Hong Kong Students Lead Democracy Fight with Class Boycott

HONG KONG - Thousands of Hong Kong university students abandoned classes on Monday to rally against Chinese government limits on voting rights, a bellwether demonstration of the city's appetite for turning smoldering discontent into street-level opposition.

'University students must shoulder the responsibility of these times,' Nathan Law Kwun-chung, the acting president of the student union of Lingnan University, told the crowd crammed into the main quad at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Some held banners of their schools, many others umbrellas to shield off the sun in this tropical former British territory.

'Boycotting classes is just the first wave of resistance,' he said. 'Today is not the last step for us all. It's the first step, and countless resistance campaigns will bear fruit.'

The student strikers, who have said they will boycott classes for the week, are at the vanguard of a planned succession of protests against rules proposed by China that would effectively give Beijing the right to screen candidates for Hong Kong elections.

High school students plan to join the boycott for a day on Friday. The biggest expected showdown will come if the main pro-democratic group, Occupy Central with Love and Peace, acts on vows to flood Central, the city's main business district, with demonstrators.

The confrontation with Beijing has moved the territory to the front lines of the battle for democratic rights in China after a government clampdown has silenced much dissent on the mainland. Since Hong Kong was returned by Britain to Chinese rule in 1997, it has enjoyed considerable legal autonomy under the 'one country, two systems' formula, in which Hong Kong residents retained rights not available elsewhere in China.

The Chinese legislature proposed election rule changes for Hong Kong last month that starting in 2017 would allow residents to vote directly for the leader of the city's government, the chief executive, but would use a nominating committee dominated by pro-Beijing loyalists to restrict how many and which candidates can enter the contest.

The demonstrations may have only the slightest chance of forcing Beijing to change its mind and allow an openballot, but student activists said they were ready to fight for many years.

'We have to raise our bargaining power,' Alex Chow Yong Kang, secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, said in an interview. 'We have to tell them that Hong Kong people are willing to sacrifice much more,' he said. 'Then they'll think, 'You're crazy,' then they'll have to think whether they're better off giving a democratic proposal to us.'

Frustration with Chinese policy in Hong Kong is especially deep among the young, and contention over voting rights has given many otherwise apolitical students a jolt of political engagement.

The student strike is the first gauge, since a modest protest the day the Chinese legislature announced the plan, of how much support pro-democracy groups can muster.

Hong Kong, with a population of about seven million, has more than 78,000 undergraduates enrolled in its seven main universities and a teacher-training college, and there are about 10 smaller colleges. Organizers said about 13,000 students attended the rally, but did not immediately have an estimate of the number of students who boycotted classes on Monday.

'I'm not sure if this protest will really affect the decision by China, but I'm sure if I don't come I will regret it in the future,' said Cathy Lee, a 21-year-old criminology student at the City University of Hong Kong, who attended the protest. 'I have to join this protest in order to fight for democracy in Hong Kong in the future.'

A poll by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, conducted this month and released over the weekend, vividly demonstrated the generational divide. While 54 percent of Hong Kong residents said the city's Legislative Council should veto electoral changes if they excluded candidates whose political positions differed from the Chinese government's, that percentage went up to 76 percent among people aged 15 to 24.

The 27 pro-democracy members of Hong Kong's 70-member Legislative Council have the power to veto any election changes, if they remain united.

But President Xi Jinping, who has led a crackdown against demands for political liberalization within China, appears unlikely to give in to democracy demands in Hong Kong. Last week in Beijing, Zhang Dejiang, a senior party politician, told visiting Hong Kong lawmakers that Occupy Central and the student strike would not alter the Chinese government's stance.

On Monday, Mr. Xi was to meet a delegation of some of Hong Kong's wealthiest tycoons, many of whom have argued that street protests like those threatened by Occupy Central would imperil the city's reputation for business-friendly stability.

Students on the main campus of the University of Hong Kong noted a drop in attendance of local students on Monday. Benny Tai, an associate professor of law at the university, who co-founded Occupy Central, said his morning class was half empty.

'Last week we had an almost full class there, so I assume a lot of them decided to join the boycott,' he said.

He said that if the student strike evolved into wider demonstrations, it could prompt Occupy Central to start its own civil disobedience on the streets of central Hong Kong.

'If a lot of students, after the boycott, start their action of occupying already, we cannot just wait for any longer,' Mr. Tai said. 'We have to join them.'

Most students from the Chinese mainland avoided the boycott, though some watched from the sidelines.

Jean Wang, a Communist Party member from Zhejiang Province on China's east coast, attended the protest to make a video for her journalism class. It was interesting to see the Hong Kong students exercising their right to protest, she said.

'But in the end,' she added, 'like with the Scotland referendum, they won't get the result they want.'