HONG KONG—Police arrested 511 people who refused to leave a street in the financial district Wednesday, a day after a huge crowd marched across the city to mark the anniversary of the city’s handover to China by denouncing interference from Beijing and demanding democratic elections.
Those arrested were mostly students who had vowed to stay in the park in the city’s Central district until 8 a.m. Police began clearing the park in the early morning hours and the last students were taken at that time after the crowd counted down to 8 a.m.
Hong Kong will see a ‘rough period’ in politics over the next six months and possibly a new mass street protest, says Danny Gittings of the University of Hong Kong. The WSJ’s Ramy Inocencio recaps July 1st protests marking the city’s return to China.
Some of those taken away by police shouted and struggled, while others walked or were carried silently. Police held signs over the crowd telling them to board police buses.
The protesters were arrested for unauthorized assembly and obstructing police officers, police said. None of the protesters has been formally charged.
Tuesday marked the 17th anniversary of the end of British colonial rule and the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty, a public holiday that has become a day of protest. Demands for universal suffrage are growing while the public is increasingly concerned about Beijing’s approach to the city, which was promised a high degree of autonomy after the handover.
The slogan of this year’s rally was “Defending Hong Kong Authority: No fear of Beijing’s threat of comprehensive control.”
Organizers estimate 510,000 people joined the rally, while police estimated a crowd of 98,600 at its peak. People who have seen previous rallies say they have never seen a crowd as large, and it took more than four hours for the last marchers to leave the protest’s gathering point at Victoria Park. Organizers had hoped to draw more than half a million people to the march.
Disparity between organizers and police in estimates happens every year, with analysts saying that the true number typically lies somewhere in the middle. The University of Hong Kong, a more neutral party, estimates around 154,000 to 172,000 people took part in the protests. Last year, organizers estimated that 430,000 people took part in the protest, while police estimated the rally size at 66,000 at its peak.
Beijing has said universal suffrage in Hong Kong will begin in 2017. But the city’s government has wrestled with the question of how to introduce direct elections.
“I have never come to protest in the July 1 march before,” said Kwok Lin-ka, a wheelchair-bound 81-year-old waiting for the protest to begin. “If I didn’t come this year, I feel like my grandchildren and great-grandchildren would never forgive me.”
Late Tuesday night, hundreds of people gathered at the rally’s end point in the Central business district at a sit-in organized by students. Leaders from the student group said they intended to march to Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying’s office later in the night and said they were ready to face arrest. People continued to arrive in Central from the protest’s starting point. A representative of a pro-democracy group told the crowd to “prepare for the possibility” that arrests would occur.
Word spread among the protesters that the police expected them to leave by 4:30 a.m.
The sit-in was seen as a precursor to future protests. A pro-democracy coalition, Occupy Central, has called for protesters to paralyze the city’s financial district later this year if their demands for universal suffrage in the election of Hong Kong’s top leader aren’t met.
A carnival atmosphere prevailed at Victoria Park, with crowds singing “Do You Hear the People Sing” from the musical “Les Misérables” competing for attention with a uniformed, drum-heavy marching band convened by Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in mainland China. Organizers said more than 100 civil groups joined the event.
Along the protest’s route, volunteers from Hong Kong’s panoply of political movements handed out pamphlets and shouted slogans supporting a range of political views, from demanding the resignation of Mr. Leung, to mourning perceived losses in press freedom, to protecting the city’s northeast from development. At one point, police allowed protesters onto the tracks of Hong Kong’s tram line to accommodate the swelling crowd. By the time the front of the protest reached Central, protesters were drenched by one of the city’s common summer rainstorms.
In 2003, more than 500,000 people took to the streets during a July 1 rally, demanding the resignation of former Chief Executive Tung Chee-Hwa after he said he planned to introduce an antisubversion law. Mr. Tung stepped down in March 2005, nearly two years before completing his second five-year term.
Mr. Leung struck a conciliatory note with pro-democracy advocates earlier Tuesday, saying he and his government “will do our utmost to forge a consensus” on implementing universal suffrage. Mr. Leung spoke after the official ceremony Tuesday morning marking the anniversary of the handover but stopped short of detailing plans for the vote for chief executive in 2017.
Earlier this week, Occupy Central completed a 10-day unofficial referendum that has no legal standing, though it represented a chance for residents to express their views on the mechanism for picking candidates for the city’s leader. The results, released Monday, showed that almost 800,000 people—more than 10% of Hong Kong’s 7.2 million population—took part, and a plurality of them backed an electoral-reform proposal that would allow candidates for Hong Kong’s chief executive to be nominated by the public, political parties, or the nominating committee.
The vote results come after a week of heated political rhetoric, with pro-Beijing media denouncing the vote as “an illegal farce.” The organizers of the referendum, however, have interpreted the turnout and results to mean that even temporary acceptance of “non-genuine universal suffrage…[has] been defeated.”
Earlier in June, Beijing stressed in a report that Hong Kong has only “the power to run local affairs as authorized by the central leadership.” That position has stirred fierce opposition in the former British colony.