It's hard to tell with the shell-game of controlled-opposition meant to destabilize:
"Hong Kong activists are cleared from streets without resistance" by Chris Buckley and Alan Wong, New York Times November 18, 2014
HONG KONG — The Hong Kong government moved to clear prodemocracy protesters from a small area in front of an office building on Tuesday morning in the first action against the demonstrators in weeks. The authorities met no resistance, with student protesters saying they would not oppose the court order.
The Hong Kong government prepared Monday to push back against pro-democracy demonstrators for the first time in weeks, warning that the control may clear an area in the center of the city that protesters have made into a base.
Dozens of bailiffs wearing black vests, backed by the police, supervised the removal of barricades in a small section of the main protest area around the Citic Tower after reading aloud a court injunction.
The government said control officers were ready to help court bailiffs enforce an ban ordering people to stop congregating around the Citic Tower in Admiralty, a neighborhood near government headquarters that for more than 50 days has become a street camp for thousands of protesters, some living in tents.
The operation’s timing was no surprise; it was announced ahead of time. Demonstrators had largely vacated the area, and the police, unlike in past operations against the movement, did not wear riot gear.
“The majority of us don’t want to violate what they claim to be the law,” said one protester, Chris Wong, a student from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Yet even without court injunctions, he said, the time had come for the movement to consider its next phase.
A control response would mark the first attempt by the Hong Kong government in a month to shrink the barricaded camps that protesters have built in an try to force the authorities and Chinese Communist Party leaders to heed their demands.
But protesters and the government have said that any clearing operation would be just one go in a politically fraught endgame that is far from over.
“The major thing we have done is arouse the attention of everyone,” he said outside his blue-and-orange tent before the court officials cleared the area in only a few minutes
“Ideally, we should stay until we get true democracy, but that doesn’t seem really possible. Staying here should be the means, not the ends,” he said.
The ends, I was told, are meaningle$$ elections.
The court-mandated operation, applying to only a limited area, was unlike previous police efforts to clear broader areas. Those efforts, most recently a month ago, backfired, infuriating demonstrators and drawing thousands more people out on to the streets.
Demonstrators have blocked streets around Hong Kong’s main government buildings since Sept. 28, when police tried to quell student-led protests with tear gas and pepper spray.
Tuesday’s clearance, which was still underway late in the morning, only covered a sliver of the occupied area, but it was the first attempt in weeks to shrink the barricaded camps that protesters have built in an effort to force the local authorities and Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing to heed their demands for free elections for Hong Kong’s top leader, the chief executive.
An Aug. 31 ruling by China’s Legislature set strict guidelines on how candidates could win a spot on the ballot. Demonstrators contend the ruling guarantees that only people backed by Beijing can run for office. Hong Kong, a former British colony, has been run as a semi-autonomous part of China since 1997.
Acting on a complaint from the building’s owner, a Hong Kong court issued an injunction earlier this month against blocking traffic to the Citic Tower, an office and retail building across the street from the government headquarters on the south side of Victoria Harbor in an area known as Admiralty.
The court has issued a similar injunction for a street in Mong Kok, another protest site on the north side of the harbor that is usually packed with Chinese tourists, after a taxi drivers’ association and a minibus company brought complaints. The government warned that anyone obstructing the police could be culpable of “criminal contempt of court.”
It did not say when the police might try to enforce the injunction in Mong Kok, an area where rowdy protests have sometimes flared into violent clashes.
Balzac Lam Yin-tung, a student studying education, said most, if not all, protesters outside the Citic Tower were resigned to retreating, as long as the police did not try to remove the newly reinforced barriers guarding the main protest camp.
“We should stay in Admiralty until the government responds,” she said as she put protest stickers on books, bottles, and other belongings she planned to leave for the bailiffs. “People won’t leave Admiralty until we get a real plan, a plan for real universal suffrage.”
Then the print picks up verbatim:
A person involved in the Hong Kong government’s decision said the police would not rush to completely clear the three occupied areas, although the closure of major avenues had caused traffic jams and hurt sales in stores. The person insisted on anonymity, because he was not authorized to speak openly about the matter.
“The government is in no hurry to end the whole thing because public opinion is growing on our side,” he said. “It will be guerrilla warfare — we will clear it, they will regroup, we will clear it again, they will regroup, but eventually, they will dissipate.”
An opinion poll in Hong Kong carried out in early November found that 34 percent of respondents supported the protests, while 44 percent opposed them, according to researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who organized the telephone survey of 1,030 Cantonese-language residents. The survey also reported that 67 percent of respondents said they thought the protesters should leave the streets.
But growing public opinion is on the other side, uh-huh.
That poll and others, but, showed that support for the protests remained robust among residents in their teens and 20s, who often say they feel marginalized by high housing costs and diminished opportunities.
Don't you Occupy Wall Street kids wish you had received such glowing coverage?
The street standoff started with a student-led sit-in further than Hong Kong’s government headquarters in Admiralty in late September. The control used pepper spray and tear gas in an attempt to clear crowds nearby, but thousands of demonstrators, angered by the control actions, seized the three city areas on Sept. 28.
In view of the fact that then, the number of protesters camping on the sites has shrunk, and in mid-October, the control cleared some roads and reduced the areas under occupation. Many of the protesters who remain say they are determined to stay, but, and some have threatened to occupy other areas if they are pushed out.
“I will defend here until we get what we want, and what we want is democracy,” Jason Yim, a sound engineer in his 20s, said at the Mong Kok protest site. “If here’s enough people, we will resist. If here is not, we will leave and come back with more people.”
--more--"
And you wonder why I'm no longer spending the time.... ????
"Hong Kong protesters met with pepper spray" by William Wan, Washington Post November 19, 2014
HONG KONG — After one group of protesters offered little resistance to authorities clearing out a section of their long-running encampment Tuesday morning, others — apparently frustrated that the movement has stalled — arrived in the evening and used barricades to break the glass facade of the government’s legislative council building.
The more radical protesters appeared to be trying to storm into the legislative building while other protesters blocked police from interfering.
In response, the police unleashed pepper spray.
The different approaches by the prodemocracy demonstrators helped punctuate a debate over when and how to end the protests — and what that ending will mean for this city’s prospects for democracy.
It began quietly enough. The authorities cleared barricades from several roads around the main site Tuesday after a court issued an order to allow free access to a commercial building. A few protesters even helped workers carry away barricades as a sign of compliance.
**********
Hong Kong’s leaders appear to be taking an incremental approach, after use of force in recent months only sent more residents into the streets in support of the movement.
The authorities did not attempt to clear barricades or tents from the center of the protest site, where a few hundred demonstrators have remained.
Several hundred protesters observing the street clearing did not resist the court order, though many debated with authorities exactly which areas were covered by it.
The action, telegraphed well in advanced by police on Monday, began at 9:30 a.m. as bailiffs read out the court order and asked people to leave the site. Shortly afterward, several workers hired by the property owners used wire cutters to remove plastic ties binding together barriers around the 33-story CITIC building, which houses offices, restaurants, and shops. About 100 police officers stood by, without the riot gear that has marked several of their previous violent clashes with the student protesters.
Or the forces deployed in Ferguson.
************
The court issued a similar injunction last month ordering students to leave a site in the working-class neighborhood of Mong Kok, after complaints by taxi drivers and a bus company....
For more than a month, students have camped out in three of Hong Kong’s busiest neighborhoods: Admiralty, Mong Kok, and Causeway Bay.
In late September, in the movement’s early days, hundreds of thousands of people joined them, particularly after Hong Kong authorities, with little warning, used pepper spray and tear gas on unarmed students. Since then, despite sporadic clashes, the government has been reluctant to employ similar force for fear of further galvanizing the movement.
I wish my heavy-handed, "security"-sensitive, thug enforcers and their superiors felt that way.
As a result, the movement — known as the Umbrella Revolution or Occupy Central — has waned in recent days, with a hard-core group of just a few hundred protesters remaining on most days.
According to a poll released Sunday by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, support for the occupying students has dropped to 33.9 percent, compared with 37.8 percent in October. Of the respondents, 43.5 percent said they do not support the Occupy movement, up from 35.5 percent in October.
And you saw what the NYT was telling me before they switched songs.
--more--"
So what do covert coup attempts and destabilization campaigns turn to when they have been defeated?
"Violent Hong Kong protest decried" November 20, 2014
HONG KONG — The most violent clashes between prodemocracy demonstrators and police in a month have underscored the difficulty authorities face in evicting people from the barricaded tent cities that have blocked some of the city’s busiest streets since late September.
Had no problem here in AmeriKa.
On Tuesday night and continuing into Wednesday morning, dozens of demonstrators attempted to break into Hong Kong’s legislature, using metal barricades as ramrods to smash through doors and windows of reinforced glass.
Police charged at least six people with assaulting officers and damaging property.
Student groups and prodemocracy lawmakers joined police in criticizing participants in the protest, condemning the use of violence.
Because those are the US agent provocateur groups doing that.
It occurred hours after bailiffs, aided by police, began enforcing court injunctions to clear some roads.
Student demonstrators Tuesday put up no resistance as part of a road in the Admiralty district, directly across from the legislature, was opened to traffic.
Several protesters said it was time to end the demonstrations, which have failed to win any concessions from either the Hong Kong government or the central authorities in Beijing.
But some demonstrators are frustrated with the strategy of nonviolence advocated by the lawmakers, academics, and students who earlier this year conceived of the sit-in protests as a way to pressure the Hong Kong and Beijing governments to allow free elections in the former British colony.
Gee, I wonder who they could be.
--more--"
"Hong Kong protesters denied entry into China" Washington Post November 25, 2014
HONG KONG — A growing number of people in Hong Kong who have taken part in the city’s recent prodemocracy protests are suddenly finding themselves being denied entry into China.
Related: New York courts Chinese tourists
The action has shocked many people and sparked widespread belief that Chinese authorities have assembled a blacklist with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of names.
They call it a no-fly list over here.
Hong Kong authorities said they plan to remove some barricades Tuesday from a protest site in the Mong Kok district, the scene of earlier violent confrontations between demonstrators and police. A court order has been issued to remove obstructions from the site, which activists have occupied for nearly two months.
In a well-publicized incident last week, three leaders of the ongoing student protest were stopped while trying to fly to Beijing to confront Chinese leaders.
Their case drew international headlines, but subsequent cases have been more surprising because they involve relative unknowns — not leaders — who merely participated in protests, among hundreds of thousands of others.
For some, the denials threaten their livelihoods because of how intertwined Hong Kong’s economy is with mainland China’s. They may also cast a pall on freedom of expression in Hong Kong and have already fueled paranoia among protesters.
--more--"
"Hong Kong police struggle to clear protest; Reinforcements defy court order to leave street" by Chris Buckley and Alan Wong, New York Times November 26, 2014
HONG KONG — Thousands of demonstrators surged into a Hong Kong neighborhood Tuesday, defying a police attempt to shrink one of the protest camps that have filled some city streets for nearly two months. A display of official force early in the day gave way to a night of angry crowds facing off against police officers, some of them wielding batons and pepper spray.
Police officers had initially assembled Tuesday to enforce a court injunction demanding that protesters stop blocking Argyle Street in Mong Kok, a crowded commercial neighborhood where demonstrators have camped since late September. Two sites in other parts of Hong Kong are also occupied by protesters, who are demanding fully democratic elections for the city’s leader.
They used those to clear cities here.
The police did not try to clear Nathan Road, where most of the protesters in Mong Kok have been camping. Still, even with hundreds of officers mobilized, clearing a 50-yard stretch of Argyle Street took much of the day. Hundreds of demonstrators and supporters crowded into the area, many of them walking the brief distance from Nathan Road.
In the middle of the afternoon, the police ordered protesters, onlookers, and reporters to move aside and allow court bailiffs to clear the street. After issuing warnings over megaphones, the police advanced and dragged off about a dozen people who had not left.
“They did not want our reinforcements to come in the evening, after working hours, so they rushed to clear us off the street,” said Matthew Wong, a 24-year-old information technology worker who was among the protesters.
As of 8 p.m. local time, more than 80 people had been arrested for unlawful assembly, assaulting officers, obstruction, or criminal contempt of court, according to a police spokeswoman. A hundred or so officers remained on guard around the street after opening one lane to traffic.
But as has happened before the street demonstrations erupted, the police had difficulty maintaining control after initially dispersing the crowds. Protesters and onlookers massed outside a mall near the cleared street, and the police formed lines to try to get the growing crowd to move on, producing tense, chaotic scenes in the crammed area.
Milling groups of protesters discussed plans to push back the police or to defend their remaining area, which was filled with thousands of people.
“If too many people go home because of work tomorrow, the police might break through,” said Ross Yang, an event manager in his 20s who was among the masked protesters. “We should keep going, to tell the government that force is not a solution.”
What do you think I have been doing here the last 8 years?
The Hong Kong police indicated that there would be no letup of pressure Wednesday, when they would enforce a court injunction ordering people to clear Nathan Road. But thousands remained on the street late into the night.
By evening, confrontations were bubbling up in various locations nearby as people got off work and joined the protesters, with the police unable to disperse them.
Outside one subway exit, hundreds of protesters and onlookers yelled at the police to retreat. The protesters handed out safety helmets and goggles, preparing for a tense night.
The police, for their part, shut a subway exit in an effort to limit the growing crowd, mostly young men.
The demonstrators want the Chinese government to open elections for the city’s chief executive to candidates who have not been approved by Beijing. In recent weeks, the protest movement seems to have become polarized over maintaining the blockades.
Growing numbers of protesters have said it is time to consider leaving their street camps. But a minority, which is especially vocal at the Mong Kok site, says that only continued defiance can win concessions from the government.
The hallmark of a U.S-backed group.
--more--"
Did this concession win anything (it did with me because we never see this in AmeriKa)?
"7 Hong Kong police charged with beating protester" by Michael Forsythe, New York Times November 27, 2014
HONG KONG — Seven police officers were arrested in Hong Kong on Wednesday, accused of beating a prodemocracy protester last month.
The officers, who were not identified, were arrested on charges of “assault occasioning actual bodily harm,” according to a police statement.
In the predawn hours of Oct. 15, Ken Tsang, a social worker, was kicked and beaten by a number of police officers. The incident was filmed by a television crew and heightened animosity between the Hong Kong police and protesters after it was shared on social media.
The Hong Kong government and the police have come under criticism for moving slowly to prosecute the officers. The police statement issued Wednesday said there had been no delay.
Has a familiar ring, doesn't it, Amerikan?
“Police reiterate that if any force member commits illegal acts, police will handle this seriously and investigation will be conducted in a fair and impartial manner,” the statement said.
The move to arrest the officers came after the police successfully cleared one of Hong Kong’s busiest shopping streets of encamped protesters Wednesday. But only hours later, demonstrators gathered in force again in the Mong Kok neighborhood, only a short distance away from the original encampment on Nathan Road.
Late in the evening, hundreds of police officers and demonstrators faced off on Sai Yeung Choi Street, one block east of Nathan Road, which had been closed to traffic almost continuously for the past two months as protesters settled in a tent city.
In a pattern seen again and again during these protests, the police action during the day was countered by a surge of boisterous demonstrators after darkness fell.
That's the narrative anyway.
Hundreds of people shouted “I want true universal suffrage” in Cantonese, with their chants echoing off the tall buildings in the area, amplifying their voices. Several people were arrested by police officers.
“They’ve already cleared the site; I have nowhere else to go,” said Viktor Chu, 26, a leasing officer who was wearing a face mask and safety goggles as he stood with protesters on Shantung Street. “I must come out and show my opinion.”
Chu said the protesters hoped to retake some part of Mong Kok to continue pressuring the government. The demonstrations began two months ago in response to a decision by China’s legislature to set strict guidelines for elections for Hong Kong’s chief executive.
Scholars and prodemocracy advocates say the rules ensure that only people approved by Beijing will be allowed to appear on the ballot.
“The occupation is only a means to a goal,” Chu said. “We’re not just here to occupy something. We’re occupying something to give pressure to the government.”
The streets filled with the protesters are lined with stores catering to mainland tourists, particularly jewelry shops and pharmacies.
The protesters, in a nod to the commercial significance of the location, chanted “Shopping! Shopping!” in Mandarin after the police demanded to know why they were there.
No, you need to STOP shopping!
--more--"
