• Huge Crowds (800,000) Turn Out for Hong Kong Pro-Democracy March By KEITH BRADSHER

Huge Crowds Turn Out for Hong Kong Pro-Democracy March
By KEITH BRADSHER

Protesters participated in one of the largest marches in Hong Kong's history on Tuesday.
HONG KONG — A huge crowd of people, mostly young, began one of the largest marches in Hong Kong’s history Tuesday to demand greater democracy, defying Beijing’s dwindling tolerance for challenges to its control.

 

The march 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.

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 were still full of people, and a nearby street was completely filled with others 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.
“It looks like there are more people than in 2003,” an organizer said over the public address system.
The police had no early estimate of the crowd, and it was hard to assess the accuracy of the claim.

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 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, along with members of two other families. 

She said the 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,” she said.
 
The crowd joining the march from Victoria Park was a sweating, sometimes cacophonous distillation of the complaints that many Hong Kong people direct at their city government and its overseers in Beijing.
Many held banners and shouted slogans demanding true choice in elections. 

Occasionally, a flag of colonial Hong Kong — a gesture of rejection of mainland authority — bobbed up above the crowd.
One of the crowd, a teacher who gave only his surname, Chin, said people understood the need to defy Beijing by coming out in large numbers. 

“They say they won’t listen no matter how many, but we think the more Hong Kong people are on the street, the more the Chinese government will come around. It’s a numbers game.”

He and four friends were busy assembling a banner accusing Hong Kong officials of corruption. 

He said he did not want to give his full name because he was a teacher and feared his school would be unhappy.
Moderate groups, including demonstrators like Mrs. Chan, were among the first to march to the center of the city, and they had said in advance that they planned to go home upon arriving there. 

By contrast, radical groups like the one known as People Power, with histories of scuffles with the police, were hanging back in the park so as to arrive at the center of government later in the evening.

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 suggested 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 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,” saidBenny 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 Hong Kong 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.


Massive Pro-Democracy Protest on Anniversary of Hong Kong Return to China
By Natasha Khan



Thousands of residents gather to march in downtown streets during an annual pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong, on July 1, 2014.

Protesters started an annual march on the 17th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, demanding full democracy and highlighting opposition to Chinese control over the election of the city’s top official.

Civil Human Rights Front, the rally organizer, said as many as 500,000 people may show up after earlier telling police it expected 150,000 marchers. 

Occupy Central With Love and Peace, an activist group, has called on residents to join the rally after almost 800,000 people voted in an unofficial referendum against China’s insistence that it vet candidates for the chief executive election in 2017.

“I love Hong Kong and I’m here to fight for its future,” said Alan Ng, a 22-year-old worker at a logistics company. 

“The developments of the past few weeks have really worried us. Hopefully the Hong Kong and China government will see us out in full force today and realize they need to make a change.”

A white paper issued by the Chinese government on June 10, saying the city’s high degree of autonomy isn’t an inherent power, has ratcheted tensions in Hong Kong.
Division over that and the election issue threaten to bring about the city’s biggest political turmoil in a decade since half a million people marched against a planned anti-subversion law.

The attendees of the rally, some holding umbrellas and carrying banners, gathered atVictoria Park before starting the march about 4 p.m. local time to the Central business district.

Marching Band
Political parties including the Civic Party and Democratic Party set up booths and hung banners, while the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China, had a marching band.
Some people hoisted the colonial Hong Kong flag while gathering around a statue of Queen Victoria, a reminder of Hong Kong’s colonial past.

The July 1 rally is an annual event on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s 1997 return to Chinese rule.
Under terms agreed between the U.K. and China, Hong Kong enjoys its own freedoms and legal system until 2047 as a special administrative region, under the principle of “One Country, two Systems.”

Last year, the July 1 rally organizer said 430,000 took part to demand the government address a widening wealth gap and introduce broader democracy.
The police said there were 66,000.
Both figures were the highest in at least nine years.

Public Nomination
Allowing for public nomination of candidates, which is what the Occupy Central referendum demands, will be against the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution, officials in Hong Kong and China have said.

Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying is expected to submit an electoral reform proposal to Beijing for approval, before starting a second public consultation by the end of the year.
He will submit the final plan to lawmakers.

About 87.8 percent of the voters in the referendum ended June 29 said lawmakers should reject any proposal that doesn’t meet international democracy standards.
Occupy Central has threatened mass sit-ins at the city’s financial district should the government fail to meet their demands.

Such tactics will paralyze the city, drive away tourists and companies and damage Hong Kong’s reputation as a global financial center, according to tycoons, foreign business leaders, brokers and accounting firms.

The concern is that today’s protest turns violent, with the police setting up a makeshift detention center in case of mass arrests, according to the South China Morning Post.

The Hong Kong Federation of Students and a student activist group called Scholarism are planning for a sit-in at Chater Road in the business district from midnight till 8 a.m. on July 2, Radio Television Hong Kong reported yesterday, citing spokesmen Chow Wing-hongand Joshua Wong.
The students, who expect 2,500 people, plan to leave by 9 a.m., RTHK said.