The interesting point there is that the police might not have actually been lying at all. Weird.

Well, others have pointed out that the police estimate last month for a completely-sitting-still candlelight vigil on June 4 on the same set of soccer pitches was 99,500 people. So unless the police gave a vast over-estimate last month, it just does not seem plausible that only 98,600 exited the soccer pitches this Tuesday. That time lapse video shows so many more people streaming in as others exited.

After some further reading up on crowd counting(1), experts say that a "dense crowd" contains about 1 person per 4.5 square feet, or 0.42 m^2. Mosh pit density or Tokyo subway at rush-hour is 0.27 m^2. I don't think it was quite mosh pit density in the soccer pitches, but it was definitely a very dense crowd.


(1) OK, one lousy article from Popular Mechanics

China's endgame is revealed. They have organized:
a) A counter-petition, and
b) A counter-protest,
with the goal of proving that there are more "loyalists" than "traitors".

The counter petition was gloriously free of hacking, allowed anybody to sign whether they lived in Hong Kong or not, and took no measures to prevent duplicate or false signatures. There were numerous reports of large companies requiring their employees to sign the thing, and signature gatherers went out to rural villages to get elderly illiterate farmers to sign without exactly telling them what they were signing. "Sign this thing if you support peace and love and puppies and oppose hooligans". They claim to have gathered 1.5 million signatures compared to the pro-democracy camp's 800,000.

The counter-protest happened yesterday, amid reports that protesters were being bussed in over the border to participate, elderly people were offered free lunches and cash payments, and companies volun-told their employees to join. The police claim there were 111,000 people, higher than for the first march. The university says there were between 79,000 and 88,000, half their estimate for the first march.

Regardless, China will now claim that they have proven that the democrats are a hopeless minority who nobody cares about, so shut up, you whiny children.

So, in short, they're covering their ears and going "LA LA LA LA I can't hear yooooou....", right?

Well, on the bright side, it means they're not clamping down heavily on the democrats. (Presumably someone pointed out to them that clamping down heavily gives said democrats a certain extra visibility). And, in the meantime, the same democrats have gathered a fair amount of actual support.

Well, if "clamping down heavily" means openly hauling people off to prison, no, they haven't done that. They can't do that without losing face, scaring investors, and inviting a diplomatic crisis. But they have surreptitiously mailed razor blades, hacked personal information, launched smear campaigns, and made death threats towards people deemed sufficiently trouble-making. One of my friends, a freelance opinion writer, received threats against himself and his family. The pro-democracy news site he worked for was intimidated into shutting down. They are clamping down lightly, with an air of plausible deniability.

Oh yes, and the government's official "public consultation" on democratic reform has been blatantly rigged. Over 90% of the submissions were obvious copypasta form letters, largely from anonymous sources. They of course support the most conservative reform option: Beijing gets to pick all the candidates before the public is allowed to vote for them.