November 03, 2014
Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
HONG KONG — The dramatic opening of the Occupy Central movement five weeks ago, complete with liberal use of batons, pepper spray and tear gas by the police against unarmed students, triggered a surge of support for the young pro-democracy protesters. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of demonstrators still occupy several of the city’s main traffic arteries, camping out in neat lines of colorful tents.
That police brutality unexpectedly heralded the amazing rise of a new socio-political force. Already dubbed the Occupy Central Generation, its members, drawn from the cohorts born during and since the 1980s, are mostly students and young workers, many of them professionals. While also dedicated to democracy and deeply wary of Beijing, they are more localist and have less affinity for the cultural identity of mainland Chinese than their elders, including the original proponents of Occupy Central and stalwarts among Hong Kong’s Pan Democrats, as the pro-democracy camp is known here.
Last week, when top government officials held a dialogue on political reform with the protesters, five university students and leaders of the movement were invited as its representatives. The civility displayed by both sides could not mask what was in large measure a generational face-off, and the talks utterly failed to bridge the gap.
The officials rejected the students’ demand that candidates for the 2017 election for chief executive, the territory’s top post, could be nominated by independent citizens’ groups. Quoting verbatim from a recent ruling from Beijing, the officials maintained that potential candidates must first be vetted by a nomination committee of 1,200 persons, chosen from specially defined interest groups mostly favorable to Beijing. Neither the student leaders nor the wider public were impressed.
There appears to be no easy resolution to the standoff: The government seems hesitant to use force again to end the occupation, and the students are not backing down.
Earlier fears that the People’s Liberation Army would come in to do a Tiananmen II have been dispelled by spokesmen carrying word from Beijing. The reason for this self-restraint is obvious: Mainland-controlled companies account for some 60 percent of Hong Kong’s stock market capitalization, and the Communist Party’s princelings own many private equity funds and much prime real estate here. They are in no mood to see a bloodbath in Hong Kong, which could trigger a flight of capital and a collapse of the asset markets.
The protesters, for their part, seem resolute. Unlike their parents and grandparents, most of them have grown up middle class in a city-polity with good governance, and mostly during what is widely deemed to be its golden period — from the late 1970s to the handover in 1997. Well-educated, well-traveled and well-informed, they have a surprisingly strong disdain for what they see in mainland China: an authoritarian government, corrupt, uncivil, lacking in the rule of law and controlled by an elite much inflated with a misbegotten sense of cocky patriotism.
These young people have been further alienated in recent years by the intrusion of the mainland’s economic clout, which among other things has driven real estate prices incredibly high. Immigrants from China keep arriving, and young Hong Kongers perceive the government’s preferential treatment of them as depriving locals of educational opportunities, health care and other benefits. They deplore seeing shops that used to serve their daily needs being turned into pricey outlets for well-heeled mainland tourists and bootleggers — “locusts,” as the latter are sometimes called. In fact, the more young Hong Kongers depend on the mainland economy for employment and income, the more they resent Beijing.
