FILE – Pro-democracy protesters holding yellow umbrellas attend a rally outside the Legislative Council in Hong Kong, Wednesday, June 17, 2015.
July 03, 2015 1:38 AM
This week, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists turned out in lower numbers than expected for marches marking the 18th anniversary for the territory’s handover to China.
After almost a year of non-stop rallies, some 48,000 Hong Kongers took to the street on July 1, making it one of the annual protest’s lowest turnouts since 2003, according to the organizers. Police estimates say the number peaked at 20,000.
That led Johnson Yeung of Civil Human Rights Front into admitting the city’s momentum for democracy has slightly slowed down. And a lack of clear goals and direction for the movement’s future has kept the numbers down, one of the key protest leaders, Joshua Huang of Scholarism, told local media.
But Emily Lau Wai-hing, chairperson of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, downplays the significance of the turnout, said the struggle will go on.
“And now that, the force, the universal [suffrage] package is voted down, there’s a sigh of relief, and of course, people will regroup and continue their struggle,” Lau said.
Hong Kongers haven’t pulled away from their political engagement, she added.
Two weeks earlier, the city’s legislature voted down a China-backed electoral reform proposal by a 28 to 8 vote. The measure would have changed the way the Chinese-controlled territory chooses its next chief executive in 2017, but critics said it did little to alter a system that allows only pro-Beijing candidates.
The rejection was widely viewed as a loss for the city’s pro-Beijing political parties.
But Zhang Jian of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies said the vote has led Beijing to put the city’s electoral reform on hold, posing a problem for pro-democracy advocates.
“It’s actually not in the interest of the pan-democracy camp after it voted down the political reform proposal because they [pro-democracy activists] will now be excluded in the platform, which used to allow them to further take part in the political arena, and risk losing momentum,” Zhang said.
