Tens of thousands march in HK anti-government rally

Bloomberg

Tens of thousands of Hong Kong protesters marched through the city centre to the vicinity of government headquarters, ignoring a police-approved end point and defying a ruling that shortened the planned route.
The march marked the sixth straight week of anti-government rallies that have put increasing pressure on the financial hub’s administration.
Organizer Civil Human Rights Front said the rallies, which have drawn hundreds of thousands of people, were held to show support for demands including the withdrawal of
legislation that would allow extraditions to China, amnesty for arrested protesters and the resignation of Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who is backed by Beijing.
The Appeal Board on Public Meetings and Processions’ that the march, originally planned to end at the city’s Court of Final Appeal in Central, must finish in the Wanchai district, citing potential difficulties in crowd control.
Marchers ignored the ruling, and police retreated and shifted their barricades to allow the mass of protesters past the Wanchai end point.
Shopkeepers along the route supplied marchers with water and other drinks as the temperature in the city hovered above 30 degrees Celsius.
Barricades surrounding the police station in Wanchai were converted into so-called Lennon Walls, spontaneous message boards adorned with brightly colored sticky labels.
Claudia Mo, a pan democracy lawmaker, said at Sunday’s rally that protesters wanted Lam to pledge not to target people who took part in the rallies.
“We would like her to say that there will be no prosecution of the protesters arrested, that there will be general amnesty in this very sad saga,” Mo said. “She refuses in the name of the rule of law.”
Lam will not resign and will not make any further concessions to the protesters, Bernard Chan, the convener of the city’s Executive Council, said in an interview with the New York Times. The chief executive will consult with different sectors of the Hong Kong population and will concentrate on drafting a broad policy address for mid-October, the report cited Chan as saying.
Kingston Cheung, a 17-year-old student who’s taken part in the protests since they started on June 9, said he marched on Sunday to voice opposition to the government’s handling of previous protests. “The focus of the protests has been about the extradition bill, but we are also starting to see how the government and police have mishandled them,” he said. “The abuse of power by the police has added to the public’s anger.”
The march comes a week after attempts to clear a demonstration in the New Territories area of Sha Tin, near the Chinese border, devolved into
dramatic clashes between protesters and riot police inside a shopping mall — keeping the heat on Lam. Officers arrested more than 40 people.
“My fear is there will be an escalation of violence,” said opposition lawmaker Alvin Yeung, who was at the New Town Center in Sha Tin when the scuffles erupted. “It seems like everyone knows if this continues, somebody must die — either a protester or police officer. And then what?”