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Hong Kong Police Begin Removing Protesters as Dismantling of Camp Proceeds Hong Kong Police Begin Removing Protesters as Dismantling of Camp Proceeds
(about 9 hours later)
HONG KONG — Dozens of prominent members of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement gave themselves up for arrest in a show of defiance on Thursday after the police swept through a protest camp, tearing down tents, posters and speakers’ platforms that had given voice to anger over the government’s restrictive election plans. HONG KONG — Constance So, a slightly built university student, wept as she looked for a way past the tightening ring of police officers closing in on the last of the protest camps in downtown Hong Kong.
For 11 weeks, the street camp in the Admiralty district near the city government offices was an impassioned forum for public discontent, drawing in tens of thousands of people at its peak. But after the police received orders to clear the site, the end came swiftly. On Thursday morning, officers cleared a patch of the camp, and in the afternoon they massed, encircling the rest of the site and warning people to leave. With friends urging her to avoid an arrest record, Ms. So, like many others, made the decision to give up voluntarily. There was no violence, only a few defiant final stands and many tearful goodbyes, as the nearly three-month-long Umbrella Movement disbanded.
Hundreds of protesters stayed, risking arrest after officers surrounded the area and issued repeated warnings to depart. The holdouts included a roll call of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement: lawyers, legislators, student leaders and Jimmy Lai, the media mogul who has regularly challenged the Chinese government. “It was like my home,” Ms. So said. “I’m leaving my friends behind. I feel like I’m betraying them.”
Lee Cheuk-yan, a longtime labor leader and pro-democracy lawmaker who was among the group waiting to be detained, said, “Our determination is the message we want to give out.” For the Hong Kong authorities and their superiors in Beijing, the peaceful end to the protest is likely to be viewed as a major victory. They repeatedly rebuffed protesters’ demands for a greater degree of democracy in this former British colony, and defused the longest sustained political uprising on Chinese territory in many years without a bloody crackdown.
As she was escorted by two police officers to a nearby police bus, Claudia Mo, a pro-democratic member of the city legislature, shouted, “We will be back.” Martin Lee, a prominent lawyer and veteran pro-democratic politician, followed her. Yet even in their defeat, the protesters, most of them college students, left with a new sense of political identity, a willingness to challenge the almighty power holders in Beijing, and a slogan from a science-fiction film that many of them repeated as they cleared out of the encampment in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district: “We’ll be back.”
At a press conference late Thursday evening, the police said they had arrested 209 people at a sit-in at the protest site, and four more away from the encampment. They also collected identity card information from 909 people who departed after the area was sealed off in the early afternoon, and reserve the right to take legal action against them later, said Cheung Tak-keung, the police’s assistant commissioner for operations. “We have learned we have power when we are together and have enough people,” said Cat Tang, a tall youth who showed up for the scripted final act wearing a menacing helmet and gas mask, with safety pads on his limbs and a plastic shield on his right arm. “Today, we don’t have enough people. But tomorrow, sometime, we can.”
Mr. Cheung seemed to imply several times that there would be further arrests involving activities during the street protests. “We arrest people based on evidence — if they committed an offense, once we collect evidence, they are arrested,” he said. The four people arrested away from the sit-in have been charged with offenses including unauthorized assembly and incitement to violate laws, for actions dating from September, he added. The protests had no tangible success in forcing China to allow a more open election for Hong Kong’s next chief executive. But neither did China have any clear success in persuading the rising new generation in its wealthiest and most westernized enclave that they should passively accept China’s vision of what is best, as many of their elders have done.
The democracy advocates’ willingness to face arrest laid bare the political divisions in Hong Kong that have played out in the protests, which spilled onto the streets in late September, when many thousands of protesters occupied three sites across the city. The demonstrators called it the Umbrella Movement or Umbrella Revolution, after the umbrellas used in the protests’ early days to fend off pepper spray from the police. The protest camp in Admiralty was the last large one remaining; another, in the Mong Kok area, was cleared late last month. The intransigent positions on both sides seem likely to last. Hong Kong, if subdued for now, could well offer a continuing reminder, in an uncensored environment, of thwarted hopes for greater rights in greater China. The protests have also left the territory deeply polarized and trickier to govern.
A last, small encampment remains in Causeway Bay, a shopping district. The police said Thursday night that they would remove that one “at an appropriate time.” “It means the soldiers and generals of the future movement are there,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, a longtime labor leader and pro-democracy lawmaker. “The young people have awakened. This is really the gain of the movement.”
The protesters are calling for fully democratic elections for the city’s leader, or chief executive. They object to the Chinese government’s framework for the elections, which for the first time would allow the general public to vote for the chief executive but would effectively let Beijing screen the candidates. Solidarity with the movement was on display as it ended. The police were forced to detain dozens of the city’s pro-democracy A-list on Thursday afternoon, hauling wealthy lawyers, prominent lawmakers, student leaders and a media mogul through a phalanx of officers and onto waiting buses with barred windows.
“The Umbrella Movement has changed Hong Kong’s political and protest culture,” Alex Chow, leader of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, a leading protest group, said in an interview while waiting for the police to pull him out of the crowd for arrest. “There will be new rounds of civil disobedience.” The sight of peaceful, sober-minded pro-democracy leaders among the 209 people arrested during the clearance of the camp embodied a volatile new current in Hong Kong politics, said Fernando Cheung, a democracy supporter who is a member of the city’s Legislative Council. Many of those arrested, such as Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the city’s Democratic Party and a Queen’s Counsel of the British bar, were neither radicals nor given to confronting the police, he said.
As protesters were led away one by one to a police bus — or in some cases, carried away — the government brought in trucks with cranes to clear away debris from the sprawling encampment. Police officers tore down tents and stripped down the posters, signs and drawings that have festooned the camp. “It shows the growing divisiveness,” said Mr. Cheung, seated under a canopy surrounded by empty bottles, plastic sheets and other debris as the police cleared the site. “Society in general will have to pay a large and growing price for that.”
Constance So, a university student, wept as she looked for a way past the tightening ring of officers. Her older friends at the camp had urged her to avoid arrest, and so she was leaving, she said. A little later, Mr. Cheung was arrested after refusing to leave the area of the encampment, on a major road past the headquarters of the Hong Kong government.
“It’s like my home,” she said. “I’m leaving my friends behind. I feel like I’m betraying them.” For more than a quarter-century, many of the same men, and a handful of women, have led countless demonstrations with limited visible effect.
The long-expected operation to clear the Admiralty site had begun hours earlier, facing little if any resistance. In the morning, the police cleared barricades from a small part of the camp that was covered by a court injunction. But demonstrators had essentially abandoned that area, and it was unclear whether the dismantling of the entire camp would proceed as smoothly. But the Umbrella Movement did not only mobilize youth who had previously kept out of politics. The long standoff also garnered an audience for more truculent groups, including raucous online communities, who argued that escalating confrontation with the authorities was the only way to break the will of the government and win concessions.
After the police issued a warning by loudspeaker to leave or face arrest, hundreds of officers began moving slowly into the larger encampment from two directions, taking down tents, banners and other material. At the same time, the street protests may have had the unintended effect of increasing the job security of the very person whose resignation the demonstrators called for repeatedly: Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying.
Many people filed peacefully out of the camp at a police checkpoint, where they were asked to present identification; the police had warned earlier that anyone who stayed past a certain time could be subject to legal action. “He does have very strong backing from Beijing — they’ve found him someone they can really work with in tough times,” said a person with close ties to the Hong Kong and Beijing governments, who insisted on anonymity because of the continuing political tensions.
Meanwhile, the dozens who had decided to be arrested sat waiting for the police. One of them was Liu Chu-tong, a 27-year-old graphic designer who said he had been volunteering at one of the camp’s first-aid booths for weeks. The person also said he believed the protesters’ promises that they would keep challenging the authorities. “We will clear it, they will regroup, we will clear it again, they will regroup,” he said. “But eventually, they will dissipate.”
“I chose to stay here to get arrested because I think it could touch more people,” Mr. Liu said. “That’s how I came out in the first place — I was moved by the students.” Charlotte Chan, a 19-year-old nursing student, reclined on a sofa that had been used to block an escalator leading to the government offices and said that even those who wanted to keep up the demonstrations could see that they lacked broad support.
Those arrested beyond the main encampment on Thursday included several well-known participants in the protest movement, with the arrests taking place in or near their homes. They included Wong Yeung-tat, leader of a group called Civic Passion, who was arrested on suspicion of participating in unlawful assemblies, according to his wife, Chan Sau-wai. But Ms. Chan predicted that students would soon rebound with new plans for civil action.
The protesters in Admiralty who ignored the police warnings to leave included clusters of young men and women in the familiar garb of front-line activists: safety and motorcycle helmets, masks, elbow and knee protectors, and plastic shields. “This is the start, the very beginning, and the pressure will accumulate — the next protests will be more aggressive,” she said. “Those who claim political neutrality cannot go on. You can’t pretend not to care.”
“It’s important to show that even if we leave, it is with resistance,” said Arki Cheng, a social worker in his 20s. Some in Hong Kong worry that the protests this autumn have harmed the long-term cause of achieving greater democracy.
They fret that Beijing has now permanently transferred large numbers of security and intelligence specialists to Hong Kong to keep a much closer eye on the Chinese Communist Party’s many critics. Beijing, they say, could end up even more resistant to further democratization in Hong Kong for fear that an intransigently hostile government might be elected.
“This movement has done more damage to the pro-democracy camp than anything in the last 17 years,” said Steve Vickers, who was a senior Hong Kong police official before Britain handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, and who said he favored the introduction of greater democracy.
Under the British, and through the first 17 years of Chinese sovereignty here, the most powerful political force in the city has been the leaders of its biggest businesses — heavily Scottish at first, but now mostly Chinese families originally from the neighboring Guangdong province or from Shanghai. These tycoons have long opposed increases in social spending, fearing that they would eventually lead to higher taxes on them.
But the bruising political battle with democracy activists has hurt the tycoons’ image and their clout with top city officials and the Beijing authorities, people with a detailed knowledge of Hong Kong’s policy making said.
To Beijing’s annoyance, the tycoons were reluctant to criticize the demonstrators for fear that their own businesses might be boycotted. One of the most politically active business leaders, a real estate developer named James Tien, publicly broke ranks in October with the administration’s support for Mr. Leung and called for more negotiations with the protesters.
“The tycoons are no longer a factor; their days are past,” said the person who works closely with the Beijing and Hong Kong governments.
That may be an overstatement: The tycoons have a history of hiring retiring senior civil servants and keeping close personal relationships with government leaders. But economic inequality and a lack of job opportunities for the young emerged as potent issues this fall for rallying young people, prompting an active government review of ways to address these issues.
The students and other protesters vowed to keep the demonstrations alive.
Late Thursday night, more than 100 demonstrators gathered diagonally across the street from the newly demolished encampment. They stayed on the sidewalk, not blocking traffic, and shouted to wary police officers that they were engaged in one of Hong Kong’s favorite pastimes, “shopping!”