After months of avoiding confrontations with Beijing, democracy activists in Hong Kong are planning on today to hold their first big march since a series of rallies last July forced the government to withdraw a stringent internal security bill.
The Civil Human Rights Front, a coalition of religious, labor, social welfare, gay and feminist groups that brought 500,000 people into the streets on July 1, has organized today's demonstration.
Marchers will call for the government of the autonomous territory to allow the public to elect the next chief executive and the entire legislature, said Richard Tsoi (蔡耀昌), the front's spokesman and the organizer of the rally.
On Tuesday, all of the pro-democracy political parties here issued a joint appeal for people to attend the New Year's Day march, which will cover the same route as the July 1 march, from Victoria Park to the central government offices downtown. Heavily criticized last summer for not having done more to prepare for the earlier march, the police announced plans to close many downtown streets to vehicles today.
Today's rally, coming a month after the main pro-Beijing party suffered a sharp setback in local council elections, could make Beijing even more leery of allowing greater democracy in Hong Kong, which Britain handed over to China in 1997.
How many people will attend today's rally is anybody's guess, but nobody is predicting that organizers can draw a crowd as large as last summer's, when nearly a tenth of the territory's population turned out to protest the security legislation as well as a weak economy, mismanagement of SARS and government scandals. Since then, the economy has recovered, the government withdrew the security legislation and the two most controversial government ministers, Antony Leung (梁錦松) and Regina Ip (葉劉淑儀), have resigned.
But polls continue to show that large segments of society are upset with Tung Chee-hwa (
Michael DeGolyer, the director of the Hong Kong Transition Project said that the group's most recent poll, in November, had found only 20 percent of the public satisfied with Tung, the lowest level yet.
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