Occupy Central with Love and Peace
Occupy Central with Love and Peace was a single-purpose Hong Kong civil disobedience campaign initiated by Reverend Chu Yiu-ming, Benny Tai and Chan Kin-man on 27 March 2013. The campaign was launched on 24 September 2014, partially leading to the 2014 Hong Kong protests. According to its manifesto, the campaign advocates for an electoral system in Hong Kong that is decided through a democratic process and satisfies international standards of universal and equal suffrage. With the first three stages of the movement – dialogue, deliberation and citizens' authorization – the civil disobedience that follows must be non-violent.
The campaign called for occupation of Hong Kong's central business district, Central, if the amendments were not made. Upstaged by the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism in September 2014, its leaders joined in the Occupy Central protests.
OCLP had originally planned to launch its protest campaign on 1 October 2014, the National Day of the People's Republic of China. OCLP stated that the ongoing protest was "the Umbrella Movement, not 'Occupy Central and referred to themselves as supporters rather than organisers. OCLP was disbanded by the founders when they surrendered to the police in December 2014.
Background
Election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong and seats in the Legislative Council by universal suffrage is established in the Hong Kong Basic Law.In December 2007, the National People's Congress Law Committee officially ruled on the issue of universal suffrage in Hong Kong:
The Asia Times wrote in 2008 that both proposals for the Legislative Council and for the chief executive were "hedged in with so many ifs and buts that there is no guarantee of Hong Kong getting anything at all... "
After another six years of government inaction, on 16 January 2013, Benny Tai, then an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, published an article in the Hong Kong Economic Journal in which he proposed an act of civil disobedience be carried out in Central, the business and financial centre of Hong Kong if the government failed to announce reforms introducing genuine universal suffrage. He set no specific timetable for such action.
Reflecting increased polarisation, disaffection and frustration with government inaction and Beijing intransigence, on 21 March 2013, all 27 democratically inclined lawmakers of the Legislative Council joined in establishing the Alliance for True Democracy, adopting a more determined and confrontational stance than its recently failed and disbanded compromise-leaning predecessor, the Alliance for Universal Suffrage.
On 24 March 2013, Qiao Xiaoyang, then chairman of the Law Committee under the National People's Congress Standing Committee startled Hongkongers by announcing that Chief Executive candidates must be persons who love the country and love Hong Kong, and who do not insist on confronting the central government. The statement was taken as setting out new, vague pre-conditions for candidacy as a means of screening out candidates not sympathetic to Beijing's goals in Hong Kong, denying the promise of genuine democracy. OCLP was convened three days later.
Formation
On 16 January 2013, an article by Benny Tai Yiu-ting was published in the Hong Kong Economic Journal, entitled 公民抗命的最大殺傷力武器. Tai postulated a seven-step progression: 10,000 participants signing a declaration, live TV broadcast of discussions, electronic voting on methods for universal suffrage, a referendum on the preferred formula, resignation of Super-Seat Legislative Council member to be filled in a by-election to be seen as a referendum on the plan, civil disobedience, and, finally, Occupy Central in July 2014. Tai repeated his plan at a forum held on 24 February 2013, emphasising the importance of the non-violence pledge.In an interview together with Ho on 6 March 2013, Tai spoke at length about his referendum and protest strategies to bring about universal suffrage in Hong Kong and stated: "This is a people's movement; frankly speaking, the central government will have to accept or reject it; if they reject it, we will block the streets."
OCLP was launched at a press conference hosted by its three founders, Reverend Chu Yiu-ming, Benny Tai Yiu-ting, and Chan Kin-man, on 27 March 2013 at which they presented its manifesto.
Objectives
OCLP's manifesto stated that it would campaign for universal suffrage through dialogue, deliberation, civil referendum and civil disobedience ; it also demanded that any government proposal should satisfy international standards in relation to universal suffrage, i.e. equal number of votes, equal weight for each vote and no unreasonable restrictions on the right to stand for election, and that the final proposal for electoral reform be decided by means of a genuine democratic process. The founders emphasised their objective of non-violent civil disobedience but, as their campaign had no leaders nor membership, what acts members of the public adopted was a matter for them to decide as individuals.Democratic Party support
On 5 February 2014, the Democratic Party staged a public oath-taking, at Statue Square, with members swearing to join in Occupy Central irrespective of the risk of arrest and imprisonment. Members of People Power, disparaging of the Democratic Party's failure to demand direct civil nomination of Chief Executive candidates in its platform, disrupted the ceremony.Deliberations on reform
Deliberation days were organised by OCLP on 9 June 2013, 9 March 2014, and 6 May 2014, at which attendees were invited to exchange views on strategies to be adopted to achieve democratic reform.On the third deliberation day, the Occupy Central participants voted on electoral reform proposals put forward by various pro-democracy groups, with the objective of determining which should be put to a plebiscite. Five proposals were put to the attendees and the three most popular selected. The proposal by student groups Scholarism and Hong Kong Federation of Students which allowed for public nomination, received 1,124 votes – 45 percent of the vote. People Power's proposal came in second with 685 votes, while the three-track proposal by the Alliance for True Democracy consisting of 27 pan-democracy lawmakers got 445 votes. The civil recommendation method proposed by 18 academics got 74 votes and Hong Kong 2020's proposal came in last with 43 votes. A total of 2,508 votes were cast in the poll.
All three selected proposals included the concept of civil nomination, which the mainland authorities had already flatly rejected as not compliant with the Basic Law. The three chosen proposals were thus considered to be the more radical, leaving moderate pan-democrats in the cold, laying the ground for friction and division among democrats. The League of Social Democrats and People Power lawmakers, notwithstanding their common membership in the Alliance for True Democracy, had urged their supporters to vote against the Alliance. Snubbed Civic Party lawmaker Ronny Tong Ka-wah, who had seen his moderate plan soundly marginalised in the poll believed "the Occupy Central movement has been hijacked by radicals". He believed that the poll results would make it harder to find a reform package agreeable to Beijing. He thought Occupy Central's plan to block streets in Central was likely to materialise.
Civic referendum
OCLP commissioned the University of Hong Kong Public Opinion Programme to run a poll on three proposals – all of which involved allowing citizens to directly nominate candidates – for presentation to the Beijing government. It ran from 20 to 29 June 2014. A total of 792,808 people, equivalent to over one fifth of the registered electorate, took part in the poll by either voting online or going to designated polling stations.The proposal tabled by the Alliance for True Democracy, a group comprising 26 of the 27 pan-democratic lawmakers, won the unofficial referendum by securing 331,427 votes, or 42.1 per cent of the 787,767 valid ballots. A joint blueprint put forward by Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students came second with 302,567 votes, followed by the People Power proposal, which garnered 81,588 votes. All three called for the public to be allowed to nominate candidates for the 2017 Chief Executive election, an idea repeatedly dismissed by Beijing as inconsistent with the Basic Law. The Alliance's provided for nomination by the election committee and by political parties, as well. The plan was not specific on method of formation of the nominating committee, only stating that it should be "as democratic as it can be". The two other proposals were for nomination by the public and nominating committee only. 691,972 voters agreed that the Legislative Council should veto any reform proposal put forward by the government if it failed to meet international standards, compared with 7.5 per cent who disagreed.
The unofficial referendum infuriated Beijing. Mainland officials and newspapers called it "illegal" while many condemned Occupy Central, claiming it was operating at the behest of foreign "anti-China forces" and would damage Hong Kong's standing as a financial capital. Zhang Junsheng, a former deputy director of Xinhua News Agency in Hong Kong, denounced the poll as "meaningless". The state-run Global Times mocked the referendum as an "illegal farce" and a "joke". The region's chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, offered this rebuke: "Nobody should place Hong Kong people in confrontation with mainland Chinese citizens." Mainland censors meanwhile scrubbed social media sites clean of references to Occupy Central. The poll also prompted a flurry of vitriolic editorials, preparatory police exercises and sophisticated cyber-attacks where strategies evolved over time. According to CloudFlare, a firm that helped defend against a "unique and sophisticated" attack, the volume of traffic was an unprecedented 500 Gbit/s and involved at least five botnets. OCLP's servers were bombarded with in excess of 250 million DNS requests per second, equivalent to the average volume of legitimate DNS requests for the entire Internet.
Before the referendum, the State Council issued a white paper claiming "comprehensive jurisdiction" over the territory. "The high degree of autonomy of the HKSAR is not full autonomy, nor a decentralised power," it said. "It is the power to run local affairs as authorised by the central leadership." Michael DeGolyer, director of the transition project at Hong Kong Baptist University, said: "It's very clear from surveys that the vast majority of the people voting in this referendum are doing it as a reaction to this white paper – particularly because they see it as threatening the rule of law... That's not negotiating on the one country two systems principle, that's demolishing it."