Hundreds of Hong Kong students yesterday marched through the heart of the financial center, chanting pro-democracy slogans ahead of a planned blockade of government buildings if the territory’s leader fails to discuss their demands for free elections.
Others remained in Tamar Park flanking the Legislative Council, where they sat in temperatures of up to 30oC, listening to lectures by sympathetic academics in the middle of a week-long class boycott.
Beijing last month rejected demands for people to freely choose the territory’s next leader in 2017, insisting that candidates have to be pre-screened, prompting threats from pro-democracy activists to shut down Central business district.
Photo: Reuters
Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英) declined to discuss the students’ demands with them on Tuesday, prompting Federation of Students leader Alex Chow (周永康) to set a 48-hour deadline, saying the students would surround and paralyze key government buildings if he did not face them.
“We must fight back, democracy now,” student leader Lester Shum (岑敖暉) shouted yesterday. “Hong Kong is my home ground, [Beijing] is not representing me.”
About two dozen police stood guard outside Leung’s offices, where barriers were in place.
“We urge all Hong Kong residents to join us for the Oct. 1 banquet and peacefully Occupy Central,” said Lau Ka-yee (劉家儀), a member of a women’s association and a spokeswoman for the Liu Xia Concern Group, who joined the student march, referring to China’s National Day holiday.
“Hong Kong is my place,” she said. “Democracy is in my hands.”
Occupy co-founder Benny Tai (戴耀廷), an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, hinted earlier this week that the takeover of Central could begin on Wednesday next week, when much of the district will be empty.
“While others are celebrating the big day of the country, we will set up a grand banquet in Central to fight for Hong Kong’s democracy,” he wrote in the Apple Daily, a comment that local media widely tipped as a reference to next Wednesday.
The former British colony’s relationship with Beijing has become increasingly fraught in recent months as activists push for freedoms they believe are theirs under the “one country, two systems” formula.
Confidence in Beijing’s “one country, two systems” is at the lowest it has been since the University of Hong Kong’s public opinion program began tracking the issue in 1993, it said in a survey released on Tuesday.
More than half, or 56 percent, of the 1,000 people in Hong Kong surveyed by telephone this month said they had “no confidence” in the system.
Additional reporting by AFP and staff writer
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