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December 17, 2005

Battle of Wanchai

As the long awaited Battle of Wanchai finally erupted, ESWN takes issue with what appeared to be unwise police tactics. IMHO, while he thinks that the Hong Kong Police has misread the protestors' intentions, he has himself misread what the police was aiming to do.

So anyway, back to what I saw. The street action today started in mid-afternoon. Some demonstrators went down Hung Hing Road by the harbor. Based upon the experience from the previous days, the police had narrowed the roadway by moving concrete blocks in. The demonstrators were met with water hoses. The Hong Kong forums are saying that the police especially directed the water against Cantonese-speaking reporters.

So the demonstrators were blocked at the Hung Hing Road access point. It is simple and naive to assume that the action would cease for the day. Instead, the demonstrators flowed elsewhere to find other access points. In one case, the police quickly moved police trucks and successfully prevented the demonstrators from progressing. However, there are too many access points in the broad perimeter. There were more police than demonstrators, but the police were deployed all over the perimeter and it was a matter of the demonstrators finding that weakest point. Before too long, the demonstrators were flowing onto Gloucester Road, the major six-lane east-west road. At that point, Wanchai was in a total shutdown. No vehicles were allowed, no traffic across the Hung Hom tunnel and no MTR service.

The story about targetting the media are hearsay at this point and I do not intend on elaborating on them at this time.

What the entire second paragraph seemed to suggest, though, was that the intention of the protestors were not merely to continue “action,” but to breach police defences. The day's protests clearly had a different objective than previous protests, in that there appears to be a specific objective to reach the HK Convention & Exhibition Centre (HKCEC). Given such a strategy, it would have been nearly impossible for the police to block all access points, but the police had exactly an obligation to do so.

What the police did, therefore, was deal with any breaches as necessary, and take the initiative while protestors were retreating to make it increasingly difficult for the protestors to try again, leading to the protestors being held up at Gloucester Road. Indeed, bottling up the protestors at Gloucester was probably the best option the police had: a particularly wide throughfare, Gloucester allowed for a very large concentration of people (of course, the best choice would've been a park or public square, but you take what you can). A smaller street would've necessitated sealing of dozens more intersections. And all reports I've read so far suggested that the protestors lost the initiative to reach the convention centre once they were hemmed in at Gloucester.

Sure, the protestors can make a spectacle for hours and satisfy their goal of making a big scene for the cameras, but the police's immediate objective was not to dissipate the protests entirely, but prevent them from getting too close to the HKCEC and creating a cascade effect: in this, they were quite successful. Indeed, the decision for the protestors to take Hung Hing Road to the initial confrontation was fated to play well to police hands: the HKCEC can be easily seen from the road, and media reports have been raving about how the police managed to stop the protestors just “hundreds of metres” from the HKCEC. I'm sure had they chosen an inland route, they could've easily spun the whole thing into a police crackdown when the HKCEC was nowhere in sight.

What next? The demonstrators simply sat down, had dinner, gave speeches, danced and sang. Meanwhile, the police commissioner proclaimed at the press conference that the 900 demonstrators were in fact under police control on Gloucester Street. Huh? Then he promised that as long as they sit there peacefully, they will not be interfered with; but if they resort to violence, the police will have to act according to the law.

This is simple and naive because of the assumptions about the goals of the demonstrators. If their goal is to take control of the Conventional Centre, then this may be a correct statement. If their goal is to make street theater for the global media, then this is playing right into their hands as there will be an all-night vigil with continuous television coverage. And if they still refuse to leave? The police must eventually go in to remove them, while the world is watching live on television. It is now almost midnight on Saturday, and we still have a standoff. It looks like the demonstrators are not budging, and it will be up to the police to dig themselves out of the hole that they created. I will try to keep watching as long as I can.

The objective of the police, before the Gloucester shutdown, was to prevent the protestors from reaching an uncontrollable tipping point. They did this without excessive violence and harm. But now that the protestors were hemmed in, the police now had a different objective: to disperse the protestors as non-violently as possible, within a reasonable time limit.

It didn't matter if the police “play[ed] right into [the protestors'] hands” if the police achieved their initial objective! Sure, now the police had the task of clearing the road, but that was much better than trying to disperse the crowds on the grounds of the HKCEC. Whether the crowd intented on seizing the HKCEC or just making a scene outside it is irrelevant: the police had an obligation to stop the protestors in any case, and because the protestors never made it to the HKCEC, they have no way of proving themselves to be capable to holding themselves back had they made it. The police isn't going to say that all those thousands of people on march had the intention of ransacking the HKCEC, but by having a major confrontation away from the HKCEC, the protestors now have to convince people that they would've been less confrontational had they made it. Being peaceful at Gloucester means jack squat since, as the Commissioner said already, they were “under police control”.

ESWN appears to be suggesting that for the police to remove the protestors with full media attention would result in embarrassment. I beg to differ. Removing protestors would only be embarrassing if the police acted brutally, and now that the removal has begun, it appears that the protestors still wish to make a spectacle but have certainly failed to induce police violence. Indeed, some protestors, frustrated at the police's slow and deliberate pace, are going into police wagons on their own initiative. What the world will see is the police bending backwards to clear the road as peacefully as possible. I fail to see how that would be bad press for the police.

As for the rest of the article, I agree with ESWN that the Hong Kong media is naïve (though I find his choice of words interesting), so I won't elaborate. On the PLA comment, I suspect that some reporter probably wanted to get a soundbite, so asked a question about it. Again, media's fault, not police's (though I'm speculating on that).

Posted by Kelvin at December 17, 2005 7:40 PM

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