with the authorities was the only way to break the will of the government and
win concessions.
At the same time,
the street protests may have had the unintended effect of increasing the job
security of the very person whose resignation the demonstrators called for
repeatedly: Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying.
“He does have
very strong backing from Beijing — they’ve found him someone they can really
work with in tough times,” said a person with close ties to the Hong Kong and
Beijing governments, who insisted on anonymity because of the continuing
political tensions.
He also said he
believed protesters’ vows that they would keep challenging the authorities. “We
will clear it, they will regroup, we will clear it again, they will regroup,”
he said. “But eventually, they will dissipate.”
Charlotte Chan, a
19-year-old nursing student, reclined on a sofa that had been used to block an
escalator leading to the government offices and said that even those who wanted
to keep up the demonstrations could see that they lacked broad support.
But Ms. Chan
predicted that students would soon rebound with new plans for civil action.
“This is the
start, the very beginning, and the pressure will accumulate — the next protests
will be more aggressive,” she said. “Those who claim political neutrality
cannot go on. You can’t pretend not to care.”
Some in Hong Kong
worry that the protests this autumn have harmed the long-term cause of
achieving greater democracy.
They fret that
Beijing has permanently transferred large numbers of security and intelligence
specialists to Hong Kong to keep a much closer eye on the Chinese Communist
Party’s many critics. Beijing, they say, could end up even more resistant to
further democratization in Hong Kong for fear that a hostile government might
be elected.
“This movement
has done more damage to the pro-democracy camp than anything in the last 17
years,” said Steve Vickers, who was a senior Hong Kong police official before
Britain handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, and who said he favored the
introduction of greater democracy.
Under the
British, and through the first 17 years of Chinese sovereignty here, the most
powerful political force has been the leaders of the city’s biggest businesses
— heavily Scottish at first, but now mostly Chinese families originally from
the neighboring Guangdong Province or from Shanghai. These tycoons have long
opposed increases in social spending, fearing they would lead to higher taxes
on them.
But the bruising
political battle with democracy activists has hurt the tycoons’ image and their
clout with top city officials and the Beijing authorities, people with a
detailed knowledge of Hong Kong’s policy making said.
To Beijing’s annoyance,
the tycoons were reluctant to criticize the protesters for fear that their own
businesses might be boycotted. One of the most politically active business
leaders, a real estate developer, James Tien,publicly
broke ranks in October with the administration’s support for
Mr. Leung and called for more negotiations with the protesters.
“The tycoons are
no longer a factor; their days are past,” said the person who works closely
with the Beijing and Hong Kong governments.
That may be an
overstatement: The tycoons have a history of hiring retiring senior civil
servants and keeping close personal relationships with government leaders. But
economic inequality and a lack of job opportunities for the young emerged as
potent issues this fall for rallying young people, prompting an active
government review of ways to address these issues.
The students and
other protesters vowed to keep the demonstrations alive.
Late Thursday,
more than 100 demonstrators gathered diagonally across the street from the
demolished encampment. They stayed on the sidewalk, not blocking traffic, and
shouted to wary police officers that they were engaged in one of Hong Kong’s
favorite pastimes, “shopping!”
