After an last minute abort of our Shanghai ticket (I made it all the way to boarding before bailing after Emma’s visa was found to be expired) we found ourselves with an extra few days in Hong Kong. What was going on yesterday? The pro-democracy march. We couldn’t sit around and let that happen without us so we headed down to Wan Chai and joined in. I’m not exactly a protesting veteran so I only have the London anti war marches for comparison but I wanted to write down my impressions (for a visual account I have a Hong Kong Pro-democracy March photo group on Flickr).
From reading the local paper, the self-censoring South China Morning Post, I got the impression that the march was going to be a meager affair. This was compounded by the tiny turnout for the buildup to the march outside the Legco building last weekend. I know that 500,000 people turned out to the last one but I was really worried that this one was going to be a failure, signalling the slow decline of the democratic aspirations of the Hong Kong people.
We had to ask police for directions to the march since we couldn’t find a route on the web and I have to say that I’ve never met more helpful coppers. We talked to 3 or 4 and all of them were incredibly polite and helpful, pointing us in the right direction and telling us where the best place was to intercept the march. Following these directions we hit the procession just outside Pacific Place… And the mass of people stretched back for as far as I could see.
The official count from the government today is set at 63,000 people but I am absolutely certain that this figure is FAR, FAR short of the real turnout. The organisers estimate 250,000 and I think this closer to the truth. The scale of the protest was definitely comparable to the London ones from a few years ago. The crowd was a facinating mix of ages and backgrounds, with whole families turning out. The crowd was remarkably passive, although I did see one woman being carried off by police, with photographers in hot pursuit.
I was quite disappointed to find that the march ended up outside an obscure government building behind Queens Road Central, instead of the Legco building. The government had organised a children’s play day outside their seat of power, which just happened to co-incide with the march and prevent the protesters from coming anywhere near their legislature. I can’t believe that this wasn’t engineered… Instead the marchers were forced to wend their way up Battery Path, behind the HSBC building, taking them away from the center of town.
At the end of the march people tied their ribbons and stuck their stickers onto the railings outside the building to register their presence. We were there early but already they were covered… Will the Chinese government ever agree to free elections in one of their SARs?
