Hong Kong Protesters, Despite Clashes and Setbacks, Remain Committed
By MICHAEL FORSYTHE and CHRIS BUCKLEYDEC. 1, 2014
Manni Ng, a film student, will soon have to tell her parents about her involvement in the protests, something she has been avoiding because of their opposition to the movement. Credit Eric Rechsteiner for The New York Times
HONG KONG — Manni Ng has stayed with Hong Kong’s protest movement from the start, boycotting her classes, sleeping in a tent on a city street, even cleaning up garbage. But after an attempt by the demonstrators to surround the city government complex failed over the weekend, she is wondering how to continue.
Ms. Ng, like many of the student protesters here, will soon have to tell her parents about her involvement, something she has been avoiding because of their opposition to the movement.
More important, she and thousands of other young people have learned firsthand just how daunting it is to go up against the highly organized, uncompromising Communist government in Beijing. And now, polls show waning sympathy for the students among the general public.
But in some ways, her life is much richer than it was before demonstrators took to the streets here in late September, and the changes suggest that the citizens of Hong Kong may be able to sustain a protest movement for years, if not decades.
In two months, Ms. Ng has formed the most intense friendships of her life, she has shed her previous view of the city as a “cruel place” after seeing the generosity and selflessness of her fellow protesters, and she has vowed, at age 22, to keep pressing for democracy in the former British colony, even if it takes a lifetime.
“I’m very worried about this place, but I don’t know what can I do,” Ms. Ng, a film student at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, wearing a black hoodie, black-rimmed glasses and braces on her teeth, said on Monday. “I know the opportunity for success is small, but this movement has shown that we are powerful and this place is ours — maybe we can take a little rest and one day we’ll be back.”
The demonstrations, now in their 10th week, may soon reach a finale as the police increasingly whittle away at the main protest area and as students, pro-democracy lawmakers and sympathetic academics wrangle over how to proceed.
In the early morning on Monday, the police began their most aggressive incursion in two months, clearing demonstrators from a pedestrian bridge that spans the heart of the protest area.
After that setback, the thousands of people who took part are thinking about what comes next. In interviews, demonstrators spoke of the resilience of the movement and of an organizational prowess built on grass-roots volunteerism. But they also expressed a newfound realization of how arduous their fight may turn out to be.
In many ways, the protest movement is back where it was on Aug. 31, when China’s legislature laid out strict terms for elections in Hong Kong. Pro-democracy activists say those rules ensure that only candidates acceptable to Beijing will be able to appear on the ballot for the city’s top job, the chief executive.
That decision led to the protests, originally called Occupy Central, which were meant to pressure the Hong Kong and Chinese governments into changing the election guidelines so that pro-democracy candidates could have a chance to run for the office.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Since then, the governments in Hong Kong and Beijing have made clear that the decision, by the National People’s Congress of China, is not negotiable. President Xi Jinping, speaking last month at a news conference with President Obama, called the protests illegal.
“The fact is that the movement is going down,” said Jack Pun, 47, a professional commercial translator who for over a month has operated a stall at the protest site in the Admiralty district that hands out postcards with pictures and ink stamps illustrating the movement’s ideals. “It’s very hard to maintain such a large movement for such a large time. It would be better to bring it to an end by ourselves.”
A surge of support for the movement after the police fired tear gas on the protesters in late September has faded. A poll conducted by the University of Hong Kong and released in mid-November found that almost 55 percent of people surveyed opposed Occupy Central and that more than four in five wanted the demonstrations to end. The poll of 513 people was conducted Nov. 17 to 18 and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
Still, Mr. Pun, like many other demonstrators, said the events of the fall had given him new confidence.
“It’s very hard to believe that you have the courage to resist the police,” he said. “Nobody ever imagined so many things about our movement. Nobody ever imagined that our movement would be represented by an umbrella.”
Nikki Lau, a 34-year-old assistant film director with cropped hair dyed flaming red, has been among the volunteers supporting the protest site since it sprang up on Sept. 28. After a worsening bout of fever that began 45 days into the occupation, she has come less frequently. Already petite, she estimated she had lost about 15 pounds.
“I had no idea I could go this far,” she said. “None of us did.”
Ms. Lau said the two months of protest had transformed the views that many Hong Kong residents, including her, had about the city and its people’s capacity for defiance. “It’s Hong Kong people giving civil disobedience a whole new definition.”
She said that the main lesson that many ordinary residents had come away with was that they could speak out. “That’s never been a problem for me, but for a lot of people that’s been something to learn,” she said.
But, she added, “There’s also a dark side to this — to see that politics are never easy.”
“We don’t know why they don’t talk to us, why there’s so much behind closed doors,” she said, referring to the government. “I’ll remain involved in the movement, but also looking at the big picture of how long it’s going to take.”
Benny Tai, a law professor who helped plan the movement more than a year ago, said that after the decision by China’s legislature, what was needed was a movement that could endure for years or decades, much like the American civil rights movement.
Ms. Ng, the student, said she was ready for just such a protracted struggle. She knows the odds, but she also knows how much the effort has helped reshape her life.
“This is a lifelong movement,” she said. “We cannot give up. Because we belong to this place. If we want this place to be well, we cannot just leave it.”
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