concentration, dispersal & resistance in Hong Kong

The protesters are led by a group called Occupy Central...

Always good to have Vox around to get something neatly wrong. Here's my crack at it, as much to clear my own head as anything else:  Friday & Saturday's attempt to storm Hong Kong's government centre was not originally under the leadership of OccupyHK, but organised autonomously by high school and university students as the climax of a rolling series of events designed to publicise and promote the class boycott that students launched in protest against the political settlement imposed for the 2017 full-suffrage Hong Kong chief executive elections. The organisers are clearly aligned with Occupy HK's wider ideals, but their main leadership came from the Scholarism group, which was originally organised among students to protest, successfully, against attempts to impose 'patriotic education' on the curriculum a couple of years back.

Occupy HK offered the students tepid support at best; they have, in fact, been backing down somewhat since the 2017 settlement was imposed. They decided to have a symbolic occupation of the business district on October 1, for instance, precisely because it is a national holiday, so no business is being done on that day.

And yet as the standoff intensified on Saturday, Occupy suddenly woke up, turned up at the protest site, and at Midnight on Saturday, declared that Hong Kong was now officially Occupied. This may help explain the extremely messy nature of today's events. A good many of the students at the site didn't much like the appropriation of their moment and drifted away – others of course were simply unprepared for an open-ended peaceful seizure of important bits of real estate - enabling the police to establish a stronger cordon around government offices and place blocking detachments to prevent protesters concentrating. What seems to have happened today is that protestors – still mainly students, so far as I can tell – got as far as they could towards Central and then decided to simply occupy wherever they happened to be, also targeting dispersed 'sensitive' facilities, like the local PLA barracks.

There are now occupations in Central, SheungWan, Admiralty, WanChai & CausewayBay on Hong Kong Island and in MongKok in Kowloon. Cops are Kettling protestors. Protesters are surrounding cops. What the cops seem to be trying to do is use tear gas and baton rounds to widen their cordons and slowly push and barge demonstrators into one place, though I've no idea where that may be, also counting on people to leave as the night progresses.

The demonstrators demands include the resignation of the Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung and the renegotiation of the whole 2017 process. This, needless to say, is a bit of a tall order. What it seems to come down to at this point is brute numbers. If protesters can field enough to overwhelm the Hong Kong cops, then we're at the crisis point – and I really don't want to think where that may lead. If not, then the cops can slowly grind down the protesters, assuming they have the patience for that. If the demonstrators can come up with an alternative series of protest actions at this point that don't involve direct confrontation with the cops, then they can de-escalate while keeping the movement as a whole going.

Anyway, we'll see tomorrow.

Comments

[Dan Hardie]

'The demonstrators demands include the resignation of the Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung and the renegotiation of the whole 2017 process. This, needless to say, is a bit of a tall order.'

I have some (probably stupid) questions. The demonstrators' demands don't seem to have changed, and you're quite sure that Beijing can't give in to them. So what might constitute an acceptable compromise in the eyes of a) Beijing and b) a workable number of the demonstrators? And if there aren't any acceptable compromises around, does this peter out with demonstrators going back to work or university, or is a nastier end likely?

[jamie]

Well things are petering out right now, with the promise of talks about talks. It's notable that Beijing, in the event, did absolutely nothing overt, though there were reports that it's security agents were crawling all over the place last week. So the locals are expected to handle this.

I don't anticipate any change to the nominating committee stitch up, not least because it is just about within the letter of the Basic Law. What I think the HK govt may do is promise to allow a comparative liberal on the ballot in an attempt to split the mainstream pan-democrats from the comparative radicals, which may well work.

[Alex]

An interesting point I saw on twitter: HK is obviously hyper-dense, and everyone has a smartphone (and very often gigabit broadband at home). This creates the possibility for a fast re-mobilisation (roughly what happened last week). People "drifting away" may not mean much if they remain on the alert for a renewed call-out.

[jamie]

quite a bit of old fashioned physical exhaustion seems to be coming into it. But this is certainly interesting in terms of re-mobilisation

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/world/asia/as-protests-ebb-hong-kong-finds-itself-in-stalemate-over-barricades.html

[Dan Hardie]

Cheers, Jamie. Another question: if there isn't a remobilisation, but Beijing offers a liberalish candidate on the ballot, and demonstrators don't find themselves hauled off to jail on, say, tax charges after a decent interval, wouldn't that be fairly close to a win for the demonstrators?

[jamie]

Need to unpack this a bit. The occupy HK people want the whole nomination process to be thrown open (which for one thing, goes against the letter of the Basic Law Article 45). The mainstream pan-democrats don't mind the nominating committee but want ideological vetting dropped, which implies structural changes to the committee. I think the HK govt may agree to let a liberal while keeping the membership and function of the committee the same, but if that goes through it's basically a defeat for the wider pan-democratic movement.

Where it gets interesting is that the existing plan has to be ratified by legco by a 2/3 majority, probably next March, and the various democratic parties have enough seats in legco to veto that. If that happens, the current system stays in place. Offering to perfume the ticket with a liberal is probably the minimum that the HK establishment/Beijing need to do if they want to split off enough waverers among the Dems for the plan to go through.

This is where backlash politics may come into it, because what we have here is a classic reactionary 'common sense' trap. While liberals are arguing that voting is a necessary but not sufficient component of democracy etc etc, the pro-establishment side just shout THOSE LIBERALS ARE VOTING TO STOP YOU HAVING A VOTE over and over again.

That said, this is why the democratic side are avoiding this trap by just calling the whole thing fake democracy and leaving it at that. And polls currently show that a good plurality oppose the current plan. So we're basically into a political attrition phase.

[Alex]

Protestors called back out: http://qz.com/278586/an-end-to-hong-kongs-unrest-is-now-more-distant-than-ever/