Umbrella Revolution Through the Prism of Occupy Wall Street

It started in Tunisia in December 2010 when a food vendor set himself on fire to protest his treatment by a local government official. Mass protests over joblessness, inflation, corruption -- the whole hopeless condition we have become familiar with over the last 20 years -- followed, leading to president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fleeing to Saudi Arabia in January 2011.

That same month protesters occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo. By February president Hosni Mubarak had stepped down, handing power to the Council of the Armed Forces.

There was a feeling of jubilation. Old, rotten systems could be swept away by people power. That was the feeling the Arab Spring inspired.

In September 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement began in Lower Manhattan in emulation of the Tahrir Square protests. “America needs its own Tahrir.” Copycat Occupy encampments shot up all over the United States and Europe. We were all giddy with hope.

Once Zuccotti Park -- the central protest site of Occupy Wall Street -- was cleared early one morning in November by NYPD, the party was over. Other Occupy encampments would linger on, but without the central, symbolic site of resistance in Wall Street, the movement shuffled off the stage.

I was a supporter of Occupy Wall Street; I supported financially and participated modestly in the activities of the Occupy Seattle.

My assessment is that weather is an issue for peaceful sit-ins/occupations of the type that Hong Kong is embarking on with its Umbrella Revolution. (Thank goodness it has been named something other than another color.) Rain, constant rain in the fall here in the Pacific Northwest, turned the Occupy Seattle encampment, once it had been moved from downtown's Westlake Park up to Seattle Central Community College, into a fetid frigid filthy swamp populated by what seemed to be mostly junkies and homeless youth. It went from being a tightly run, clean, compact encampment with a busy field kitchen serving nutritious hot meals to a post-apocalyptic slum.

The gist of Keith Bradsher's article this morning, "Hong Kong Government’s Strategy on Protesters: Wait Them Out," is that the decision makers, following Sunday's orgy of  tear gas and pepper spray, have gotten a handle on things:

The wait-them-out strategy appears to have the support of the city’s influential tycoons, many of whom are out of town during this holiday week in any case. The tycoons derive the bulk of their income from leasing out their many commercial, office and residential properties, and their tenants have to keep paying Hong Kong’s famously high rents even as protesters restrict access to many businesses.

The hope of the Hong Kong government, and of Beijing, is that this economic pressure will turn owners of small businesses and other members of the middle class against the demonstrators. Local officials hope that the public will come to see the protesters as people who inconvenience others, not as icons of democracy, as the students occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing became in 1989 before China’s brutal crackdown.

“This is a Cultural Revolution revival, this is not Tiananmen — they think they are doing the right thing, so they can infringe on other people’s interests and therefore make the government kowtow to them,” said the person heavily involved in the government’s decision-making. 

The government adviser said officials were actively trying to avoid a Tiananmen-style crackdown. “We cannot repeat the mistake of 25 years ago,” the adviser said.

The rainy season in Hong Kong is in the spring. Autumn is supposed to be pleasant. The cool winter months can be spent easily outdoors with the proper amount of layering. So the Umbrella Revolution could be lengthy. Bradsher hints at a possible concession that the PRC is willing to make:

The central authorities in Beijing have allowed Hong Kong officials to manage the political crisis here as long as they do not promise fundamental changes in how the next chief executive is chosen in 2017. The Hong Kong government has been mulling, with Beijing’s support, a small compromise that might allow democracy supporters to say later that they had achieved something. 

Beijing has mandated that while all adults will be allowed to vote in 2017, only names approved by a nomination committee will be allowed on the ballot. The nomination committee is to be drawn in equal shares from four sectors of society; one of these, for example, is the “industrial, commercial and financial sector,” which tends to be dominated by pro-Beijing tycoons. 

The Hong Kong government is willing to broaden the number of people who participate in each sector’s selection of delegates, said the person heavily involved in local decision-making. But while a few pro-democracy politicians have been willing to discuss such a change, there has been no such interest from protesters. They mainly want the general public to be allowed to nominate candidates, an idea that officials have firmly ruled out.

The primary difference between Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Central with Love and Peace is that OWS rejected the whole neoliberal system where the 99% are ruled by their 1% overlords who controll the predatory casino capitalist economy and the democratically elected representatives. The Umbrella Revolution doesn't want to change the neoliberal system; it just wants to change Hong Kong's Basic Law to allow for direct elections of freely nominated (meaning not pre-selected by Beijing) candidates for chief executive. In other words, the goal of the Umbrella Revolution is no revolution at all.