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 Post Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 3:05 am 
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I think the government has screwed up royally.

Right until it happened, there was a possibility that Occupy Central would have turned out to be no big deal. A few thousand students blocking off one road downtown, for a couple of days, until the police carried them away. That's what it could have been. But no, the authorities were set on playing hardball, and it turned out to be the equivalent of standing in front of a fan and throwing poop at it.

A week an a half ago last Monday, a student class boycott started in front of the government headquarters. They had permits to remain there until Friday. Saturday rolled around. The students didn't leave. They were tolerated. Then, in the very early hours of Sunday morning, leaders of Occupy Central announced that they would kick off their civil disobedience protest two days early in order to ride on the momentum of the student protest.

On Sunday morning, more people started making their way to the government headquarters.

A bit past noon, the police cordoned off all entrances to the protest site. People were allowed to leave, but nobody was allowed to enter. They started getting a build-up of people around the cordons. People started shoving at the barricades (this is what seasoned protesters here do - it's almost like a game to them). The cops shoved back. People shoved harder. The cops started smacking them with batons and spraying them with pepper spray and ordering them to disperse. The protesters put up umbrellas to protect their faces. This was all televised live. The shoving continued throughout the afternoon; meanwhile more people kept arriving. By mid-afternoon they had counter-surrounded the police. There was nowhere for all these people to stand, so they stood in the road, blocking traffic. If they had been allowed into the protest site, they wouldn't have. Central was now occupied.

At around 6 p.m., the riot cops put on gas masks and raised a blag flag. It read: DISPERSE OR WE WILL FIRE TEAR GAS. And they did. In the most literal sense of the word, the protesters dispersed. Yhey ran backwards (and were lucky nobody was trampled). But they didn't stop protesting. They just continued protesting further down the road. And when the tear gas dispersed, they came back. And then more tear gas was fired. A lot of them had come prepared with goggles and masks and raincoats. Meanwhile, people watching this at home on TV were outraged, and as the evening wore on, more and more people came out to join them.

Some started up a new protest site in a shopping district 2.5 km down the road. By 7 p.m. there was a third protest site in a crowded shopping district on the other side of the harbour. Instead of one road blockage, the cops were now looking at at least three. 50,000 people in three locations across the city.

Eventually someone high up must have realized they were making it worse. People on the ground say that they saw the cops making preparations to take out the water cannons. But instead, the order to withdraw was given, and the streets were given over to the protesters. Now I think they're going to try to wait it out, hoping that eventually people get fed up and go home.

Where was I while all this was happening? At home with a bloody migraine. I finally went out on Tuesday night and joined the sit-in for about 4 hours. Then I went home to bed. I'm a wuss :P

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 Post Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 4:07 am 
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I've been reading about this in the paper, and I'm glad to get your perspective on this. There's a bit of a worry over here that things will turn messy and give the authorities reason to crack down in a bad way. At the same time, we're all rooting for the protesters. Talk about a balancing act.

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 Post Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 11:28 am 
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Keep an eye on the news. Some serious stuff is gonna go down within the next hour.

Edit: the standoff seems to have been averted, for now. There is a mass of protesters and cops amassed in front of the government headquarters. The protesters have surrounded the building to stop senior officials from going in to work tomorrow morning. The cops were seen carrying a load of riot gear into the building as if preparing for a siege. It's been tense. Diffused somewhat when the government agreed to a meeting with protest leaders in a press conference just before midnight, but I am not sure what things will look like in the morning.

I already know that the protesters will lose. Beijing neither negotiates nor compromises. It's just a matter of whether things will end peacefully, and whether things will get better or worse in the long run.

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 Post Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 1:21 am 
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Things are still tense, but nothing crazy has broken out yet.
The protesters have basically laid siege to the government headquarters. Civil servants have been told to work from home today. Protesters have been stopping meal trucks from getting through to the cops amassed inside. Yesterday an ambulance was used to sneak in riot gear; today the protesters are suspicious. They offered to carry the supplies in to government headquarters themselves; the police refused. So there's probably 80 or 100 very hungry policemen stuck inside now.

Late last night, scuffles broke out among the protesters between a minority who wanted to block of the one remaining free east-west road on the north shore of Hong Kong Island, and the majority who thought that doing so would shoot the movement in the foot. The latter formed a human chain to try to block the former from walking out onto the road. It didn't work, and the road was partly blocked for a few hours this morning. I think they've finally been wrangled out.

Some people are getting pissed off at the protesters for getting in everybody's way. Hecklers are showing up. Eggs have been thrown. A determined counter-protester has engaged the protesters in a war of dismantling and reassembling their sandbag barricades. Meanwhile, the protesters have lost one of their smaller sites due to dwindling numbers.

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 Post Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 6:38 am 
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An angry mob has descended on a much smaller number of protesters at one of the protest sites. They are pulling down tents and beating people up. Too few cops to keep order.

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 Post Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 9:37 pm 
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Stay safe (being a wuss helps!), Kea.

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 Post Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 1:04 am 
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Major mob violence last night. Instigated by the Triads, claiming to represent pissed off shopkeepers. Police mostly let it happen. Attempted to use the violence as an excuse to clear the protesters out, but more protesters showed up and reinforced the barricades.

8 of 19 people arrested had known triad backgrounds. Seriously depressed. I think the government is behind it. Can't use police, use thugs.

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 Post Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 12:44 pm 
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Yarg, this all sounds like it might be turning into something pretty bad. Stay safe, Kea.

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 Post Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2014 5:41 am 
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How do you rent a mob that big and keep it covered up? You can't. With a mob of that size, you're getting into "My coworker knows a guy who was offered $200 to go rough up protesters" territory. One teenager living in a low-income suburb about as gang-ridden as you'll ever get in Hong Kong even contacted the media and said that he'd been receiving text messages offering cash for intimidating protesters, and that he knew people who actually did it.

Which is probably why the mobs have backed off in the last couple of days. They didn't succeed in scaring enough protesters away for the police to clear out the rest, and they're becoming an embarrassment to the government. Or maybe they're waiting to bring in hardcore thugs - a cache of knives was found near one protest area. You can't just recruit some random lulz-seeking wannabe tough guys for that, you need to find people willing to go to prison for large sums of money.

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 Post Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2014 10:33 am 
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I guess thugs are primarily hired to scare protesters away or to create minor escalations, where the police can arrest both sides. If it starts to look, like the goverment can control neither civil rights movement nor the gangs and thus there is large scale chaos, this is more of an embaressment for the goverment, then if they just have protesters.

That is unless they are actually paid by someone, who hopes that some mainland power takes over openly, and therefore wants the Hongkong leadership look bad. Luckily i don't know of any other indicators for that.

Are there any attempts at finding some sort of compromise? Even if it's some form of Austrian solution*?

* you find some wording, that prevents all sides from loosing face, at least if you don't look too closely, and everyone agrees to call it a compromise.

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 Post Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2014 11:28 am 
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It's very difficult. The government agreed to talks on Thursday, but then on Friday the mobs attacked and the students called off the negotiations and demanded an investigation into police misconduct.

Because the police reaction to the mob violence was at best inadequate and at worst suspicious as all hell. If you are a policeman and you've just detained someone for alleged assault do you:
1) Cuff him and put him in the police van, or
2) Flag down a cab for him and send him home?

DING DING DING! The answer is Number 2!

So it took another couple of days for the two sides to even start wanting to talk to each other again, and now they're having talks about having talks. They so far haven't even agreed to the conditions of the negotiations. The student leaders are trying to ensure that the negotiations don't just put them in a room with government officials spouting the same old bullhockey without really listening, and the government is trying to avoid this becoming a real negotiation in which they actually have to adhere to an agreement.

However, the protest can't go on forever. People are going to get tired. They have jobs and school to go to. And the public is going to grow increasingly tired of snarled traffic and hellish commutes and interrupted business.

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 Post Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2014 1:12 pm 
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It's been a crazy couple of weeks.
First the students called off the talks.
And then the talks were back on.
And then the government called off the talks in a snit because the students called more protesters out to rally.
And then a Mysterious Leak (tm) revealed that the Chief Executive of Hong Kong was involved in a secret shady business deal which may or may not constitute bribery of a public official.
And then another rent-a-mob attacked.
And then some poop-stirrers in the protesters' crowd (perhaps plants?) stirred up more conflicts with the police.
And then during the most recent fight, police were filmed by journalists taking an already handcuffed protester into a dark corner and taking turns kicking him.
And then it turns out they picked on the wrong guy, because he belongs to an opposition political party made up mainly of lawyers.
And then there's going to be an investigation. Plus lawsuits up the wazoo.
And now, apparently, the talks are back on again. But it might just be another distraction.

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 Post Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2014 1:23 pm 
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Well, here's hoping that all this crazy is a prelude to actual change. Keep safe Kia.

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 Post Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2014 4:02 am 
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Definitely. Stay safe and well, Kea.

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 Post Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2014 1:51 pm 
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Things got even crazier over the weekend.

On Friday morning, the police partially cleared out one of the protest sites. They took down all the protesters' barricades and dismantled their tents and opened the northbound lane of the road to traffic. They did not clear the protesters themselves out (at this point there were only about three dozen of them left) and allowed them to remain in the southbound lane. So they sat there all day.

Until that evening, when people got off from work. At which point, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people showed up to support the remaining protesters. People streamed out of the subway station and in from all directions, and the police tried to keep them on the sidewalk and prevent them from entering the north-bound side of the road. A crush of people pressed up against the police cordon, completely blocking the sidewalk, to the point where the shops closed up because no customers could get in. Not long after sundown, some smart-arses pushed over the police barriers (or nicked them) and charged into the road. Mayhem ensued.

The cops tried to beat people back with batons and pepper spray. I saw them on TV. You could see the panic on their faces. They were wailing at people with their sticks and spraying them left and right. Several police officers and dozens of protesters were injured. But the police were badly outnumbered. While they were fighting people in front, other protesters came in from side streets in the back. There were just way too many people, and after briefly calling in reinforcements, the riot cops withdrew, leaving a small contingent protecting a major intersection on one end. The protesters quickly rebuilt their barricades using whatever they could scrounge up. Stolen police barriers, municipal garbage cans, wooden pallets, bamboo poles, zip ties, appropriated bus stop signs. Ngau and I were there on Friday night. We showed up after most of the violence had died down and picked a spot right in the middle of the re-seized road, as far from both front lines as possible, close to a side street in case we needed to make a rapid exit. It was quiet there and we camped out all night.

On Saturday night, there was further violence as some hardcore protesters tried to seize back the intersection. They lost, and were forced to cede some 10 metres of ground.

So here's a question for you to chew on, especially in light of Ferguson. At what point does a protest stop being civil disobedience and start being a riot? And at what point are the police justified in using force? And how much force of what kinds of force should they use?

The protesters are going right up to the literally bleeding edge of non-violence. They don't smash and burn and loot, nor do they throw rocks and bottles at the police. Most of them refrain from physical retaliation if hit by batons and pepper spray. However, they do come equipped with goggles and helmets and dust masks. They use umbrellas as shields while advancing forwards, almost like a Greek phalanx, which results in cops getting jabbed with the pointy ends. They push over police cordons and actively try to seize ground. To the police, these tactics are an act of aggression and they will use force to push the protesters back. They even see raised arms as an act of provocation. "Go ahead, smack me around, I'm not going to punch you but I am also going to insist on being right where you don't want me to be." The higher ups seem to have handed down a moratorium on more tear gas, so they use pepper spray and batons.

Justified use of force, or police brutality?

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