Hong Kong's split over what constitutes our Lion Rock spirit
Regina Ip says Occupy Central may be over but the division in our community over what constitutes Hong Kong's core values remains as wide as ever
On December 15, Occupy Central finally went out with a whimper after the police cleared the last remaining tents in Causeway Bay - an anti-climactic end to 79 days of tension and disorder in Hong Kong's government and business centres.
Discussions are continuing on the forces which drove this unprecedented movement and its impact on Hong Kong.
It has been almost two years since Professor Benny Tai Yiu-ting first mooted the idea of mobilising 10,000 followers to occupy the central business district to put pressure on Beijing to grant Hong Kong democracy. If Tai's "civil disobedience" project had gone as planned, no violence would have been involved. Yet violence broke out in June, well ahead of the street protests, as demonstrators attempted to storm the Legislative Council building over a land dispute.
In the course of the 79-day siege of the city, 32 police vehicles were damaged; scores of government properties stolen or damaged; nearly 1,000 demonstrators arrested and hundreds injured.
Was Occupy Central a civil disobedience movement gone wrong? Or was it, in the words of political scientist Eric X. Li, part of the global "maidancracy" movement (rule of the square, from Maidan in central Kiev where the Ukrainian protests started)? Carried to the extreme, such movements could result in the overthrow of government.
Occupy came close to that. It began with the student group Scholarism's calls to occupy government headquarters and for Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying to step down. On December 1, there was another attempt to storm Legco. If government headquarters or the Legco building had been occupied, as Taiwan's Legislative Yuan was earlier this year, and if the chief executive had been forced to step down, the outcome could have been tantamount to the overthrow of the government.
