HONG
KONG — A huge throng of people, mostly young, began a pro-democracy
march Tuesday from Hong Kong’s largest urban park to the heart of the
city, defying Beijing’s dwindling tolerance for challenges to its
control.
The
march, held each year on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to
Chinese sovereignty in 1997, comes days after nearly 800,000 residents
participated in an informal vote on making the selection of the city’s
top official more democratic, an exercise that Beijing dismissed as
illegal. It also follows the release last month of a so-called white
paper that reasserted the central government’s authority over the
semiautonomous territory.
As
a nearly solid river of protesters poured peacefully out of Victoria
Park, moving down the westbound lanes of a broad avenue, buses brought
dozens of additional police officers in bright green vests as
reinforcements. At 4 p.m., the police closed the streetcar lines that
run down the middle of the avenue to relieve severe overcrowding — a
move that the police had resisted taking in past marches, but allowed
during the one in 2003 that has been Hong Kong’s largest demonstration
for local democracy until now.
More
than an hour after the demonstrators began leaving Victoria Park, its
six concrete soccer fields and nearby walking areas remained full of
people, and a nearby street was still completely filled with people
waiting to enter the park and join the protest.
July
1 is a public holiday in Hong Kong, and large-scale protests on the
date have become an annual tradition since 2003, when hundreds of
thousands marched to protest
plans by the local government to introduce stringent internal security
regulations at Beijing’s request. Those plans were soon shelved and have
not been revived.
The
2003 march drew at least 500,000 people, according to organizers; the
police said it peaked at 350,000. The march on Tuesday 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.
But
it was not immediately possible to calculate whether the turnout
Tuesday rivaled that in 2003. Tuesday’s march, like the one in 2003, was
so large that it spilled out of Victoria Park and into adjacent streets
in ways that made the total number harder to estimate. Organizers and
the police did not have an immediate 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
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.
Publicly
suggesting 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 subway
stations. Many were in their teens and 20s, some carrying posters
demanding genuine universal suffrage.
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.
The
Tsuen Wan Line subway route was picking up more passengers as it
approached Hong Kong Island from Kowloon and the New Territories. Groups
of families, everyone with a backpack, were heading to Victoria Park.
Among
them was May Hui, 41, who was taking her two daughters, aged 15 and 10,
to join the march. 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.”
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 that highlighted the police’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. Even luxury retailers like the Van Cleef
& Arpels jewelry store did not pull down steel shutters over their
windows during the march.
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.
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 the annual
flag-raising ceremony to mark the 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.
China
had pledged in a bilateral agreement with Britain in 1984 to respect a
high degree of autonomy in Hong Kong after the 1997 handover. But in the
so-called white paper released by Beijing last month, China’s cabinet
glossed over that and emphasized that Hong Kong was a local unit of the
People’s Republic of China — an assertion that appears to have fanned
support here for greater democracy.
Beijing
has said that it “may” allow universal suffrage, the principle of one
vote for each adult, in the next election for chief executive in 2017.
But Beijing has made it clear that it wants to be able to vet those who
appear on the ballot.
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 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.
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