Hong Kong activists share election protest on social media
Tens of thousands of pro-democracy activists, most in their teens or 20s, took to the streets of Hong Kong in response to the Chinese central government’s decision to limit Hong Kong voters' choices in the 2017 election for chief executive, according to Times reporter Julie Makinen.
As of Monday evening, #OccupyCentral had 17,367 mentions on Instagram, reports Iconosquare.
"Fight on," read Instagram user Jonathan Mak's caption of what appeared to be thousands of people walking down a highway.
"Really hope this will not be needed," user HC_NG captioned his photo of a makeshift first-aid station.
Antony Dapiran, an Australian-born corporate lawyer living in Hong Kong, told the L.A. Times in a phone interview why he felt it was important to share his photographs on Instagram.
“I think it was important to get the word out there and see what was happening. Also to enable people on the ground to communicate with each other so other people in Hong Kong could see what was happening down in Central."
Dapiran, who has shuttled between Hong Kong and Beijing for the last 15 years, said that this was the first time he had seen such a spontaneous protest erupt in the streets.
According to Dapiran, there were several mainlanders among the protesters over the last several days. Those he spoke with said people would be too afraid to do this elsewhere in China, he said, but “Hong Kong is different.” “What I’m most afraid of is the central government in Beijing doesn’t appreciate just how different it is here,” Dapiran added.
“I worry that they think that people here react to their kind of command-and-control style of ruling the same way that people in the mainland do, but they just don’t. People here are different and they’ve got a different mind-set.”
Several videos were also shared on the service, one showing protesters singing together, another showing the streets filling with smoke.
Check out a few of the Instagram posts we found using the geo-location site Geofeedia.com:
Updated 1:31 p.m. Sept. 30: This post was updated to add comments by Antony Dapiran. It originally published 8:35 p.m. Sept. 29.
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