Hong Kong financial firms brace for disruptions as protests intensify

[BlueKelah]

If you watched the show off might during chinas national day, you would expect HK people to think.thrice about making trouble. BEIJING. will just do as they like..

via Xperia Z1 with Android 4.4.4 tapatalk.

[CityFarmer]

The protest have overly affected the HK people life...

Hong Kong clashes break out away from Central protest site

HONG KONG - Violent scuffles broke out in one of Hong Kong's most famous and congested shopping districts on Friday, as hundreds of supporters of Chinese rule stormed tents and ripped down banners belonging to pro-democracy protesters, forcing many to retreat.

As night fell and news of the confrontation spread, more protesters headed for the gritty, bustling district of Mong Kok, considered one of the most crowded places on Earth, to reinforce.
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http://www.todayonline.com/world/goggles...epage=true

[greengiraffe]

Hong Kong in open revolt to a deaf government
PUBLISHED: 5 HOURS 33 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 4 HOURS 17 MINUTES AGO

Hong Kong in open revolt to a deaf government
Demonstrators in Times Square, New York hold umbrellas in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy marches. Photo: Reuters
ANGUS GRIGG
Under a covered walkway in central Hong Kong, the Fung family is sheltering from a storm as protesters beneath cheer each bolt of lightning and fresh crack of thunder.

It’s day four of the city’s largest and most sustained pro-democracy demonstrations and the family are making their first appearance.

Fittingly, mother Kitty carries an umbrella – the symbol of this civil ­disobedience campaign – but she’s not here just to spectate.

Mrs Fung spent $HK570 ($83) on 60 hamburgers, which the family had been handing out to their local church group and protesters.

“I wanted to buy 100 but my local shop couldn’t make that many,” she tells AFR Weekend. “But I did get a 20 per cent discount because the owner wanted to support the protesters.”

Along with providing welcome sustenance, she also wanted her children, Joshua, 13, and Tiffany, 17, to experience what is happening in Hong Kong.

“They shouldn’t just talk about it in class. They need to see it and show support for the protesters,” she says.

Her husband, Aman, a social worker who had left work early, says the family were ­motivated to attend after police used tear gas and pepper spray against the demonstrators on Sunday night.

Theirs is a typical story from this extraordinary week in Hong Kong – a week when thousands of protesters stood up to their government and, by extension, challenged the authority of China’s Communist Party by demanding a greater say in elections ­scheduled for 2017.

OPEN REVOLT
For a city which supposedly values stability and money more than political freedom, the scale and stamina of the protesters has topped all expectations.

The scene could not be more dramatic – the gateway to China and one of the world’s major financial centres in open revolt. In ­taking to the streets, the protesters have promoted parallels with the pro-democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 25 years ago.

That was the biggest challenge the party had ever faced and, while the demonstrations in Hong Kong are hugely significant, they are not at this level.

The scope of social media censorship on the mainland – the widest clampdown since the Tiananmen anniversary in early June – shows how worried the party is that protest could take hold in other parts of China. Given the heavy hand of authority on the mainland, that was always a possibility.

In any case, by Friday morning the Hong Kong protests looked to be losing some momentum. Hong Kong administrators agreed to open discussions with protest organisers aimed at creating a circuit breaker which could get them off the streets by Sunday night, allowing roads to reopen for the start of the working week.

This has put student demonstrators at the centre of the politics in Hong Kong.

While it was students and political activists who took the first steps on to Connaught Road to block traffic on Sunday afternoon, it was regular citizens such as the Fung family who provided the reinforcements, material support and political legitimacy.

This is a very middle-class uprising in which not a single window has been broken, car burnt out or shop looted. In rare moments of recklessness, some have spray-painted political slogans on raised median strips, only to be seen scrubbing them off with paint thinner moments later.

The protesters have cleaned up their own rubbish – even separating the recycling – and in quiet moments caught up on homework or marked exam papers. These are hardly the “troublemakers”, “radicals” or “political opportunists” portrayed by the state media in China.

Yet they are people who have become newly politicised by a combination of a government deaf to the desires of its people and a disproportionate response from police, who fired 87 canisters of tear gas and used litres of pepper spray on Sunday night and early on Monday morning.

But if you rewind six days (before the ­mid-week downpours), then this so-called “umbrella revolution” should never have happened.

POLICE’S FATAL MISTAKE
Chan Kin-man, a co-founder of the Occupy Central Group, told this newspaper on August 31 that the civil disobedience campaign would muster a few thousand people at best, but more likely a few hundred.

He described it as a “sit down” which would momentary block a city street, before authorities quickly swooped, making mass arrests. “We won’t hire lawyers or attempt to defend ourselves,” he said.

In his view, it was to be a largely symbolic protest. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The story of its transformation from a small group of activists to a mass movement began on Friday night, September 26, with a group of students.

After a week of boycotting classes, they arrived at the central government offices in Admiralty at around 10.30pm. A handful scaled the fence and occupied a previously public space, which had been ­shuttered in July.

About 50 more students rushed in and were quickly surrounded by police.

“The proposition of the students was that they were going to take back what had been a public area,” says Carol Luk, a volunteer with Occupy Central.

By lunchtime on Saturday, around half of these protesters were inside the fence but had run out of food and water, and police were refusing to let them use the toilets.

Some 2000 protesters remained outside the gates, but it appeared the demonstration wouldn’t last.

That should have been the end of it – until the police decided to clear the area on ­Sunday by surrounding those protesters who were left.

This was a fatal mistake, drawing more people to the area and pushing the new arrivals towards Connaught Road.

At around 2pm the police moved in, using pepper spray to clear the area in front of the central government offices. In this wired city, the news quickly spread via Facebook, ­Instagram, WhatsApp and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

The new demonstrators were unable to access the protest site and milled around the edge of Connaught Rd. At 4pm, the first tentative steps were taken on to the bitumen.

“At first, they just occupied one or two lanes on the eastern side and the cars drove round them,” says Luk. “Then eventually it was whole road.”

That “road” is really an expressway. It spans eight lanes, plus a further two lanes when the adjoining Harcourt Road is included.

It is the city’s busiest thoroughfare.

“[The police] made so many mistakes,” says Australian lawyer Antony Dapiran, who has been in and around the protests since Sunday.

“I don’t know who came up with those tactics to use such force, but I guess when you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.”

Suddenly the police had a far bigger ­problem on their hands, largely of their own making. At 6pm, in an attempt to seize back the initiative and end the blockade, the police fired the first canisters of tear gas to disperse the crowd.

It succeeded momentarily, before ­demonstrators rushed back in even greater numbers.

HISTORIC PROTEST
The result was the largest protest in Hong Kong’s history, as between 40,000 and 80,000 people sat down on the streets each night, blocking main roads in the city centre, Wan Chai and Kowloon.

Part of their anger was not just over plans for a phoney election in 2017, but the tin ear of Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying. “The government never listens to us, so we have no choice but to protest,” says Gary Au, a public relations student, who was manning the front line on Fenwick late on Monday.

“The government has provided the perfect case study for me in how not to handle public relations.”

In contrast, the demonstrators could not have run a better campaign.

They have been led by the Hong Kong Federation of Students, the Occupy Central movement and a grouping of secondary school students known as Scholarism.

These groups have been at pains to continually say they do not speak for all the protesters and no one group is calling the shots.

They’ve also been savvy with their use of social media and have stressed at all times that there should be no violence.

This has made the images of police firing tear gas at unarmed protesters, with their hands in the air, all the more effective in ­getting people like the Fung family on to the streets.

And just to complete the series of PR bungles, police over the weekend detained the city’s most popular student leader, Joshua Wong, for 40 hours.

He was released on Monday by a judge who said Wong had been held for an unreasonably long time – proving the Hong Kong judiciary remains independent despite efforts to crimp its freedom by Beijing.

This combination of heavy-handed policing and an unresponsive government has left a giant mess for the Hong Kong government and Beijing.

Realising that force would not work again, they have been pushed into negotiating with the students and other activists. It’s a major climb-down after months of refusing to even countenance the idea of dialogue.

Beijing and the Hong Kong government will need to show some flexibility and even offer up some concessions. It’s that or face a series of paralysing demonstrations over the coming months.

TRADE-OFF NEEDED
This won’t come naturally to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has shown himself to be a political hardliner who has wound back freedoms and cracked down on ­dissidents since coming to power in ­November 2012.

But there might be a way out for protesters and Xi.

If Beijing were to provide some flexibility around the nominating process for the 2017 elections, both sides might come to a compromise, albeit an uneasy one.

At present, Beijing has granted Hong Kong residents the right to vote, but insists it select candidates for the ballot paper.

Clay Chandler, an independent consultant who has worked for McKinsey & Company, says one solution could be a veto or trade-off process for candidate selection.

“That would allow a candidate to emerge who was still loyal to Beijing but was more representative of the people,” he says.

“They need someone who is going to attend town hall meetings and not always agree with Beijing.”

This might also allow Xi to cast himself as a flexible leader, capable of containing ­difficult situations.

As a man who wants to be remembered alongside former Chinese leaders Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong, this formula could provide a way out.

But it’s the most optimistic projection and so far Xi has given no sign he is capable of allowing politics to exist outside the tight confines of the party.

For now, the Hong Kong government and Beijing have bought themselves time, but if they fail to compromise, the events of last week could be replayed very soon.

The Australian Financial Review

BY ANGUS GRIGG
Angus is a China correspondent, based in Shanghai.

@AngusGrigg

[BlueKelah]

Arab spring can become China spring. Dropping house prices on the mainland are not helping at all. Already some demonstrations outside some developers sales office when they started giving discounts. Someone could take this chance to start another political revolt/insurgence in China itself if Beijing isn't careful with how it proceeds. Especially in the muslim areas in China

If this continues longer, it could very well be the Black Swan event we had not been expecting. I am expecting a swift clampdown by Beijing once the weekend is over and they finish their celebrations on the mainland.

This is the sort of geopolitical risk that can't be mitigated by printing money or sending our warplanes to bomb.

[VIChris]

Arab spring can become China spring. Dropping house prices on the mainland are not helping at all. Already some demonstrations outside some developers sales office when they started giving discounts. Someone could take this chance to start another political revolt/insurgence in China itself if Beijing isn't careful with how it proceeds. Especially in the muslim areas in China

If this continues longer, it could very well be the Black Swan event we had not been expecting. I am expecting a swift clampdown by Beijing once the weekend is over and they finish their celebrations on the mainland.

This is the sort of geopolitical risk that can't be mitigated by printing money or sending our warplanes to bomb.

I have to disagreed. The chances of Arab spring in China is very slim or almost non.
The basic elements of Arab spring is missing in China. What China mainly have as compared to the rest:
1. Inflation in China is well controlled. There are affordable food to go around.
2. Strong leadership with strong military support
3. Strong military power
4. Strong media control
5. Growing GDP with annualized increase in average worker pay of 10%
to 15%
6. Mainly Han Chinese is the dominating races in China
7. Strong anti corruption drive
8. And many more.......

In China history of Dynasties, only when there is no food to go around, pleasant will then start to revolt.

Cheers

[LLS]

I am interested in purchasing the hang seng index as it trades at 11 times earnings only, u guys know of any etf that tracks hsi?

[CityFarmer]

I am interested in purchasing the hang seng index as it trades at 11 times earnings only, u guys know of any etf that tracks hsi?

I assume you ask for SGX-listed HSI ETF, there is one, Lyxor HSI, quoted in US$. Stock code A9B.

There are many more in SEHK, of course.

[brattzz]

think beijing can afford to "close-down" hongkong for 3-5 yrs by redirecting all their financial biz elsewhere...
in the end, hk will suffer and her people will suffer too..

This is really a no-negotiation end for hk...what didn't happen in 1997, happened in 2014... :O

If i am a hkonger, i don't see any choice left, except to migrate elsewhere, if i can....

[CityFarmer]

think beijing can afford to "close-down" hongkong for 3-5 yrs by redirecting all their financial biz elsewhere...
in the end, hk will suffer and her people will suffer too..

This is really a no-negotiation end for hk...what didn't happen in 1997, happened in 2014... :O

If i am a hkonger, i don't see any choice left, except to migrate elsewhere, if i can....

I am reading the ST article of Mr. Wang GungWu, titled "Hong Kong and China: An exceptional relationship". One similar statement from him, "The most important is Beijing does not need Hong Kong the way it did from 1949 to 1997".

Sharing a view while reading the article in detail.

[brattzz]

Beijing & Shanghai is sufficient to handle china's financial needs already...

hey! china can also ask singapore to handle 5 to 10% mah.... we are pro-china leh!