香港人「七一」大遊行，要求真民主
2014年07月02日
Vincent Yu/Associated Press
周二，抗議者參與了香港史上最大規模的遊行之一。
香港——一個巨大的人群，其中大多是年輕人，不顧北京對挑戰其控制的忍受程度正在減少，周二從香港最大的城市公園向城市中心開始了一個親民主的遊行。
1997年香港的主權歸還給中國後，每年在回歸紀念日都有遊行，今年的遊行是在近80萬居民參加了一次有關更民主地產生這個城市的行政長官的非正式投票之後舉行的，北京斥責非正式投票非法。此次遊行也在上月發佈的所謂白皮書之後，白皮書重申了中央政府在這個半自治地區的權威。
隨着示威者的人流源源不斷地從維多利亞公園和平地湧出，將一條西行的寬廣大道的多條車道充滿，大巴運來了更多的穿着鮮綠色背心的警察，作為增援。下午4點，警方停止了沿着大道中間行使的電車的運行，以緩解嚴重的擁擠，以前遊行時，警方避免採取這一行動，只是在2003年時這樣做過，那次是迄今為止香港發生的要求地方民主的最大的示威。
示威者開始離開維多利亞公園的一個多小時後，公園裡的六個水泥地足球場和附近的步行區仍到處是人，而且附近的一條街道上仍充滿了等待進入公園、加入遊行隊伍的人群。
7月1日是香港的一個公共假日，自2003年以來，在這天召集大規模的抗議活動已成為一種年度傳統，2003年曾有數十萬人參加遊行，抗議當地政府應北京的要求設立嚴格的內部安全條例。那些計劃很快擱淺，未曾再次出台。
據組織者稱，2003年遊行的參加者至少有50萬；警方則稱參加人數最多時是35萬。周二的遊行看來比6月4日的紀念天安門鎮壓事件25周年的守夜活動大得多，參加守夜的人數警方稱是99,500，但活動的組織者估計「超過18萬」。
還不可能馬上計算出周二遊行的參加人數是否與2003年的相當。與2003年的那次一樣，周二遊行的參加者非常多，以至於維多利亞公園已經裝不下他們了，示威者滲透到附近的街道中，這使得估計總人數變得更難。
主張民主的抗議者和這裡的由北京任命的政府近來都變得更加對峙。這讓許多人預測，某種形式的鎮壓不可避免，如果不是發生在周二抗議活動時，則可能發生在未來幾個月中。
示威者很年輕，他們比香港以前的抗議者對法律妥協有更少的興趣。同時，北京在當地的盟友也採取了更強硬的立場。他們已在響應中國大陸態度的變化，自從2012年11月上台以來，國家主席習近平在中國大陸逐步加大了對人權倡導者和其他活動人士的拘留和起訴行動，也加大了對據認腐敗的官員的打擊力度。
直到最近，公開提出人民解放軍可能會介入當地問題是政治上不可接受的，但是現在，某些北京的顧問已提出這種可能性。「攤牌已一天天地愈發不可避免，某種程度的暴力迫在眉睫，」劉迺強(Lau Nai-keung)說，他是北京在香港的最知名的支持者之一。「如果發生最壞的情況，人民解放軍必將會從其營房裡出來。」
劉迺強是基本法委員會的六位香港成員之一，基本法委員會在北京的全國人大常委會之下，負責制定與香港的基本法有關的政策。陳方安生(Anson Chan)曾在英國將主權歸還給中國之前和之後的香港政府中任第二把手，也是著名的支持民主的人，她說，不難想像少數激進分子也許會在周二遊行中製造暴力。但是她表示更多的擔心是，政府可能會在人群中安插挑釁者來上演暴力事件，希望以此改變公眾對民主求訴的支持態度。
她說，「我不排除親北京的勢力安插鬧事者的可能性。」
隨着遊行隊伍的出發，向維多利亞公園涌動的人群威脅要堵塞附近的天后和銅鑼灣地鐵站。許多是十幾、二十歲的年輕人，有些人舉着要求真正普選的標語。
幾個人說，他們為參加今年的遊行做了特別的努力，雖然在過去幾年中他們沒有參加遊行。「這是因為中央政府的所做所為，」一位20出頭的辦公室職員伊恩·曾(Ian Tseng)說。「那個白皮書，所有的事情，都讓我們不高興，」他說。
荃灣線地鐵在從九龍和新界進入港島的沿線有更多的乘客上車。以家庭為單位的人群，帶着背包，湧向維多利亞公園。
他們中有41歲的費梅（May Hui，音譯），帶着她10歲和15歲的兩個女兒，來參加遊行。她說，那份所謂的白皮書激勵了她參加今年的活動，為的是教給孩子們有關和平示威的東西。「這是我們的權利，」身為小學二年級教師的費梅說。「我要教給孩子們遊行是怎麼回事。」
「許多人都不滿意。」
香港的警察有能夠和平地管理巨大人群的全球聲望。美國聯邦調查局前任局長羅伯特·S·穆勒三世(Robert S. Mueller III)說，在他擔任局長期間，美國曾經向香港學習控制人群的方法。
周二的一件小事凸顯了警方對付抗議的外交手法。一個示威者跳上一個極為不穩定的鋼鐵障礙物，想把一個小橫幅掛到一個路牌上，一位女性警官和幾位同事穩住了示威者。他們抓住示威者的雙腿，確保她不會掉下來，然後樂呵呵地說服她在幾分鐘後爬下，並幫她下來。2003年的抗議活動顯著的一點是沒有人被逮捕，而且也沒有故意破壞和其他犯罪行為，如果有同樣大小的不滿人群在其他的大城市上街遊行的話，很少有城市能得到這樣的結局。在那次遊行中，就連像梵克雅寶(Van Cleef & Arpels)珠寶店這樣的奢侈品銷售商也沒有沒拉下遮擋他們窗戶的鋼百葉窗。
那次示威的參與者包括了各個年齡的人，這在相當程度上決定了示威的和平性質。許多2003年的抗議者，比如當年45歲的建築工人保羅·陳(Paul Chan)和67歲的裁縫莎拉·吳(Sarah Ng)，以前都沒有參加過示威活動，就連1989年針對天安門廣場鎮壓事件發生的香港大型抗議活動都沒參加過。
相比之下，香港現在的民主運動越來越多地由年輕人帶導，有時是特別年輕的人。
「我們認為，要改變社會，我們不需要用我們的言語求助於政客，而是要用行動來向他們施壓，」學生運動組織學民思潮(Scholarism)17歲的領導人黃之峰(Joshua Wong)這樣說。
各個政治派別的領導人一致認為，收入和財富的高度不平等、以及年輕人的經濟機會減少，看來增加了這裡的不滿程度。政府的統計數據顯示，今年春季的失業率在年齡為15到19歲的人口中達到10.9%，在年齡為20到29歲的人口中為4.6%。但是，許多批評者辯稱，實際的失業率要高得多。
一份當地報紙去年曾提供記錄表明，統計員的獎金是基於他們尋訪的人數數量，而且他們可能試圖說服人們不要說自己失業，因為那樣會延長訪談的時間。政府已開始檢查其使用的方法。
周二的抗議活動一大早就開始了，是在每年紀念主權回歸中國的升旗儀式上。在附近的一條街道上，有一小群人抬着一個黑色的棺材，棺材上有象徵著「一國兩制」方針死亡的標記，該政策讓香港享有高度的自治權。
在1984年與英國的雙邊談判中，中國承諾在1997年主權回歸之後，尊重香港的高度自治權。但是，在北京上月發表的所謂的白皮書中，中央政府掩飾了這一點，而是強調香港是中國人民共和國的一個地方單位，這一宣稱似乎激發了香港人對更多民主的支持。
北京曾說過，「可能會」在2017年的行政長官選舉中允許普選，普選指的是每個成年人都能投一票的制度。但是，北京已經明確表示要保持其審查什麼人能出現在選票上的能力。
倡導民主的人士在挑戰北京上該走多遠有分歧。像學民思潮這樣的組織在呼籲「民間提名」，也就是更廣泛的公眾能夠提名幾乎任何人。其他人、比如原香港官員陳方安生則呼籲更嚴格地按照基本法行事，基本法規定由一個提名委員會來控制能上選票的人，但是這些人提出，委員會應該具有一種構成，使其不把任何人排出在尋求當選之外。
目前，一個由北京的支持者佔主導地位的1200人的選舉委員會負責挑選行政長官，然後北京會任命這個行政長官，任期為五年。
另一個支持民主的團體「讓愛與和平佔領中環」(Occupy Central With Love and Peace)一直在威脅，要在今年晚些時候佔據香港市中心的街道，從事公民不服從運動，直到政府發佈有關更多民主的一個能被廣泛接受的方案。這個團體上月搞了一次投票，有近四分之一的香港註冊選民參與了投票，他們在三種方案中進行選擇，這些方案都包括民間提名。
「不是所有參加投票的人都會加入到公民不服從行動中來，但我覺得，所有參加了投票的人，至少他們同情運動，同情公民不服從行動，」佔中運動領導人戴耀廷(Benny Tai)說。「如果政府不肯認真考慮人們的要求，這群人中，有更多的人會從同情變為積極支持，同情行動的人也可能開始採取各種各樣的不合作行動，想想吧，如果整個社會拒絕配合的話，一個政府還能如何執政？」
非正式投票部分地通過網絡進行，它也成為一次大規模功擊的目標，攻擊用的是讓服務器拒絕服務的形式，發起進攻的組織者仍屬未知。壹傳媒的商務主管馬克·西蒙(Mark Simon)說，公司在周二也遭到來自網絡的重度攻擊，壹傳媒是一個支持民主的媒體集團，旗下擁有香港和台灣的報紙、電視和互聯網業務。
商業團體則因政治糾紛而左右為難，他們一方面受到來自政府的極大壓力，要發佈聲明譴責抗議者，另一方面則是公眾要求他們支持政治權利的呼聲。
德勤、安永、畢馬威和普華永道這些所謂的四大會計師事務所在當地的辦事處上周五在當地報紙上付費刊登廣告，廣告警告說，佔中運動可能會給香港的金融業帶來破壞。四家中沒有一家願意在周一發表評論。
另一份廣告則於周一出現在由壹傳媒出版的《蘋果日報》上。這份廣告由「四大事務所熱愛香港的一群職員」署名，廣告稱，「老闆的聲明」不代表他們的觀點。
傅才德(Michael Forsythe)，儲百亮(Chris Buckley)，Jonah Kessel, Hilda Wang和Alan Wong對本文有報道貢獻。
Huge Crowds Turn Out for Hong Kong Pro-Democracy March
July 02, 2014
Vincent Yu/Associated Press
Protesters participated in one of the largest marches in Hong Kong's history on Tuesday.
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.
- 查看大图
Dale De La Rey/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesProtesters waited unflinchingly and with barely a complaint amid intermittent tropical downpours to walk through downtown Hong Kong. - 查看大图
Vincent Yu/Associated PressA protester waves a flag of colonial Hong Kong, a gesture of rejection of mainland authority. - 查看大图
Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesActivists gathered in preparation for a pro-democracy march in Hong Kong on Tuesday, the same day as a public holiday marking the territory’s reversion to Chinese rule in 1997.
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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