Hong Kong protesters shout ‘shame on you’ outside home of city chief
Ongoing rallies suggest televised dialogue between student leaders and the authorities has failed to ease tensions
Jonathan Kaiman in Hong Kong
The Guardian, Wednesday 22 October 2014 23.38 AEST
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A stand-off between Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters and police. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP
About 200 pro-democracy demonstrators have marched to the home of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing chief executive Leung Chun-ying, chanting slogans decrying his recent suggestion that democratic elections in the city would give too much voice to the poor.
At around the same time on Wednesday afternoon, demonstrators in the gritty district of Mong Kok, the site of violent clashes between police and protesters over the weekend, scuffled with a group of taxi drivers as they attempted to remove barricades blocking a major thoroughfare. In the early evening, one counter-protester attempted to pour paint thinner over the protesters’ supplies and set them alight before he was apprehended by onlookers.
The continuing demonstrations suggest that a televised dialogue between student leaders and government officials on Tuesday failed to ameliorate political tensions driving the so-called umbrella movement as it stretches into its fourth week.
Police did not interfere with the rally outside Leung’s residence, but waited in droves on side streets, riot shields and helmets at the ready. “Shame on you,” shouted the crowd, as it amassed at the gates of Government House, a stately British-built edifice on a bluff high above the central city.
“The government is trying to use legal reasoning to avoid political responsibilities,” said Avery Ng, 37, the vice-chair of the League of Social Democrats, a left-leaning political party.
Many protesters at the rally said the top official’s comments, in an interview with foreign media on Monday, confirmed their suspicions that the city’s pro-Beijing business elite have engendered a growing wealth gap in the city, fuelling economic discontent.
“You have to take care of all the sectors in Hong Kong as much as you can,” Leung told reporters, according to the New York Times, “and if it’s entirely a numbers game and numeric representation, then obviously you would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month … Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies.”
Protesters also voiced disappointment with the outcome of Tuesday night’s dialogue between student leaders and government officials, the first formal meeting between the camps and, perhaps, China’s first major public debate over democracy since the Tiananmen Square demonstrations roiled Beijing in 1989.
On Tuesday night, thousands of people gathered at three main protest sites – near government offices in the district Admiralty and on bustling commercial streets in Mong Kok and Causeway Bay – to watch a live broadcast of the dialogues projected on to big screens.
During the two-hour talk, five representatives from the Hong Kong Federation of Students, dressed in black T-shirts with the words “Freedom Now”, sat across from five suited government officials at a local medical university, reiterating their demand for “true universal suffrage” in 2017.
The city government – and its backers in Beijing – have mandated an electoral framework that would permit the city’s constituency to vote, but would allow only pro-Beijing candidates on the ballot. Protesters call the arrangement a “sham democracy”; the government has refused to back down.
The talks appeared more like a debate than a dialogue, as both sides dissected the role of special interest groups in Hong Kong politics and finer points of the city’s mini-constitution, the basic law.
Lam urged the protesters to take the 2017 elections as a start for achieving greater democratic freedoms, arguing that political reform would not happen overnight. She acknowledged that the protests were a “social movement of a very large scale”, and promised that the government would submit a report to central authorities detailing the events taking place in Hong Kong over the past month.
Lam also proposed establishing a platform for dialogues among Hong Kong political parties, to “help handle the long-term development of the city’s political system”.
Lester Shum, the group’s deputy secretary general, said protesters were forced to resort to civil disobedience after exhausting formal channels to express their demands. “Why would we sleep on streets? Why would we face pepper spray? It’s for our basic rights,” he said. “We hope that government officials would come out with courage and sincerity to face the public and solve political problems of your own making.”
The government made no promises, and the students remained sceptical about its overtures – at a press conference afterwards, student leader Alex Chow described them as “kind of vague”.
As the protests gathered steam on Wednesday, smooth-jazz saxophonist Kenny G, who recently completed a tour in mainland China, visited the protest camp at Admiralty, drawing a rebuke from the foreign ministry.
“In Hong Kong, at the sight of the demonstration,” tweeted the saxophonist, whose full name is Kenny Gorelick, above a photo showing him standing in front of pro-democracy posters. “I wish everyone a peaceful and positive conclusion to this situation”.
Chinese state media has repeatedly blamed the protests on “hostile foreign forces”, and warned foreign diplomats the issue was an “internal affair”.
Gorelick, whose music is ubiquitous in Chinese supermarkets, public squares and cafes, is the first foreign celebrity to provoke the Chinese government’s ire in connection with the demonstrations.
“Kenny G’s musical works are widely popular in China, but China’s position on the illegal Occupy Central activities in Hong Kong is very clear,” a ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said at a daily press briefing, according to Reuters. “We hope that foreign governments and individuals speak and act cautiously and do not support the Occupy Central and other illegal activities in any form.”
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