Hong Kong’s Occupy Central Movement Says ‘FU’ to Beijing Communists with Online Vote

Occupy Central with Love and Peace protest in Hong Kong

The Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) pro-democracy movement has been steadily growing in China, much to the chagrin of mainland Communists, and their pro-business autocracy in Hong Kong. OCLP recently began a mock-election that has drawn hundreds of thousands of voters already, and lots of criticism from Party officials. But that’s to be expected, since OCLP is basically telling the CCP to get their fingers out of HK, a prospect that Beijing has 0 interest in considering. After all, HK makes a lot of money for China, so letting them go would be a disaster on multiple fronts, not least to the ‘strong-man’ image that China is trying to hard to project recently.

If you want to understand just how scared China is, all you have to do is look at this opposition video made to attack OCLP (below), or recall the massive cyber-attacks launched against the OCLP voting site and affiliated websites, all done with official Party sanction. As Alan Wong recently wrote about the attacks:

“The online voting platform for the unofficial referendum now underway on Hong Kong’s political future has been subjected to one of the most severe cyberattacks of its kind ever seen, according to the head of the Internet security company tasked with protecting it. Matthew Prince, chief executive and co-founder of the San Francisco-based company CloudFlare, said in an email Friday that the distributed denial-of-service attack (also known as DDoS) on Occupy Central’s voting platform was “one of the largest and most persistent” ever. Mr. Prince said the attackers appeared to have commanded a network of compromised computers around the world to overwhelm the platform with traffic in hopes of disabling it. The owners of the computers exploited in such attacks are usually unaware that they have been compromised.“

You know you are doing something right when the Chinese security apparatus launches one of the biggest and longest cyber-attacks in recent years to try and stop an unofficial online vote from even being able to take place. Wow, talk about scared shitless! If an online vote with no actual political effect can get the Party that worked up, image what will happen when half those many people actually take to the streets and start doing real political actions.

After all, that is what Beijing is really worried about, as the recent efforts to sanitize any reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre from Chinese collective memory clearly demonstrates. After all, authoritarian political regimes always hate it when people know their dirty secrets.

Until next time…remember those who came before you in struggle.

25 years ago, on June 4, 1989, hundreds of Chinese pro-democracy demonstrators were killed when tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in central Beijing to squash a six-week long, student-led protest. (Courtesy of Liu Yi/Courtesy Mariah Hale/Folger Theatre)

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