The latest petition by the Avaaz Community is having wide circulation and the organisers are saying that in just 84 hours, more than 50.000 signed up to call for an investigation of police violence in Hong Kong. Title: Investigate Hong Kong abuses.
Yes, the police came on strong, in the earliest days when tear gas was used which shocked many people and brought thousands more protesters onto the streets. Since then, despite some heavy stuff between protesters and police, nothing terrible happened until two nights ago when video clearly showed police wildly swinging batons and pointing pepper spray jet directly into the faces of close-by protesters. OK, so there is something to be said asking police to be more controlled, afer all they are professionals. But the videos and witnesses also made it clear that the protesters did not keep to the students expressed methodology of choice, non-violent activism. Also, weapons were found, not a lot but sticks with nails in them and the like, knives also.
Things got out of control. The students apologised, especially to those injured. Next day the three core members of Occupy Central announced they will hand themselves over to the police surely to be arrested (update – the arrest or whatever will be in a future moment as the request by police was to write a note on their presumed illegal action and they all walked free waiting for future developments) for public disturbance. The threesome, one weeping, made use of the occasion to tell the students to cease the street occupation. Well, it’s not their business. It’s up to the students – one leading light, Joshua is now on hunger strike (plus two other students). Only one democratic camp group openly refused to ask the students to leave the streets, Albert Chan’s People Power Party.
The students are asking for a response from the Hong Kong government to their calls for a re-assessment on what the people of Hong Kong are calling for because what was reported to Beijing by the Hong Kong administration is widely considered wrong, not reflecting local wishes at all.
That is a reasonable call by the students.
The chief executive Leung Chun-ying has hardly been seen in public and is as hiding behind his top echelon officials who made less and less public appearances the longer the protests continued.
Now, as is well recorded there have been some strange and suspect funding going to the groups shouting for a more democratic election regime which are all part of the pro-democracy-stroke-anti Beijing camps – namely, the National Endowment for Democracy. Of course Beijing has its own way of funding the more pro-Beijing camp groups.
It needs to be borne in mind that there are big players watching and working from ‘the wings’. In one way of seeing these institutions it is business-as-usual funding and subverting for democratic ends, so easily supposed as ‘good’, but the reality is it is the fight by moneyed Capitalism against grass-roots Socialism, plus the power that come from the people, surely, in the name of the CCP.
China for all its size and power is with the latter camp and has no reason to doubt its Communism with Chinese Characteristics way, that has brought the mainland Chinese out of poverty on a grander scale than hitherto ever seen under any regime in China.
There are powerful influences at play on the streets of Hong Kong and the students need to be very careful how their sincere protests are used by others – on both sides of the divide. As for the trio that are handing themselves in to the police this day at 3pm, they should have known better.
In light of the bigger picture as briefly hinted at here I cannot recommend this particular Avaaz Community initiative.
Freedom to elect and to be elected is not being denied by China – the present moment is not a done deal or the end of it as there is a process taking place. What has been announced in the recent White Paper does not breach the Sino-British Joint Declaration, it’s a work in process.
The Independent Police Complaints Council (ICC) as the organisation responsible for investigating complaints against police officers’ wrong doings has never been particularly responsive to citizen calls for investigations into its own officer’s possible wrong doing and always sides with its men and women. Nothing new there.
The weakest point on the chain of events that can be penetrated, or contrariwise, the strongest bet for the pre-electoral reform camps, is to get the CE and his administration to revisit their report on constitutional reform which it sent to Beijing earlier this year.
Nothing was done to urge a second look, behind the scenes, over that August 31 decision by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress; recall – it raised the threshold support required for those seeking to be nominated to compete in the 2017 chief executive election. That threshold can be revised back to the default one of before – no step forward and no step back but hey, give the students their due, they deserve this for great efforts – and let’s not in no way speak of failure!
