MCLC: protesters march in HK

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: protesters march in HK
***********************************************************

Source: NYT 
(7/1/12):http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/world/asia/protesters-march-as-n
ew-hong-kong-leader-is-sworn-in.html

Protesters March as New Hong Kong Leader Is Sworn In
By KEITH BRADSHER and KEVIN DREW

HONG KONG — Huge crowds of protesters thronged the streets of Hong Kong on
Sunday afternoon, hours after President Hu Jintao of China swore in a new
chief executive and cabinet for the territory.

Surging down broad avenues between high-rises in a central shopping
district, the protesters marched toward two government office complexes
carrying a variety of banners. A wide range of causes were represented,
including greater democracy in Hong Kong and calls for better state
pensions and day care.

But the most common theme was derision toward Hong Kong’s new chief
executive, Leung Chun-ying. Democracy activists contend that he is “a wolf
in sheep’s clothing,” whose sympathies for the Chinese Communist Party may
lead him to roll back some of the city’s cherished civil liberties —
although Mr. Leung has denied that.

“We worry that as he becomes our leader, he will betray our freedoms and
civil rights,” said Juno Wu, 24, a librarian.

The Hong Kong government issued a statement on Sunday evening saying that
it would protect civil liberties.
“The government will uphold the core values of Hong Kong and protect the
freedom and rights of the people,” the statement said. “The chief
executive and his team will honor their pledge to hold themselves
accountable to the people.”

People streamed out of Victoria Park, where the protest began, and into
the march for more than four hours, making it one of the largest political
protests in Hong Kong in the past decade — or even anywhere in China,
since protests are banned on the mainland.

The Hong Kong police said that the number of people in the park at the
beginning of the march had been 55,000. Organizers said that 400,000
people had participated in the march, including many who joined along the
nearly two-mile route.

Ivan Choy, a Hong Kong politics analyst at Chinese University of Hong
Kong, said that the crowd’s size relative to Hong Kong’s population of
seven million would make it harder for Mr. Leung to preserve his political
legitimacy. “We have 5 percent of the population asking him to step down
and focusing on his integrity,” Mr. Choy said.

The protest took place after Mr. Hu had already flown out of Hong Kong at
midday, following the inauguration ceremony.

An unexpected element of the demonstration that may discomfit Beijing
officials lay in the participation of hundreds of mainland Chinese who
carried banners denouncing the confiscation of their farms for
government-backed real estate projects in communities near Hong Kong.

“It is not possible to protest in China, so we come here instead,” said a
middle-aged mainlander who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid
government retaliation.

Mainland Chinese have frequently attended vigils and other protests here,
but usually at night. It is unusual for them to carry large banners
through the streets in broad daylight.

Earlier, Mr. Leung’s swearing-in ceremony was briefly disrupted when one
of the 2,300 guests began shouting during Mr. Hu’s speech. An unidentified
man asked Mr. Hu to end one-party rule in mainland China and to remember
June 4, a reference to the date of the military crackdown in 1989 on
protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Security guards quickly escorted the man out of the room.

Mr. Hu promised the audience that Beijing would uphold the “one country,
two systems” model in place since 1997, when Britain returned Hong Kong to
Chinese sovereignty; the move came after British and Chinese leaders
promised considerable autonomy to the city until at least 2047.

As he took office, Mr. Leung did not speak in Cantonese, the Chinese
dialect prevalent in Hong Kong, and instead used Mandarin, the dominant
dialect on the mainland, to say his government would immediately begin to
confront the array of social issues. In June, the Hong Kong government
said the divide between rich and poor, already the greatest in any economy
in Asia, had reached its widest mark since the beginning of record-keeping
in 1971.

Iris Wong, a 26-year-old Hong Kong resident, said the issues facing the
city were interlinked.

“There isn’t one issue I’m concerned about more than others,” she said.
“They’re all connected. If we had democracy and a political system that
was not dominated by a few wealthy people, we could begin to address
economic problems.”

When Mr. Leung entered the election campaign last fall, he was widely seen
as an underdog. His rival, Henry Tang, the scion of a wealthy
manufacturing family originally from Shanghai, had strong support from the
influential Shanghai faction in mainland Chinese politics.

But Mr. Tang’s candidacy imploded in a series of setbacks
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/world/asia/henry-tang-a-candidate-to-lea
d-hong-kong-runs-into-trouble.html>, notably the disclosure early this
year that an extensive basement had been built under his wife’s house
without planning permission from the government or the payment of real
estate taxes and fees. So it came as a surprise a week ago when it turned
out that Mr. Leung had six illegal structures at his home — valued at 500
million Hong Kong dollars, or $64 million — in one of Hong Kong’s most
prestigious neighborhoods.

Mr. Leung, one of the city’s most successful real estate surveyors, has
publicly apologized. He said that four of the structures were already
there when he bought the house in 2000 and that he did not realize the
other two, a glass canopy and a trellis, were illegal.

Hilda Wang and Jacob Fromer contributed reporting.