Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
By Julie Makinen And Violet Law, Los Angeles Times (TNS)
HONG KONG — Hong Kong police arrested nine people Sunday and Monday suspected of conspiring to manufacture explosives in this semiautonomous Chinese territory. News of the bomb plot comes before a highly anticipated vote in the territory’s legislature this week on a contentious framework for Hong Kong’s next major election.
Acting late Sunday night on a tip about suspicious activities at a vacant TV studio, officers found a cache of explosives and air rifles, along with maps marking a dynamite depot and two neighborhoods, including Admiralty, the seat of the legislature and government headquarters.
Despite reports in local media quoting unnamed police sources linking the possible bomb plot to the upcoming vote, police said at a news conference they had uncovered no evidence of a connection. “We won’t rule out any possibility,” said Au Chin-chan, chief superintendent of the police’s organized crime and triad bureau. Officers said the investigation was continuing. “We’re still trying to locate the depot,” said Au. “We may make more arrests later.
Five men and four women ages 21 to 34 were arrested, and at least one of them admitted to being a member of a “local radical group,” police said.
Two of the men were arrested at the vacant TV studio, police said. They were found with several pounds of white powder and a few liters of brown liquid, which police described as “semi-finished bomb materials.” Munitions experts arrived later and spent several hours detonating the materials. Authorities also found acetone peroxide, or TATP, a primary high explosive, at the home of other suspects.
Willy Lam, a political analyst based in Hong Kong, said more details about the arrests would need to be aired before conclusions could be drawn. But among intellectual and pro-democracy circles, he said, there has been significant discussion about whether Communist Party backers and supporters of current Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying might work behind the scenes to “encourage some of these more radical people to act irrationally and then arrest them as a form of intimidation” against others who might want to peaceably demonstrate their views.
But Lam said there was “no proof” that the arrests were orchestrated in such a fashion.
“Some groups do want to air their grievances in a more passionate manner,” he said, and depending on how far they go it could be a negative for the democracy movement if their tactics alienate more moderate residents.
The suspects included a post-secondary student, a teaching assistant, a construction worker, a technician and three unemployed people, according to the South China Morning Post, quoting an anonymous police source.
Police had warned last week that they were monitoring online forums of activist groups as the vote approached.
A number of pro-democracy groups have organized several days of protests ahead of the vote around the main government complex, where tens of thousands massed last fall in unprecedented street demonstrations that lasted 10 weeks and seriously riled Communist leaders in Beijing.
Those protests were aimed at a proposed election framework drafted by authorities in Beijing for Hong Kong’s next chief executive election. Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 under an arrangement known as “one country, two systems.”
The election framework being voted on this week would, for the first time, allow Hong Kong citizens to cast ballots directly for the territory’s top leader, but would limit their choice to two or three candidates endorsed by a screening panel expected to be composed mainly of “pro-Beijing” members. (Until now, the chief executive has been chosen by a 1,200-member committee.)
For the framework to be implemented, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council must vote to adopt it, and a vote is expected later this week. But a bloc of legislators known as the Pan-Democrats have vowed to block passage of the framework.
Barring any last-minute surprises, it appears that the Pan-Democrats will have the numbers to vote down the election framework. But among supporters of last fall’s democracy protests, there is little jubilation surrounding that likely scenario.
The vote will simply ensure that the current system will remain in place, and little electoral reform is likely to be forthcoming for years, noted Jason Y. Ng, a Hong Kong author and attorney who is writing a book about the protests.”People feel damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” he said.
The organizers of last year’s demonstrations have fractured since the protests petered out last December, and no strong leader has emerged to take up the mantle of the movement. Into the void, a small but vocal clutch of “nativist” activist groups have become more prominent. They have staged protests against mainland Chinese tourists and traders, with some advocating secession or even independence.
(Law, a special correspondent, reported from Hong Kong and staff writer Makinen from Shanghai.)
(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Photo: mariusz kluzniak via Flickr
By Antony Dapiran and Stuart Leavenworth, McClatchy Foreign Staff (TNS)
HONG KONG — Police cleared Hong Kong’s government center Thursday of pro-democracy protesters. Now the question becomes: Is this the final chapter of the challenge to Beijing and its all-powerful control of the former British colony or just the beginning?
The police faced little resistance from demonstrators as they demolished tents and pushed out people from the city’s largest protest site, in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district. Street occupations there, surrounding Hong Kong’s government complex, have gripped and gradually dismayed the city’s residents for 75 days.
Yet as they left, protest leaders and rank-and-file demonstrators offered few clues of what might come next. Some wept. Some said they were ready to move on. Some said it was time to plan a new phase of action.
“The movement has lost the support of the people,” said a protester named Phoebe, who declined to give her surname and said she had been there every day since the protests began. “If they tried to clear earlier, maybe there would have been more resistance, but now everyone is tired.”
Others were more defiant, frustrated that more hadn’t been gained by 11 weeks of sacrifice, including clashes with police and street camping under thunderstorms. Some said more direct action could be expected — if not immediately, then in coming months.
Acting on a court order, bailiffs, police and demolition crews began removing barricades at roughly 10:30 a.m. local time outside the city’s government buildings. By late afternoon, they had cleared a vast area once occupied by hundreds of tents. By the evening, traffic was restored to some of the streets that protesters had blocked off.
Leaders of the main student protest groups, Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students, had urged protesters to comply peacefully with the removal order. The vast majority did.
A group of roughly 70 demonstrators sat down in the street and waited for police to act. The police arrested them in phases late in the afternoon and into the evening.
As most protesters left of their own accord, police checked their IDs and recorded their names for possible future prosecution. According to Hong Kong news media, two shifts of about 7,000 police officers were to be deployed in the clearance.
Students and pro-democracy activists had been protesting a decision by Beijing to screen candidates who will run in 2017 for the post of Hong Kong’s chief executive. Protesters want a system of open nominations, as opposed to candidates put forward by a committee stacked with people loyal to Beijing.
After police used tear gas on a small group of protesters Sept. 28, thousands had rushed in and started occupying the Admiralty site, as well as two other locations in the city. The demonstrations had drawn international attention, but as the weeks passed, public support waned and divisions emerged among factions of the “Umbrella Movement,” so called because of the umbrellas the protesters used to ward off the tear gas.
Fernando Cheung, a Hong Kong Legislative Council member who has been supporting the students, said the protests had highlighted the generation gap in Hong Kong, with young people much more frustrated about their prospects and much more willing to rebel against the system.
Asked what the next step is for the movement, Cheung responded: “We need to recuperate, reorganize ourselves. We need to look at other options.” One of those options, he said, is for the Legislative Council to press Chief Executive C.Y. Leung, also known as Leung Chun-ying, to seek broader reforms from Beijing.
In recent weeks, bus and taxi groups had obtained court injunctions against the street occupations, prompting bailiffs and police to act. On Thursday, a bus company employee who gave his name only as Chau expressed satisfaction as the police cleared the site.
“It is good that life is getting back to normal. Opening the roads is the most important thing,” he said. “This has brought a lot of inconvenience to a lot of people. If they go and demonstrate in a park, that is fine.”
Although the number of protesters had fluctuated over the last two months, the Admiralty site had grown into a mini-city. Demonstrators built a large covered “study center” — with tables, chairs, lights and Wi-Fi — for students to do their homework. New protest artwork popped up daily. All of that is gone now, either removed by demonstrators for safekeeping or taken down by clearance crews.
Protesters sought to preserve some of what had taken place here, including hundreds of sticky notes expressing support for the movement that had festooned what became known as “Lennon’s Wall,” named for the late John Lennon of the Beatles. On Thursday, amateur archivists took down nearly all the notes, an attempt to save them from the garbage bin.
With traffic expected to be restored to the area Friday, the debate continues on the Umbrella Movement and its impact. Has it planted the seeds of democracy in a corner of China, a former British colony? Or is it a futile effort to budge a Communist Party that has no intention of experimenting with governance that might challenge its absolute rule?
Rose Tang, a New York-based human rights activist who participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, is one who thinks that history was made. She traveled to Hong Kong last week to witness the demonstrations.
“What this movement has achieved the most is that Hong Kongers have found their identity,” she said. “The whole movement has been incredibly creative, imaginative, romantic and humorous.”
Tang said it was the first time since Tiananmen that China’s one-party government had been openly challenged by street protests.
“This is the beginning of a great movement, of a new phase of the movement,” she added. “The seeds of the Umbrella Revolution have been buried, and when the seeds are buried, they do not disappear. They sprout and bloom.”
___
(Dapiran is a McClatchy special correspondent. Leavenworth reported from Beijing.)
Photo: A protester yells as police and demolition crews clear the main Hong Kong protest site in China on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014. Pro-democracy protesters have occupied this site, near government headquarters, since Sept. 28. They are defying Beijing to seek a more open election system to choose Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2017. (Antony Dapiran/McClatchy DC/TNS)
By Sean Silbert and Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times
BEIJING — Hong Kong’s democracy protesters are fighting off their chief executive, who is dressed as a wolf, with nothing but umbrellas, incense sticks and durian fruit.
At least that’s how the conflict takes place in “Yellow Umbrella,” a free game for Android cellphones that’s become an overnight hit among demonstrators. Since the app was released on Oct. 20, it has been downloaded more than 60,000 times, according to Hong Kong-based developer Awesapp. (A version for iPhone and iPad is under review by Apple.)
The app puts players atop one of the blockades that have become a flashpoint in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory’s conflict over rules for elections in 2017. Characters must defend against tear-gas wielding police, thuggish Triad gangsters and the city’s leader, Leung Chun-ying, wearing wolf clothing (Leung is a near-homophone for the Cantonese word for “wolf,” which has unflattering connotations). And in keeping with the nonviolent principles espoused by protest leaders, players cannot attack their assailants but must peacefully defend using umbrellas.
CEO and founder Fung Kam-keung said Awesapp wanted to make a game not only for fun but to show support to the students and to “let others know that they are very peaceful in asking for real elections.” In an email, he added that the game was constructed in just five days, with his team working day and night.
As for what gamers can achieve when they play “Yellow Umbrella” all the way through, he said, “Nobody can win this game. We want to tell that this is not a revolution. The protesters ask for democracy and peace.”
The game has received positive reviews on the Google Play store. Unsurprisingly, it is not available in mainland China. Most of the downloads so far, Fung said, have come from Hong Kong.
Cellphone games and other apps fall under China’s massive Internet censorship apparatus, which looks to only be getting more stringent. The Beijing News this week quoted experts suggesting that the State Internet Information Office, which manages online censorship, will introduce more regulations on who is qualified to publish cellphone apps and games.
The new regulations were not specified, but the agency claimed that they will strengthen Internet regulations to protect users’ “online security” and privacy.
Occasionally politically minded games like “Yellow Umbrella” make it through the firewall in China. In 2010, a game called “Nail House War” had players defend a house scheduled to be demolished by throwing shoes, Molotov cocktails and other weapons at a wrecking crew. Forced demolitions have been a contentious social issue for years in China, with many people being evicted from their longtime homes to make room for new developments.
AFP Photo/ Xaume Olleros
Want more political news and analysis? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!
The National Memo is a political newsletter and website that combines the spirit of investigative journalism with new technology and ideas. We cover campaigns, elections, the White House, Congress, and the world with a fresh outlook. Our own journalism — as well as our selections of the smartest stories available every day — reflects a clear and strong perspective, without the kind of propaganda, ultra-partisanship and overwrought ideology that burden so much of our political discourse.
