https://t.co/3ipZEQCt56 #umhk #OccupyHongKong pic.twitter.com/VErtiDzf5w
— Helen Ng (@helenlena_hk) December 16, 2014
The PRC tanks never rolled in, but eventually the street-clearing trucks did. According to the Washington Post, “Evidence has emerged that authorities have drawn up a blacklist of those involved in the protests, with several young people denied entry into mainland China in recent weeks.” There are rumors that “Beijing has permanently transferred large numbers of security and intelligence specialists to Hong Kong to keep a much closer eye on the Chinese Communist Party’s many critics.” The protestors made it to the website (though not the cover) of the Rolling Stone. And “leading Hong Kong businesswoman & member of the city’s Executive Council… who is also a board member at the prominent bank HSBC” Laura Cha earned brief international noteriety with a bizarre historical analogy: “American slaves were liberated in 1861 but did not get voting rights until 107 years later,” she was quoted as saying by the Standard newspaper. “So why can’t Hong Kong wait for a while?”
Louisa Lim, in the New Yorker, “Scenes from Occupy Hong Kong’s Last Stand“:
… “We don’t want this to be over,” Theresia Hui, a business consultant in her forties, said. She was distributing free bookmarks stamped with motifs of the Umbrella Movement, as the protests have come to be known—a reference to the umbrellas deployed by students to shield themselves from teargas. For her, the tent city, brimming with collaborative creativity, had been a transformative experience. When university students began boycotting classes at the end of September, she decided to stay neutral. Then police fired teargas at protesters, and she experienced a political awakening. “I was white, and then I became dark yellow, even golden yellow,” she says, referring to the color adopted by the Umbrella Movement. “The government made me this way. They pushed me to become deep yellow.” The use of teargas and the subsequent violence in late September has resulted in plummeting public satisfaction with Hong Kong’s police force—once lauded as Asia’s finest. They are now ranked below China’s People’s Liberation Army in popularity.