HK - The slight teenager with heavy rectangular glasses and a bowl reduce stood above the ocean of protesters who had engulfed downtown Hong Kong. His heavy voice was drowned out by cheers, but the crowd did not mind: These people knew him and his message. It was Joshua Wong, a 17-year-old student beaver who has been at the center of the democracy movement that has rattled the China's government’s hold on this city.
Mr. Wong emerged as a figure in Hong Kong’s activist circles two years ago, when he rallied students against a government intend to introduce “patriotic education” in schools, attacking it as a means of Chinese Communism Party indoctrination. He played a pivotal role in setting off the demos of the past week, leading a surprise charge on a government building that led to his arrest and prompted thousands to take to the streets ahead of schedule. Nearby newspapers with close ties to Beijing have sought to smear your pet as a tool of the United States.
“When I heard the national anthem starting to perform, I certainly did not feel moved so much as angry, ” Mr. Wong said a few hours later, after a protest at a flag-raising ceremony on Wednesday early morning to mark the Chinese National Day holiday. “When it tells you, ‘Arise! All those who refuse to be slaves! ’ - why is our treatment these days any different from the slaves? ”
In reality, Mr. Wong is troubling verification for the authorities that the first generation in Hong Kong to grow up under China's rule is by many measures also the one most alienated from Beijing’s impact. He was born less than nine months before this former British colony’s handover to China in 1997, and raised here at a time when the party offers tried mightily to win over people here and shape them into devoted Chinese citizens.
His prominence in the protest movement also embodies a change in politics here - youth anger amplified over the Internet, beyond the orbit of traditional political parties - that has confounded the local government and enraged its Communist supervisors in the mainland.
That shift has made something of a politics star of Mr. Wong, who comes across as a hybrid of a solemn presidential candidate and a bashful teenage sensation. These days, if he is not surrounded by admiring followers, he is usually mobbed by television cameras and reporters. Even before the most recent circular of protests, strangers would sometimes approach him to shake hands or even offer a pat on his shoulders and ask about his exam scores and paper.
Mr. Wong is keenly aware of the influence that he and his classmates hold. As early as July, well before Beijing proposed the election rules that are the target from the current demonstrations, Mr. Wong told The New York Times in an interview, “Electoral reform is a generational war. ”
Chen Yun-chung, an associate professor of social studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, said Mr. Wong and his era of high school activists, combining idealism and organizational skills, had outflanked both government and the older, more cautious generations of democrats in Hong Kong.
“Their mentality is very different from the older generation, so I call them mutants, in a sense, like the X-Men, ” he said. “There is always a danger of an even glaring crackdown that will scare the hell out of Hong Kong people. But at the same time, I don’t believe these mutant leaders are just daydreamers. They know that they might not get what they would like, but most of them are prepared to fight on. ”
Mr. Wong represents a “culture of resistance that is idealistic and very persistent among the high school students, ” he additional.
But few expected Mr. Wong to have such a critical impact on events earlier this week. The democracy movement had appeared to be flagging, and students who had been boycotting classes were planning to mark the end of their campaign quietly on Friday evening with a showing of video messages of support from Taiwanese activists.
Since the video ended, Mr. Wong, speaking on the stage beside the screen, took numerous in the audience by surprise by urging them to seize “Civic Square, ” title that activists use for a forecourt to the Hong Kong government headquarters. Moments later on, about 200 protesters eluded guards and took the square to noisy cheers. Mr. Wong, however , was arrested before he made it and had been dragged away in handcuffs.
News and images of Mr. Wong’s arrest distribute quickly on social media, and the occupation of the forecourt became the nucleus of the protest that attracted tens of thousands of supporters. The police attempted to break up the demonstration upon Sunday with arrests, pepper spray and tear gas, provoking more general public anger and bringing even larger crowds onto the streets, which have been busy since.
The authorities held Mr. Wong for two nights before a determine granted a habeas corpus petition for his release.
Lee Cheuk-yan, the actual 57-year-old chairman of the pro-democracy Labor Party, said he was both stunned as well as heartened by the outpouring of youthful protest in the streets in the following times.
“You look at the faces here, and they are very young, ” Mr. Lee stated as he stood on a platform where he had been speaking to a vast audience on Tuesday night. “The old men will die, but the young will go on. They will beat them. ”
He then resumed speaking to the young crowd via a loud speaker, and repeated his comment to a roar of approval.
Mister. Wong, who is just shy of his 18th birthday, when he will obtain the right to drink alcohol, is a veteran of theatrical protest politics. While in high school, at 14, he and a classmate formed a youth group, Scholarism, to battle the “patriotic education” plan proposed by Beijing’s handpicked leader in Hk, Leung Chun-ying.
At first, their Internet-based movement was seen by many inhabitants as quaintly naïve, but as more students joined, it became a potent force within the campaign against the curriculum changes. After big street protests in 2012, the actual Hong Kong government shelved the plan. Since then, Scholarism has been a major force in promoting needs for democratic elections that would allow voters to nominate candidates for the town leader, and it promoted a student boycott of classes last week.
“If you informed people five years ago that high school students would get involved in politics, they wouldn’t possess believed you, ” he told The Times in July. “For students, what we should have is persistence in our principles and stubbornness in our ideals, ” this individual said, adding, “If students don’t stand in the front line, who will? ”
Hong Kong’s news media has treated him with some of the intensity that it usually devotes in order to film and pop idols. In July, interest was so high in Mr. Wong’s university entrance exam score that he held a news conference. (Mr. Wong’s score turned out to be middling by Hong Kong’s rigorous standards, and he has signed up for a local university that specializes in distance learning. )
Mr. Wong has said that he acquired their passion for politics from his parents, Grace and Roger Wong, Protestants who kindled a concern for social injustice and have said they are proud of their own son but otherwise stay out of the spotlight.
Mr. Wong and the wave of younger protest he has helped inspire are much less open to compromise than the traditional democracy camp in Hong Kong - a rift that may widen if the Chinese federal government offers only mild concessions and the protests continue. He did not respond to repetitive calls and messages seeking an interview.
In an interview earlier this year with a Hk online publication, Mr. Wong argued that “compromising before you even begin battling is illogical. ”
“I have no problems with negotiating, ” he added. “But before doing that, you better have some bargaining chips. If you don’t have that, how can you fight a war? ”
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