Ten years ago this week, a sea of yellow umbrellas filled the streets of Hong Kong in what at the time was the largest mass campaign for democracy in the city. In what became known as the ‘Umbrella Movement’, the people of Hong Kong courageously showed the world their desire for freedom – and their determination to fight for it. For 79 days, crowds occupied major streets in the centre of Hong Kong, demanding genuine multi-party democracy.

The protests were preceded by demands by civil rights groups in an unofficial referendum for universal suffrage in elections for the city’s chief executive (effectively, the mayor) – a right promised in Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law. At the end of August 2014, Beijing responded by announcing that the 2017 chief executive election and the 2020 legislative council election would indeed be by universal suffrage – but that Beijing would handpick all the candidates. To which the ‘father’ of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, distinguished barrister Martin Lee, quite rightly retorted:

Hong Kong people will have one person, one vote, but Beijing will select all the candidates – puppets. What is the difference between a rotten apple, a rotten orange and a rotten banana? We want genuine universal suffrage and not democracy with Chinese characteristics.

On 28 September 2014, the movement – though already underway – began in earnest, with tens of thousands of Hong Kongers occupying the city’s financial district, singing ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ from Les Miserables. School and university students demonstrated by day, and were pictured diligently doing their homework in their tents by night. Protesters picked up litter from the demonstrations in order to keep the streets clean. They were the most orderly, well-behaved, moderate and decent protests imaginable.

While the protests were entirely peaceful, the police response was not. Hong Kong’s Catholic Bishop Emeritus, Cardinal Joseph Zen, was arrested and Martin Lee tear-gassed.

‘Like many of the other tens of thousands of calm and non-violent protesters in the Hong Kong streets … I........

© The Spectator