By Sherrie Chen
2015 is a sheep year in China. And the city’s leader C.Y. Leung sent the people of Hong Kong the Lunar New Year message: “Please be more like sheep.”
Last year, student-led protests for democratic open elections took over major streets in the heart of the city which was the biggest political challenge to Beijing since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
The attitude of Hong Kong’s leader is clear that he is hoping 2015 to be a peaceful year and his flock won’t rock the boat.
On the other side, Hong Kong’s young protesters have vowed to return in force in the Year of the Sheep. “I believe within this year they will have a new act, they will have occupy action or civil disobedience again,” says Joshua Wong, the teenage face of the Occupy protests and co-founder of the student activist group Scholarism.
With the slogans”we’ll be back” since December, the demonstrators plan to return and will once again rely on the civil disobedience tactics since causing some trouble to the government and increase the ruling cost of the government are the only ways they’ve seen that will actually give pressure to the government.
The major reason for the movement is that young people are facing a growing shortage of university places, disappointing job prospects, and a widening wealth gap.They want the right to vote on candidates for chief executive who are independent of Beijing.
Though Hong Kong has been governed under China’s principle of “one country, two systems” since the handover from Britain in 1997, these people are not satisfied with the present freedom.
“It’s not like the Chinese government owes us anything,” says student activist Glacier Kwong of Keyboard Frontline. “We have the right to have these things. We have the right to have democracy — true democracy — and universal suffrage because this is a human right.”
