If you think protest is finished in Hong Kong, think again

WHATEVER became of Hong Kong’s Occupy movement? Three years ago thousands of people, most of them young, staged 79 remarkable days of sit-ins in some of the Chinese territory’s busiest districts. They were calling for the genuinely universal suffrage that China had seemed to promise Hong Kong when Britain handed it back in 1997. It was an unprecedented display of civil disobedience, a challenge not just to the local government but to the Communist Party itself in distant Beijing.

“Occupy Central with Love and Peace” was conceived by a Hong Kong priest and two academics as a protest against stunted proposals for political reform that had recently been unveiled. The three had organised an unofficial “civic referendum” to gauge public opinion in favour of Hong Kongers being able, in 2017, directly to nominate candidates for the chief executive of the territory and to choose the winner. They had then threatened to block streets if the authorities ignored the result. It was enthusiastic students who turned the idea into a mass campaign, starting with class boycotts and leading to the occupation of streets around the government’s offices and farther afield. Young protesters, camping out with their homework stations and yellow umbrellas, drew admiration. Despite some initial heavy-handed behaviour by the police, which only generated more popular support for the students, the protests were generally peaceful.