Participants in last Sunday's march (from Tsim Sha Tshui to Hung Hom) will have noticed that the police were very aggressive about confining marchers to a narrow route. They initially tried to keep a crowd of 300,000 on the sidewalks! Riot police were very aggressive about this
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The last CHRF event in Hong Kong was a rally in Victoria Park on August 18. Something like a million people showed up, basically enough to fill the park many times over. The rally turned into a march simply by force of numbers. People filled every street.
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On August 18, there was no police presence whatsoever in central Hong Kong. Authorities registered their disapproval and the cops did not come out at all. The march was completely peaceful—no property damage, no barricades, no tear gas. Just an enormous crowd, all day
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Chris Tang Ping-keung, the new police commissioner, said on Thursday that "since June, whenever there have been large-scale public order events, there were violent protesters or mobs hijacking [the protests] and committing illegal acts." But this was not true on August 18
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However, it is unquestionably true that if there is a million-plus turnout on Sunday, there is no place for people to physically *stand* if they comply with the police restriction, to stage in Victoria Park and walk along just one side of Hennesey Road. Victoria Park fits ~160K
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Central Hong Kong, for understandable reasons, was not designed to have a quarter of the population march while also keeping lanes open for traffic. So I'm worried that this march is being set up to fail, quite intentionally. No one wants to see a large peaceful event succeed
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The way Hong Kong law works (and I welcome correction here), the organizer of a permitted march bears legal responsibility for it. The convener in this case is Jimmy Sham, head of CHRF, who was savagely beaten on October 16, and attacked on August 29. Both cases remain unsolved
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Sham is also an elected official from the district of Sha Tin, having won a seat in the recent landslide local elections. Anyway, that appears to be the set-up for Sunday: a march route that the police will enforce aggressively, with the option of revoking the permit on the spot
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The person legally responsible for the march is already in the government's crosshairs, and the potential is there for a million people to be declared an "illegal assembly", and face jail time for being physically unable to disperse on demand from a crowded urban core
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What everyone in Hong Kong understands is that if the police did the same thing they did on August 18—stayed home—there would be no trouble. But the last thing the government can afford is a genuinely peaceful march in large numbers; we saw how they prevented that last Sunday
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End of conversation
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