{"id":43053,"date":"2014-10-22T20:59:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T20:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=43053 "},"modified":"2014-10-22T20:59:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-22T20:59:00","slug":"43053-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=43053","title":{"rendered":"Hong Kong Students Call For Direct Talks With Beijing Officials on Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2014-10-22<\/div>
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Hong Kong residents protest Leung Chun-ying’s comments that a full democracy would place too much power in the hands of those who earn less than U.S. $1,800 a month, Oct. 22, 2014.<\/div>
 RFA<\/div>
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A student leader of a mass pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong called on Wednesday for direct talks with the ruling Chinese Communist Party following a live televised debate on Tuesday in which local officials offered minor concessions but rejected protesters’ demands for genuine universal suffrage in 2017 elections.<\/div>
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Alex Chow, leader of the influential Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS), told RFA that student leaders of the Occupy Central campaign, which has blocked major highways in the semi-autonomous city since Sept. 28, want to know exactly how far Beijing would let Hong Kong go.<\/div>
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He said the protesters have no plans to leave the occupied sites any time soon, but called for direct dialogue with Chinese officials instead, possibly with a member of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) standing committee.<\/div>
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“I’m talking about … allowing citizens to question them directly,” Chow said. “Hong Kong officials say they can’t [make concessions], but can they really not? Can this be at least on the table?”<\/div>
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Protesters have repeatedly called on embattled chief executive Leung Chun-ying to resign, and want an open nomination process for elections for his replacement in 2017.<\/div>
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An Aug. 31 ruling by Beijing said Hong Kong’s five million-strong electorate will each get a vote in the poll, but that their options will be limited to two or three “patriotic” candidates approved by a nominating committee likely to be stacked with pro-China and pro-establishment members.<\/div>
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Leung’s second-in-command Carrie Lam on Tuesday said the 2017 poll must stay within the framework laid down by the NPC standing committee that controls China’s rubber-stamp parliament, which has had the final power to interret Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, since the 1997 handover.<\/div>
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But she said the government, which ignored calls for public nominations in a July report to Beijing, would file a fresh report to Beijing and consider further changes to election procedures after 2017.<\/div>
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She also invited the students to take part in a “platform” for the exchange of views on further constitutional and political change, post-2017.<\/div>
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Students respond<\/div>
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But the students said Lam’s offers were too vague, and pledged to continue the Occupy movement and to boycott classes.<\/div>
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“About whether there will be talks in the future, this is something that isn’t decided,” Chow told reporters on Wednesday.<\/div>
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“The government has to come up with some way to solve this problem, but what they are offering does not have any practical content,” Chow said.<\/div>
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He said it was hard to see the point of a fresh report from the Hong Kong government to Beijing, as it is unlikely to affect the NPC standing committee’s Aug. 31 edict.<\/div>
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Joshua Wong, head of the academic activism group Scholarism, said he had no intention of taking part in Lam’s “platform.”<\/div>
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“We’re not even done talking about 2017 yet, so why are they thinking about a platform to discuss the post-2017 political framework?” he said.<\/div>
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“Who else would take part in it? What would it discuss? I think that the government needn’t bother inviting us if this platform won’t be discussing the 2017 political reforms,” Wong said.<\/div>
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The students’ comments came as sporadic clashes erupted once more between frustrated taxi-drivers and protesters who have barricaded themselves into a major intersection in the bustling working-class district of Mong Kok.<\/div>
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Police stepped in to prevent physical violence after scuffles and slanging matches broke out.<\/div>
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File for injunction<\/div>
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Meanwhile, a bus company and two transportation industry associations filed a writ with Hong Kong’s High Court, in an attempt to win an injunction ordering protesters camped in hundreds of tents on Harcourt Road in Admiralty district to leave.<\/div>
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The Court has already granted injunctions brought by the transportation industry in Mong Kok, but it remains to be seen whether its bailiffs feel able to enforce them.<\/div>
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Continue reading the original article<\/a>.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>Alex Chow, leader of the influential Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS), told RFA that student leaders of the Occupy Central campaign, which has blocked major highways in the semi-autonomous city since Sept. 28, want to know exactly how far Beijing would let Hong Kong go.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}