Photo by johnlsl on Flickr.

Hong Kong protests two weeks on

As another week begins in Hong Kong, people are still blockading the streets in several areas of the city. There are talks about talks, but the protesters say they are not giving up their positions without something much more substantial than what the government is offering. Sue Sparks reports.

Two weeks into the protest one of the first thing to note is that the term ‘Occupy Central’ being used as shorthand for the protests is not accurate. The protests are not actually in ‘Central’ – the business district on Hong Kong Island. More substantially, the organisation called Occupy Central didn’t initiate this round of protests, and is certainly not in control of it.

Occupy Central was set up a year ago by a group of academics and others to plan a campaign around the government’s consultation on introducing universal suffrage for the 2017 Chief Executive election. The plan, if the proposals from Beijing in response to the Hong Kong government’s report on the consultation were unsatisfactory, was for the campaign to culminate a peaceful sit-in to block the roads in Central. This was to be done by a controlled number of volunteers who were trained in civil disobedience and agreed they were prepared to go to jail.

Photo by Nick Holmes on Flickr.

In the event, nothing like this took place. In late September, the Federation of Students called a week long class boycott. Scholarism, the school students’ movement forged in the protests against ‘national education’ in 2012, called for school students to join in on the final day. Thousands of students held teach-ins close to the government’s headquarters in Admiralty. Some decided to scale the high fences enclosing Civic Square, setting off a chain of events leading to Occupy Central declaring that the long-planned protest had started.

After the police blocked access to the main site of protest, thousands of people who had come to support the students on Sunday 28 September spontaneously occupied the roads around Admiralty and began to besiege the besieging police. The police responded with pepper spray and 87 canisters of tear gas. They displayed signs saying they would ‘fire’ if protesters didn’t disperse. It was unclear if they were talking about rubber bullets.

The police later said they had not meant to display the sign at all, but their violent response to the protests had the opposite effect to what they intended. Thousands more supporters poured into Admiralty after having watched the scenes at dinner time on the TV. These included many non-students. A separate protest site sprang up across the harbour in Mong Kok in Kowloon, blocking Nathan Road, one of the main shopping streets and bus routes in the city, stranding seven double decker buses. The government recognised they had made a mistake, and the riot police were withdrawn. The police have kept a pretty low profile since, although there have been incidents of violence against protesters and some arrests, and there is, rightly, constant vigilance on the protests for signs of a police offensive.

Photo by Joming on Flickr.

On 29 September, teachers belonging to one teachers’ union, social workers and a group of distribution workers at the Coca-Cola plant in Sha Tin all declared they were on strike and for a while it looked as if industrial action might spread. But the groundwork for such action had not been done and consequently only a few groups of workers who are strongly connected with the anti-Beijing union federation, the HKCTU, responded to its call to strike.

A week of street protests has ensued. Wednesday and Thursday were public holidays meaning people were able to come out to join in, and at various times there was a carnival atmosphere. Meetings went on all the time, with people taking turns with the microphones to express their thoughts. There was lots of singing, and at night people used the flashlight functions on their smartphones to create light shows. Volunteers distributed donated food and water and cleared rubbish, being careful to recycle.

Self-organisation has been impressive and and proved important on Friday, when bands of thugs started to try to break up the protests. This has been most common in Mong Kok, known for the presence of triad gangs. A group of masked men also attacked the outlying protest site in Causeway Bay. The police made some arrests after being pressured to do so by protesters, and have revealed that some of those arrested do indeed have triad links.

Other evidence that people were paid to take part has come to light: some young men in a poor area came forward to say they received text messages offering them HK$800 (£65) a day to harass and attack the protests. Video footage shows a man boasting about getting money to do so. The attacks have been violent and deliberately provocative with people shouting things like “Your daughter should be raped!” and targeting women and girls with sexual assaults and harassment. This adds evidence that these are not simply ordinary workers and small business owners angered by the impact of the protests on their livelihood. Protesters have defended the encampments and rebuilt barricades each time after the attacks.

‘Leaders’ of the protests have repeatedly called for the Mong Kok and Causeway Bay sites to be abandoned and people to concentrate in Admiralty, however the self-organised nature of the protests and how little hold that the leadership of Occupy Central, and even the students, have over them mean these sites have not been deserted. Some people left but others took their place, arguing that to leave would embolden those who were trying to break up the protests. People are not waiting for someone to tell them what to do. In Admiralty, too, debates are continuous about how to respond to police requests to bring food and medical supplies into the government HQ, facilitate police shift changes, or clear some roads. Sometimes roads are temporarily cleared, sometimes the requests are refused.

Photo by Pasu Au Yeung on Flickr.

Clearly the movement needs to be organised more systematically, or sooner or later it will be overcome by police and other violence, splits, fatigue and the repeated calls for talks to replace action to avoid the movement lose public support. It also needs to spread from the streets into workplaces through groups being set up that can debate what should be done next. It is necessary to build to links between the struggle for universal suffrage and the economic and social issues that underlie the anger being expressed: low wages, absurdly high rents and scarce, cramped housing, long hours, abysmal social welfare and so on. The task is very difficult; the genuine trade unions are weak, as is the left.

These protests have been fuelled above all by the absolutely correct perception that the Hong Kong government does not care in the least about what people here think or want. It is run by the rich, in their interests and on behalf of Beijing. Ultimately, the movement will have to be a cross-border one. However, the talk by some sections of the international ‘left’ about the Hong Kong protests being funded by the US State Department, or that they are destabilising China on behalf of US imperialism, or that Hong Kong people are just hostile to mainland Chinese and have an inflated sense of entitlement, is basically reactionary nonsense. Many people on the mainland are anxiously watching the Hong Kong protests, in spite of massive censorship. Many mainlanders in Hong Kong support the demands of the students and wish they had the relative freedom Hong Kong enjoys and people in Hong Kong have shown many times that they support movements for greater rights on the mainland.

Although the feeling on both sides of the border may well be that Beijing will not budge, anyone who wants to see change in China should not be tempted to dismiss the Hong Kong protests as just a bunch of middle class liberals, or as a CIA plot, but see them as one element in the diverse battles being waged in the whole country.

A version of this article has also been published by the IS Network.