Hong Kong protest leader: New strategies needed to pressure government
Hong Kongs pro-democracy movement will need to muster more political power to force the government to listen to its demands, said Alex Chow, one of the student leaders of the demonstrations, as the sit-ins stretched on Wednesday.
We will need to further justify our actions and rethink the strategy of [just] calling on more people to occupy the streets, said Chow, leader of the Hong Kong Federation of Students. If occupying the streets [alone] could force the government to back down, they already would have.
Chow said protest organizers are now thinking out how to regroup [and get] that many protesters back to the streets, while at the same time figuring out how to bring the campaign from street to the community, and mobilize more power from Hong Kong people to force the government to change.
Protesters in Hong Kong, a former British territory that returnedto Chinese rule in 1997 under a framework known as one country, twosystems, took to the streets late last month to demand open nominationsof candidates for the chief executive election in 2017. Chinas centralgovernment in Beijing has rejected such a framework, insisting that allcandidates must be approved by a special committee.
Five government officials met Tuesday with student leaders in the first of what is expected to be several rounds of talks aimed at resolving the political crisis. But the session did little to raise hope that a resolution was close at hand.
In an interview with The Times after the talks, Chow, 24, expressed disappointment about the dialogue and discussed what is next for the campaign.
What the officials were willing to offer was even less than what we expected, he said. No one knew what they are actually talking about. They said they would submit a report to Beijing and consider setting up a platform to supervise constitutional development, but there were no details, no timeline, nothing."
Chow said that although the Hong Kong government could reject the Aug. 31 decision by the Chinese National Peoples Congress to require strict screening of candidates for the next Hong Kong chief executive, the reality is that Hong Kong officials wouldn't dare do that, at least not yet.
To change that, Chow said, more political power is needed. How Chow plans to accomplish that, however, remains to be seen.
The real battle right now is not confronting or negotiating with the government; it is a battle of two strengths, he said. It is about if we have enough political power to force the other give in and give us more.
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Hong Kong protest leader: New strategies needed to pressure government