Hong Kong’s acting chief executive yesterday called on pro-democracy protesters to clear sites they have occupied for more than six weeks and warned holdouts they could face arrest, a move that could swell protest numbers.
Hundreds of student-led demonstrators are camped out in two key districts of the territory, where they have pitched tents and set up supply stations.
Hong Kong media reported that authorities could start removing protesters as early as today.
Photo: AFP
“To those who are unlawfully occupying the roads, we call for you to leave the areas quickly and peacefully,” said Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥), acting leader while Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英) attends the APEC summit in Beijing.
The protesters are demanding fully democratic elections for the next chief executive in 2017 instead of the vote between pre-screened candidates that Beijing has allowed.
Hong Kong media had speculated that China was waiting to clear the protesters until after the end of the APEC summit yesterday. US President Barack Obama is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) today before flying out.
Lam spoke a day after a court ruled that police could arrest protesters who defy authorities trying to clear camp sites. Lam did not provide a timeframe.
“As the place where the whole movement began, Admiralty is likely to be the last area to be cleared because people will come out again real quick if the police touch the nerve of the movement,” Matthew Ng, 21, said from his tent in the district next to government buildings.
Many protesters said they would simply regroup if police moved in.
In related news, the number of Hong Kong residents identifying themselves as “Chinese” has reached a record low, a poll showed.
Only 8.9 percent of Hong Kongers called themselves “Chinese” in the survey by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the lowest number since the poll began in 1996.
The weeks-long mass democracy protests had influenced the vote, said the head of the university’s journalism school, which carries out the regular “Identity and National Identification of Hong Kong People” survey and published its latest findings on Monday.
“Recently people have been exposed to a lot of news about political reforms, voting, elections, and people actually are feeling that part of their identity is being affected by the Chinese authorities,” Anthony Fung (馮應謙) said.
“For the past five years people have started to realize that they have to come up with their own future... It seems that some of them may be disappointed that the procedure is not totally in the hands of the Hong Kong people,” he added.
The number of people identifying themselves as Chinese in the vote has dropped consistently since a high of 32.1 percent in 1997.
In the most recent poll, more than a quarter of the 810 interviewed said they were “Hong Kongers.” Another 42 percent said they were primarily “Hong Kongers,” but were also Chinese.
In 2010, more than 16 percent of participants of the same poll identified themselves as “Chinese,” while 12.6 percent did so in 2012.
Additional reporting by AFP
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