HONG KONG - Last January, Benny Tai, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, wrote a column in a local newspaper raising the idea of using street blockades to press the government for more democratic elections. He said the action might last a couple of days. The idea eventually spread under the rubric Occupy Central and later mutated into a student-led movement that became a monthslong affair, even outlasting Mr. Tai himself, who turned himself in to the police last week.
But all that is about to end. More than two months after protests erupted outside the local government headquarters in late September and the police failed to disperse them with tear gas, the police said they would enforce a court order to clear the last major encampment of the protesters, in the Admiralty district, starting Thursday morning and reopen the area to traffic.
On Wednesday evening, high-rise buildings sparkling with Christmas lights flashed festive messages above the rally grounds that have been home to hundreds of colorful tents. While the protesters' numbers paled in comparison with the early days of the occupation, many came out to visit the site before the police action set to start the next morning.
Nelson Li, a social worker, was one of the many who visited the site for one last time, and like many parents he brought along his child.
'I want to let him witness the protest himself, to take photos of it with his phone, rather than just watching television at home,' Mr. Li said, showing his 10-year-old son a wall of messages posted on the gate outside the city's Legislative Council building.
'Their generation will be very different from ours,' said the 38-year-old father. 'They have a stronger desire for equality and justice, and are more willing to step up and say it.'
At one of the many supply stations, volunteers were packing up the face masks, goggles and helmets they had stockpiled over the past two months of sporadic confrontations with the police or protest opponents. Some were left over from another major protest site, in Mong Kok, that the police had cleared recently.
The protesters had been calling for changes in the rigid framework Beijing has imposed for the election of the semiautonomous Chinese city's next leader, in 2017. But the government has granted no concessions.
'So far, the movement has not really won us anything,' said John Pau, 21, a model and volunteer at a supply station by a pedestrian bridge above a multilane thoroughfare outside the government complex. 'But I know Hong Kong will be better off because of it.'
Although student protest leaders said they would not retreat on their own despite the warnings from government officials and the police, they were conscious of the imminent demise of their encampment and urged protesters not to put up a fight.
Alex Chow, secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, said at an evening news conference that protesters should adhere to their nonviolent principles, that they should neither 'resist nor retaliate,' during the police clearance.
'And we want to remind the government that the clearance will not solve the social problem,' he said.
Mr. Chow and Joshua Wong, the 18-year-old leader of another prominent student group, Scholarism, said that protesters would assemble near one edge of the protest site in areas that are not under a court injunction to be cleared, and that they would coordinate with other groups. Democratic legislators have said they would await arrest in the same area on Thursday.
'I am sure before the legislature votes on the government's proposed election changes, there will be another occupation protest,' Mr. Wong said in an interview.
After two months of the government refusing to yield on the proposed election rules, which the protesters say ensure that only Beijing-backed candidates will be nominated, and increasingly forceful police operations to remove the protesters, Mr. Wong said that the government has 'lost the whole generation of about 0.7 million high school and university students.'
Jimmy Lai, a newspaper publisher and supporter of the protests, said that despite the failure of the street blockades to persuade the government to grant more open procedures for the 2017 election, the protracted protests would leave Hong Kong a better place.
'The movement means a lot because first we discovered that the young people are very determined and courageous in fighting for their future, which we never knew,' Mr. Lai said.
'Anybody who thought in the short-term that we would have anything were very naïve,' he said. 'I think it's just the beginning.'
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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