Occupy Central

Hong Kong’s Occupy Generation
By LIAN YI ZHENG OCTOBER 31, 2014 HONG KONG
— The dramatic opening of the Occupy Central movement five weeks ago, complete with liberal use of batons, pepper spray and tear gas by the police against unarmed students, triggered a surge of support for the young pro-democracy protesters. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of demonstrators still occupy several of the city’s main traffic arteries, camping out in neat lines of colorful tents. That police brutality unexpectedly heralded the amazing rise of a new socio-political force. Already dubbed the Occupy Central Generation, its members, drawn from the cohorts born during and since the 1980s, are mostly students and young workers, many of them professionals. While also dedicated to democracy and deeply wary of Beijing, they are more localist and have less affinity for the cultural identity of mainland Chinese than their elders, including the original proponents of Occupy Central and stalwarts among Hong Kong’s Pan Democrats, as the pro-democracy camp is known here. Last week, when top government officials held a dialogue on political reform with the protesters, five university students and leaders of the movement were invited as its representatives. The civility displayed by both sides could not mask what was in large measure a generational face-off, and the talks utterly failed to bridge the gap. The officials rejected the students’ demand that candidates for the 2017 election for chief executive, the territory’s top post, could be nominated by independent citizens’ groups. Quoting verbatim from a recent ruling from Beijing, the officials maintained that potential candidates must first be vetted by a nomination committee of 1,200 persons, chosen from specially defined interest groups mostly favorable to Beijing. Neither the student leaders nor the wider public were impressed. SHARE SAVE Show Full Article Most Popular on NYTimes.com  POLITICAL MEMO Why Republicans Keep Telling Everyone They’re Not Scientists  OP-ED COLUMNIST Apologizing to Japan  Judge in Maine Eases Restrictions on Nurse  BITS BLOG Reddit Opens a Crowdfunding Site  BITS BLOG HP Unveils Plan to Make 3-D Printing an Everyday Thing  Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Crashes in New Setback for Commercial Spaceflight  EDITORIAL The Prospect of a Republican Senate  ‘OMG. You’re So Much More Than Awesome.’ Back to top Home World U.S. Politics The Upshot N.Y. / Region Business Day Technology Sports Opinion Science Health Arts Style Photos Video Most Emailed More Sections Settings Download the NYTimes app Help Feedback Terms of Service Privacy © 2014 The New York Times Company