China Worker: Hong Kong: Massive protest movement against school brainwashing plan

17.9.12

China Worker - Mass movement develops rapidly, then its leaders call a sudden halt Socialist Action (CWI in Hong Kong) comments: Not many governments can match the record of Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying (“CY”) for pushing so many angry people to join street protests in so short a time. In the eleven weeks since CY came to power we have seen 400,000 marching against him on his first day in office, July 1, followed by 90,000 marching on July 29 against his patriotic education curriculum, followed when the school term began with a nine-day siege of the government complex at Tamar, with protest numbers swelling to 120,000. Polls show 77 percent are opposed to the new education policy, which is nationalistic and glorifies the role of China’s allegedly ‘communist’ dictatorship. Suddenly, without any democratic discussion, the mostly middle-class leaders of the Tamar protest movement announced through the media that they were calling off the mass protests. This u-turn was announced on the eve of the four-yearly elections to the legislature, on Sunday September 9, after CY announced a partial retreat in waiving the three-year deadline for introducing the new curriculum as a compulsory school subject. The school student campaign initiated by CWI comrades, called School Strike Against Brainwashing, which was an active and growing force in the mass Tamar protests, commented in a press release that “a historic movement has been cut short prematurely, before achieving its main aims. The government of Leung Chun-ying is in deep crisis and could have been pressed into much bigger concessions.” (The full statement is carried below).