STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Manipulated 'Occupy' Movement Goes International as Hong Kong Explodes?
By Staff News & Analysis - September 29, 2014

Hong Kong clashes, arrests kick-start plans to blockade city …. Violent clashes between Hong Kong riot police and students galvanized tens of thousands of supporters for the city's pro-democracy movement and kick-started a plan to lock down the heart of the Asian financial centre early on Sunday. Leaders and supporters of Occupy Central with Love and Peace rallied to support students who were doused with pepper spray early on Saturday after they broke through police barriers and stormed the city's government headquarters. – Reuters

Dominant Social Theme: The Occupy movement is an unstoppable international force.

Free-Market Analysis: Something happened on the way to the "Occupy" movement's apparent demise. It's gone international. Now according to Reuters, it's responsible for the Hong Kong unrest taking place to protest the Chinese government's stance on more forceful Hong Kong rule.

When we checked with Wikipedia – unfortunately, a good source for globalist spin – we found to our astonishment that the Occupy movement was reported to be actively engaged in dozens of countries around the world. The impression being left is that the Occupy movement is at the forefront of populist dissatisfaction with status-quo governance and the burgeoning "surveillance state."

And now in Hong Kong, too. Here's more:

Occupy demanded that Beijing withdraw its framework for political reform in the former British colony and resume talks. Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a formula known as "one country, two systems" that guaranteed a high degree of autonomy and freedoms not enjoyed in mainland China. Universal suffrage was set as an eventual goal.

… Some of Hong Kong's most powerful tycoons have spoken out against the Occupy movement, warning it could threaten the city's business and economic stability. The latest protests escalated after demonstrators broke through a cordon late on Friday and scaled perimeter fences to invade the city's main government compound in the culmination of a week-long rally to demand free elections. Student leaders said about 80,000 people participated in the rally. No independent estimate was available.

Occupy organisers had previously indicated they planned to blockade the financial district on Oct. 1, China's National Day holiday. The rally will now take part in the Admiralty district to build on the momentum of week-long student rallies and protests in the area. "Rather than encouraging the students to join, we are encouraged by the students to join," said Benny Tai, one of the three main organizers of the pro-democracy movement. "We are touched and moved by the work of the students."

We checked into Benny Tai's background and found that he was an Associate Dean of the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law from 2000 to 2008. The University of Hong Kong is one of the city's most prestigious universities and some of its law school professors have close ties to the British legal establishment.

Benny Tai apparently came up with the idea of an "Occupy" movement in 2013 but its current high profile is the product of a strategy said to be 1.5 years in the making. In fact – as with the Egyptian uprising – the Hong Kong protests that prominently feature Occupy are being "live streamed" by the Western media.

From what we can tell, Tai is behind the increasingly confrontational tone taken by Hong Kong protestors in the past months. He has said that law-breaking is justified as part of civil disobedience and has apparently taken a leading role in making Hong Kong protests more adversarial.

The sudden involvement of Occupy has raised tensions with students who have been at the forefront of the protest. Toward the end of the article, Reuters reports the following:

… Divisions between the students and Occupy quickly emerged as arguments broke out and some students accused the civil disobedience movement of hijacking their protest. "I came here tonight to support the students, but now I feel like I've been used … " said Sharon Choi, 20.

These sorts of complaints were heard during the New York Occupy movement as well. Research into Hong Kong protests reveals that dissatisfaction and protests go back a decade or more, but somehow Tai seems to be garnering most of the mainstream media attention, including numerous interviews and profiles in a recent Wall Street Journal blog.

We've never been big fans of the "Occupy" movement, believing it to be a kind of controlled opposition – at least in its US incarnation – that was positioned to generate class warfare in a way that would redirect people's attention from monopoly central banking and other elite facilities that are part of the West's larger economic problems.

It is true, as we predicted long ago, that what we call the Internet Reformation is increasingly giving rise to unrest around the world, certainly in Europe and the Middle East and now Hong Kong, too. But the real revolution taking place is an internal one.

The threat to business-as-usual has to do with people making their own internal decisions to try to build better and more satisfying lives outside of mainstream economic and sociopolitical constructs. In other words, the Internet "revolution" is one of human action that takes place at a local and personal level. It is not necessarily one that includes great passionate civil disobedience movements led by charismatic populists.

After Thoughts

Dissatisfaction with China's treatment of Hong Kong is obviously sincere and deeply rooted. We're a bit more skeptical of Mr. Tai's sudden involvement and increasingly high media profile. Good luck, Hong Kong.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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