Protesters set up a first aid station on Tuesday in Hong Kong. Participants said the movement's attention to hygiene, good manners and trash sorting as well as its self-organized medical teams helped send a message of determination.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times
HONG KONG — They sleep by the thousands on what are normally the busiest boulevards of this crammed, nonstop city. They live on crackers, bananas and bottled water. They clean up their trash, even taking the time to pick out plastic and paper for recycling. Their shield of choice, andthe symbol of their cause, is the umbrella: protection against the sun, rain — and pepper spray used by the riot police.
The pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong appeared headed for a showdown with the authorities on Wednesday, with larger numbers expected over a national holiday and some organizers threatening to escalate the conflict by seizing government buildings. Yet it has been a diligently clean, exceedingly polite and scrupulously peaceful insurgency, one that supporters are calling the Umbrella Revolution.
“An umbrella looks nonthreatening,” said Chloe Ho, 20, a history student distributing apples, chocolate and wet towels on a six-lane downtown expressway occupied by protesters. “It shows how mild we Hong Kong people are, but when you cross our bottom line, we all come out together, just like the umbrellas all come out at the same time when it rains.”
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The protesters' shield of choice, and a symbol of their cause, is the umbrella: protection against the sun, rain and pepper spray fired by riot police officers.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York
Hers is a movement without a clear leader, one in which crowds of largely young people are organizing themselves and acting on their own, overtaking months of planning by veterans of the city’s pro-democracy camp. The spontaneous, grass-roots nature of the protest is one of its strengths — it has adapted quickly and seized the momentum from the government — but it may also make it difficult for the movement to accept any compromise that the Chinese government might be willing to offer.
The mass sit-in — and for hardier participants, sleep-in — in several of Hong Kong’s key commercial districts has presented the Chinese leadership with one of its biggest and most unexpected challenges in years. The protesters are demanding the right to elect the city’s leader, or chief executive, without procedural hurdles that would ensure that only Beijing’s favored candidates get on the ballot.
China’s state-run news outlets have depicted the protests as the handiwork of a conspiracy aided by the West to topple the Communist Party. But what leaders in Beijing and Hong Kong face is something even more alien to party thinking: an amorphous movement that does not answer to any particular individual or agenda.
“The strengths of these protests are that it’s so decentralized, so first of all you can’t crush them through arresting the leaders,” said Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong who has monitored the demonstrations. “The weaknesses are, of course, that there could be confusions and splits as the situation quickly develops. So far it has worked remarkably well, but it might not further along the way.”
Tensions in Hong Kong over election rules built for months and reached a peak on Friday, when students stormed past the police and occupied the forecourt of the Hong Kong government’s headquarters. The standoff there drew more protesters who gathered outside, growing into a noisy carnival of disgruntled residents calling for democracy. On Sunday afternoon, however, the police moved in with tear gas.
The televised spectacle of students scattered by tear gas triggered an outpouring of anger against the Hong Kong government that drew tens of thousands onto the streets on Sunday night. On Monday, the crowds were even larger, and they grew again on Tuesday.
The protesters have commandeered city buses, using them as bulletin boards for signs and messages. They have built barricades from bamboo scaffolding and borrowed cars to fend off possible police incursions.
The city maintains an independent judiciary, and residents enjoy greater civil liberties than residents of mainland China. Hong Kong has a robust tradition of free speech.
Democratic groups say Beijing has chipped away at those freedoms, citing an election law proposed last month that would limit voting reforms.
The current city leader, Leung Chun-ying, has clashed with the pro-democracy opposition. After the crackdown on protesters Sunday, some called for his resignation.
“I came here because I don’t want to lose my Hong Kong,” said Bo Au-yeung, 20, a saleswoman at a clothing store who had volunteered to run a supply station. “I don’t want Hong Kong to be the next China.”
The society that has sprung up on the baking-hot roads has already developed its own rhythms. The days begin mostly with university students, retirees and middle-class office workers who have taken time off or been given leave by sympathetic bosses.
In the evenings, as temperatures cool and the workday ends, the crowds expand and become more diverse. Teenagers do their homework on the streets. And then the die-hards settle in for the night, sleeping under the skies on newspapers or foam before heading home in the morning for a shower and a nap.
“We want to stay clean to show that we are normal citizens fighting for our democracy,” said Billy Chan, 21, a computer science student who was heading home on Tuesday morning to wash up.
Other supporters arrived in the morning, saying they wanted to ensure that crowd numbers remained strong enough to ward off the police and impress those watching through the many television cameras. Joe Tang, an 18-year-old student wearing a black T-shirt decorated with a yellow ribbon, the uniform of many protesters, said he was a little embarrassed to seem so idealistic.
“It sounds stupid, but I came for liberty and democracy,” he said, as he prepared to hunker down for a day in the hot sun under an umbrella.
Many participants in the Umbrella Revolution acknowledged that their movement could well fail, scattered by a fresh police crackdown or just petering out. But many also said that their street movement, with its fastidious attention to hygiene and good manners and signs apologizing for “causing inconvenience” to other residents, was more than a reflection of Hong Kongers’ neat ways.
The trash sorting, constant speeches from megaphones and self-organized medical teams send a message of determination to leaders, and the world, they said.
A look at the fears and motivations driving the anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong.
Video by Jonah M. Kessel and Mona El-Naggar on Publish DateSeptember 30, 2014. Photo by Bobby Yip/Reuters.
“With such a big area, if the waste is not handled well, it will cause hygiene problems and increase disorder,” said Chan Sau-ching, a 21-year-old medical student, who was helping sort trash. “In this protest, we want to show our citizenship and our will to have a democratic government. Although this cleanup is a small thing, it is something that shows the values that all Hong Kong citizens should have.”
The people of Hong Kong are such obsessive users of their smartphones that subway stations broadcast reminders for commuters to look up from their devices and watch where they are walking. Now, protesters are using smartphones and social media to share news and rumors about the protests, and form impromptu organizations that keep the crowds clean, fed and healthy.
Alex Au Yeung, 25, a student at the City University of Hong Kong, uses the WhatsApp messaging service to coordinate staffing at first-aid tents set up around the protest zones. After responding to injuries from tear gas and pepper spray over the weekend, the medical volunteers now treat people suffering from the heat as well as the cuts and scrapes that come with sleeping on a highway.
Supplies, too, are coordinated online, through Facebook pages and Google documents that list what is needed, and where: bottled water, packaged snacks, face masks and umbrellas. At the Methodist House, a church complex near the main sit-in, volunteers sorted donations that were then carted half a mile to the protest area. By Tuesday, the storage space at the building was full, and volunteers were turning away donations.
Jeff Chan, a movie cameraman who had just spent two hours sorting trash, said he and about 200 other members of Hong Kong’s film industry had thrown themselves into supporting the protests. Cameramen, production and post-production units each had separate tasks. He said his motivation for cleaning trash was very simple: “I just can’t stand to see garbage.”
The gatherings seemed to share some common elements with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011, which attracted thousands of protesters to an encampment in a Lower Manhattan park. As in Hong Kong, the Occupy protesters eschewed a traditional leadership hierarchy but forged an ecosystem all their own, often organizing their own medical care and food distribution.
Both protests were also galvanized by televised images of clashes with law enforcement. In New York three years ago, video of a police commander pepper-spraying a group of protesters contributed in elevating Occupy from the relative obscurity of its early days to an international spectacle.
In Hong Kong, by Tuesday night the crowd of protesters in the Admiralty neighborhood had swelled to even greater numbers than before, and crammed, sweating bodies stretched to Central, the next subway stop. The demonstration appeared to be gaining cohesion, and people within earshot of loudspeakers roared as Lee Cheuk-yan, chairman of the pro-democracy Labor Party, hoarsely exhorted Mr. Leung, the chief executive, to resign. Hundreds lined up at nearby toilets, one of the many tests of protesters’ patience.
A little down the road, Chui Yik-keung, a 19-year-old student of leisure management, was trying to doze on an inflatable mattress that refused to inflate. He and his classmates lay in the shadow of the hulking concrete quarters of the Chinese military garrison in Hong Kong, whose soldiers some protesters have speculated could come out to crush them.
“I’m not afraid,” said Mr. Chui. “I don’t believe the Chinese soldiers will come out. If they do, will they ever get past here? I don’t think so.”
Police use tear gas as pro-democracy demonstrators occupy central Hong Kong
Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have brought parts of the city center to a standstill. Police have used tear gas to disperse crowds calling for more political freedom from Beijing.
Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters on Sunday surrounded a government enclave and blocked streets in central Hong Kong in an escalation of the demonstrations that the city has experienced over the past days.
Police used tear gas for the first time during the protests and baton-charged a crowd blocking a key road.
Demonstrators, many wearing goggles and plastic wrap to protect themselves against pepper spray, blocked traffic on Harcourt Road, a major throughway, as well as sections of several other roads in the financial district. At least 29 police and civilian have been injured in clashes.
The escalation in protest actions by pro-democracy supporters comes after a week of student-led demonstrations against Beijing's refusal to grant the city fully democratic elections in 2017.
On Saturday evening, the activist group Occupy Central announced it would be launching its long-threatened campaign to shut down the city's financial center three days earlier than planned, in an apparent bid to use the momentum gained by the student-led protests over the past week.
The group is calling on Beijing to withdraw last month's decision and for it to allow a consultation on political reform to start anew.
A police statement issued late on Saturday reiterated that the demonstration near the government complex was "unlawful." A spokesperson for China's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office said the central Chinese government fully supported Hong Kong's treatment of protesters "in accordance with the law."
Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying has pledged "resolute" action against Occupy Central and other pro-democracy activists.
China took over Hong Kong from British colonial rule in 1997 under an agreement that foresaw a "one country, two systems" principle, allowing Hong Kong relative autonomy until 2047. Beijing critics fear that the political freedoms granted to the city until now are being eroded under increasing influence from the Chinese mainland.
Police Arrest Dozens of Pro-Democracy Protesters in Hong Kong
ByCHRIS BUCKLEY and ALAN WONGSeptember 28, 2014
香港学生民主运动拉开“占领中环”序幕
储百亮, ALAN WONG2014年09月28日
HONG KONG — The police in Hong Kong began tightening on Sunday a ring of security around thousands of pro-democracy protesters who have besieged the city government for three days. But by clearing the protesters and appeasing the Chinese Communist Party, the Hong Kong authorities could risk a bigger backlash from even more city residents, said experts.
The Hong Kong government has been grappling with how to defuse the sit-in protest that started on Friday night and stretched over the weekend, swelling at times to a crowd of tens of thousands. Although the police had been practicing for months to quell planned protests over election rule changes, they failed on Friday to prevent hundreds of students from charging into a forecourt at the city government headquarters, drawing many more supporters who occupied an avenue and open areas next to the fenced-in forecourt. The students inside the forecourt were dragged off by the police on Saturday, but the supporters outside have stayed.
On Sunday afternoon, the police began to seal off the sit-in area, stopping supporters from entering. The city leader, Leung Chun-ying, told a news conference that the protesters were using illegal methods to threaten the government, and he declared his “absolute trust in the professional judgment of the police.”
A surging youth protest movement in Hong Kong took the political initiative on Saturday, forcing the police to retreat for a second night and prompting the city’s most prominent democratic group to shift plans and join forces with the student activists in a campaign of defiance against the Chinese government’s planned election rules.
Several older politicians who support democracy in Hong Kong said the unexpected strength of the young protesters, who have besieged the city government headquarters since Friday night, suggested an emerging shift, as their generation ceded greater say to student activists who will be even less open to compromise with authoritarian Beijing.
“What happened since yesterday was beyond our expectation,” Albert Ho, 62, a prominent lawyer and Democratic Party member of Hong Kong’s legislature, said in an interview late on Saturday.
“Now the younger people have taken control and used their advantage of surprise,” Mr. Ho said in the middle of an exuberant rally attended by thousands of people, mostly teenagers and people in their 20s, in front of the city government offices. “This is something that will deeply concern the government.”
Adding to the sense of a shift in political influence to the young activists, Hong Kong’s most prominent democracy campaign, Occupy Central with Love and Peace, announced an abrupt change in its plans.
The campaign had said it would hold civil disobedience protests in the main financial district, known as Central, because election proposals issued by the Chinese government last month failed to offer authentic democratic choice for electing the city’s leader, or chief executive. But in the early hours of Sunday, Benny Tai, a co-founder of Occupy Central, announced that the student initiative would now be the spearhead for the group’s protests.
The student-led occupation at the city government headquarters “completely embodied the awakening of Hong Kong people’s desire to decide their own lives,” Occupy Central said in an emailed announcement.
“The courage of the students and members of the public in their spontaneous decision stay has touched many Hong Kong people,” it said. “As the wheel of time has reached this point, we have decided to arise and act.”
In an interview, Mr. Tai said his group was “very moved by the participation of the citizens which have been organized and initiated by the students,” and suggested that it might switch the site of its occupation to the student one.
“You have to respond to the changing situation of the society,” he said.
他说，“必须对社会形势的变化做出回应。”
While the rest of the city went about its weekend as usual, the protesters turned an area next to the government buildings beside Victoria Harbor into a passionate but orderly stage to demand a say in electing the chief executive. The Chinese government last month laid down much narrower plans for electoral change, which would keep its power as a gatekeeper deciding who can run the city, a former British colony.
He said he was among 200 or so students who on Friday nightstormed into a forecourt near the entrance to the government headquarters, known to the demonstrators as Civic Square, which had recently been blocked off from the public.
“We want to see the Hong Kong people come out to protect their freedom and democracy,” Mr. Mak said, rapidly taking phone calls about organizing the swelling crowd. “I want the government to be representative, elected by us from our hearts, not by the Chinese government.” Under current electoral laws, the chief executive is selected by a committee dominated by Beijing loyalists.
On Saturday, the crowd veered from anger and jeering to an almost celebratory mood when number of officers thinned. Tensions rose again as darkness fell and the police regrouped across the square from metal barriers. But then the police retreated again, and crowds continued pouring into the protest area well into the early hours of Sunday.
Many in the crowd unfurled umbrellas, donned plastic raincoats and flimsy gauze masks, and put sheets of plastic wrap over their eyes, fearing that the police would use pepper spray, as they had on Friday night and Saturday morning. Some also wore yellow ribbons given out by the protest organizers as a symbol of hope for change. Seventy-four people have been arrested since the confrontation started on Friday, the police said.
Many protesters said the sight of the police squirting eye-searing pepper spray at the students on Friday night, shown on television news reports, galvanized support for protesters.
“Hong Kong people have a special feeling for our students,” said Chris Mok, a research assistant who attended the demonstration, “I decided to come down here this morning after I saw them pepper-spraying the students.”
In a society that reveres education, the students have drawn an outpouring of support from classmates and other residents, who sent bottled water, tissues and snacks, which by Saturday had accumulated into mountains of supplies. Some residents saw echoes of Beijing in 1989, when there was a surge of public support for students who occupied Tiananmen Square, before the protests were brutally suppressed.
“They are ready to pick up the democracy baton from the student movement in China in 1989,” said Sunny Lau, 57, who said he was pepper-sprayed by the police when he arrived to support the students. “Part of our success would be to put pressure on the Communist Party by getting the world’s attention.”
Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, it has kept its own independent courts and legal protections for free speech and assembly, as well as a robust civil society. But many democratic groups and politicians say the city’s freedoms are eroding under mainland China’s growing political and economic influence.
Beijing’s plan for electoral changes would for the first time let the public vote for the top leader, starting in 2017. But critics say the plan includes procedural hurdles would screen out candidates who do not have Beijing’s implicit blessing, making the vote meaningless.
“I don’t want Hong Kong to change to be like China, with corruption, unfairness, no press freedom, no religious freedom,” said Edith Fung, 21, a land surveying student.
