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As Hong Kong Occupy Protests Wind Down, Many Make One Last Visit As Hong Kong Occupy Protests Wind Down, Many Make One Last Visit
(about 2 hours later)
HONG KONG — Last January, Benny Tai, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, wrote a column in a local newspaper raising the idea of using street blockades to press the government for more democratic elections. He said the action might last a couple of days. The idea eventually spread under the rubric Occupy Central and later mutated into a student-led movement that became a monthslong affair, even outlasting Mr. Tai himself, who turned himself in to the police last week. HONG KONG — Thousands of protesters thronged the political heart of Hong Kong on Wednesday night, giving a defiant and tearful farewell to a pro-democracy camp that the police have warned they will start demolishing Thursday morning, effectively ending 10 weeks of street occupations that have laid bare divisions over the city’s political future.
But all that is about to end. More than two months after protests erupted outside the local government headquarters in late September and the police failed to disperse them with tear gas, the police said they would enforce a court order to clear the last major encampment of the protesters, in the Admiralty district, starting Thursday morning and reopen the area to traffic. Attendance has shrunk at the protest camp in the Admiralty neighborhood, next to the city government’s offices, reduced by exhaustion, cold and disappointment. But thousands returned on a cool night to see the camp, which sprang up in late September as part of a demand for democratic elections for the city’s leader.
On Wednesday evening, high-rise buildings sparkling with Christmas lights flashed festive messages above the rally grounds that have been home to hundreds of colorful tents. While the protesters’ numbers paled in comparison with the early days of the occupation, many came out to visit the site before the police action set to start the next morning. “The police can clear our protest site, but they can never extinguish our desire for democracy in our hearts,” said a woman in her 20s who climbed onto a makeshift podium in the middle of the camp, where many huddled to listen to valedictory speeches and roared approval at her words.
Nelson Li, a social worker, was one of the many who visited the site for one last time, and like many parents he brought along his child. The turnout in Admiralty was one of the largest since the early days of the protests. Families queued up to collect bracelets and other mementos made by volunteers; other people took pictures of themselves and the posters and art that have covered the camp. Many signed banners demanding democracy and left sticky notes on what has been called the Lennon Wall, a side of a government building facing the protest camp that is covered in the notes.
“I want to let him witness the protest himself, to take photos of it with his phone, rather than just watching television at home,” Mr. Li said, showing his 10-year-old son a wall of messages posted on the gate outside the city’s Legislative Council building. Many protesters, resigned to the police clearance, were busy packing away tents and other supplies. Some vowed to peacefully resist, and others may forcefully oppose any move to demolish the camp.
“Their generation will be very different from ours,” said the 38-year-old father. “They have a stronger desire for equality and justice, and are more willing to step up and say it.” “We know it’s nearly time to leave, but that doesn’t mean the struggle is over,” said Ng Kai-man, 17, who quit her job as a waitress to plunge full time into the protests. She sat on a chair with a sign that declared, “We’ll be back.”
At one of the many supply stations, volunteers were packing up the face masks, goggles and helmets they had stockpiled over the past two months of sporadic confrontations with the police or protest opponents. Some were left over from another major protest site, in Mong Kok, that the police had cleared recently. “That means, ‘If you clear us, we’ll come back sooner or later somewhere,'” said Ms. Ng, looking at the sign. “I think we have developed a spirit of solidarity. It’s a big gang of people who have learned disobedience.”
The protesters had been calling for changes in the rigid framework Beijing has imposed for the election of the semiautonomous Chinese city’s next leader, in 2017. But the government has granted no concessions. Whatever happens, the protests have exposed and widened political fissures, Hong Kong residents say. The government and its supporters have accused the protesters of reckless naïveté and of serving as tools of Western-sponsored subversion. Many protesters have said the Chinese government’s plans for election changes in the city would leave Beijing with the power to choose winners.
“So far, the movement has not really won us anything,” said John Pau, 21, a model and volunteer at a supply station by a pedestrian bridge above a multilane thoroughfare outside the government complex. “But I know Hong Kong will be better off because of it.” At supply stations for the protesters, volunteers packed away safety masks, goggles and helmets stockpiled for possible confrontations with the police. Student leaders have said they do not want a repeat of the violence that erupted after the police demolished the other main protest camp, in the Mong Kok neighborhood, on Nov. 25.
Although student protest leaders said they would not retreat on their own despite the warnings from government officials and the police, they were conscious of the imminent demise of their encampment and urged protesters not to put up a fight. Alex Chow, a leader of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, a university group at the forefront of the protests, said the protesters should neither “resist nor retaliate” during the police clearance.
Alex Chow, secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, said at an evening news conference that protesters should adhere to their nonviolent principles, that they should neither “resist nor retaliate,” during the police clearance. “We will stay here until the end, even risking arrests, to tell the government we are not the rioters they say and we bear the responsibility of our actions,” Mr. Chow told the crowd. “The movement will go on in other forms of disobedience.”
“And we want to remind the government that the clearance will not solve the social problem,” he said. But in recent weeks, the protesters have become increasingly divided between those who favor peaceful resistance and a minority who argue that only escalating the protests, and risking confrontation, can win concessions. A few protesters have vowed to vigorously resist the police in Admiralty, said Fernando Cheung Chiu-hung, a democratic member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, who has sought to defuse confrontations during the protests.
Mr. Chow and Joshua Wong, the 18-year-old leader of another prominent student group, Scholarism, said that protesters would assemble near one edge of the protest site in areas that are not under a court injunction to be cleared, and that they would coordinate with other groups. Democratic legislators have said they would await arrest in the same area on Thursday. “If you have one incident, or one person triggering the offensive from our side, the police could respond with tens or hundreds of times more forcefully,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.
“I am sure before the legislature votes on the government’s proposed election changes, there will be another occupation protest,” Mr. Wong said in an interview. The Admiralty protest camp sprang up on Sept. 28, when thousands of protesters seized the streets after a bungled police effort to disperse students with tear gas and pepper spray. The police hope that a tightly choreographed operation to clear it will avoid such misfires.
After two months of the government refusing to yield on the proposed election rules, which the protesters say ensure that only Beijing-backed candidates will be nominated, and increasingly forceful police operations to remove the protesters, Mr. Wong said that the government has “lost the whole generation of about 0.7 million high school and university students.” The operation will proceed in steps, beginning with the clearance of an area covered by a court injunction, said a police official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Jimmy Lai, a newspaper publisher and supporter of the protests, said that despite the failure of the street blockades to persuade the government to grant more open procedures for the 2017 election, the protracted protests would leave Hong Kong a better place. After that, the police will move on to the main camp, first warning people to leave, then sealing off the area so residents cannot enter, and then removing protesters and their tents. The effort could take much of the day, if not longer, and the police are prepared to make many arrests, the official said. Already, 655 people have been arrested since the protests began, he said.
“The movement means a lot because first we discovered that the young people are very determined and courageous in fighting for their future, which we never knew,” Mr. Lai said. Carrie Lam, the chief secretary of the Hong Kong government and its second-ranking official, said 3,000 employees at the government offices near Admiralty would not go to work on Thursday, and urged people to stay away from the area.
“Anybody who thought in the short-term that we would have anything were very naïve,” he said. “I think it’s just the beginning.” “Once the police operation is underway, and knowing very well that there are some radical elements amongst the protesters, confrontation might become inevitable,” she said in an email.
But Steve Vickers, a senior Hong Kong police official before the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, predicted that resistance would be limited to a few protesters. “There will be a small, very hard core who will resist,” Mr. Vickers said in an interview. “The bulk of them will probably melt away after some screaming and shouting.”