Hong Kong’s first large scale handover march in 2003 drew 500,000 protesters, a record which has yet to be broken. Year after year, the crowd varies in size depending on the political climate, but none of the July 1st protests have matched the 2003 turnout.
Yet.
This year, over half a million protesters are predicted to take to the streets and call for universal suffrage. This estimate comes after 787,000 people voted in the ten day long Occupy Central vote. The much publicised vote followed the first white paper Beijing has issued on Hong Kong since 1997, seen as written confirmation of what Hongkongers had feared after the handover: that we would lose our autonomy. While the general consensus is that the white paper was written to discourage civil disobedience, it has only served to spur several citizens into action and increase the expected number of protesters from 50,000 to 150,000.
Universal suffrage has been a perennial cause in Hong Kong ever since the handover, but recent actions from Beijing have provoked new levels of discontent from Hongkongers who are tired of not seeing results. Beijing has promised that Hong Kong residents will be able to vote for chief executive in the upcoming 2017 election, but rejected the proposal that Hongkongers should have a say in selecting the candidates, instead reiterating the importance of having a chief executive who displayed ‘loyalty’ and ‘love’ for China.
Another hot-button issue is LegCo’s plan to build two towns in the New Territories, which Civil Human Rights Front convenor Johnson Yeung Ching-yin says is one of the controversies that could make a big difference in this year’s protest. The Civil Human Rights Front has organised the annual march since 2002, but are expecting the 2014 march to be the biggest since the handover. The Front has increased the number of stewards in the crowd today from 150 to 200 and asked the police to close all six lanes outside Victoria Park, where the march will begin, in anticipation. Police have only agreed to close three lanes and the tram lane, but also seem to be expecting the worse, as the Police College in Aberdeen will be used as a detention centre for mass arrests and some 4000 police officers are expected to be deployed today.
Today’s march will begin at 3pm in Victoria Park and conclude at the pedestrian area in Chater Road, Central.
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Photo: Pro democracy activists distribute leaflets outside a polling station in Hong Kong on June 22, 2014. Philippe Lopez / AFP
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