Arch Sinophobe Jimmy Lai Wants Student Protestors to Retreat
Jimmy Lai, the rabidly anti-CPC, anti-mainland media tycoon who had financially and otherwise supported Occupy Central and the protesting students from the outset, including protest training tutored by foreign anti-China groups, now wants the students to retreat and regroup for fear of further antagonizing the vast majority of Hong Kong citizens.
Meanwhile, after the police began dismantling student barricades on court order, yesterday evening, a group of radical students broke the glass facade of the government’s legislative council building using barricades in an attempt to storm into the building as other protesters blocked police from interfering.
Unrelenting China critic Lai has been a regular at one of Hong Kong’s key Occupy protest sites: in Admiralty almost every day, returning nightly to his family in upscale Kowloon Tong. He remains despite having been attacked last week – by three men hurling bags of rotten offal – and regardless of a threatened clearance of the area by bailiffs and police. Vowing to continue his sit-in while the protest continues, he says that if officers turn up: “I will let them arrest me. I will not resist.”
Ironically, while Lai, 65, bolsters the pro-democracy camp, he also believes that, strategically, the protesters should now retreat. This as a small group of people early this morning tried to break into Hong Kong’s Legislative Council nearby, causing riot police to deploy pepper spray to prevent others from following suit.
“People are getting tired…We cannot exhaust the goodwill of the people,” says Lai, on the day that results of a Chinese University poll showed almost 70 per cent of Hong Kong people, sick of traffic jams and lost business, want the Occupiers to leave. “But it doesn’t mean we have to yield.”
Lai reckons the students and their fellow dissenters should withdraw and re-energize – and vow to return if their demands remain unheeded. “We should retreat when the momentum is there, while our determination and will are strong,” he says. “Then we will be able to come back.”
Despite Lai’s support for the students, he also believes their recent attempt to meet Chinese authorities in Beijing was a mis-step. “For them to do it [on Saturday] was not appropriate,” he says. “They should have gone during APEC, when world leaders were there. That would have created the biggest impact.”
The attempt by three Hong Kong Federation of Students representatives to fly to the Chinese capital was foiled by the invalidation of their travel documents. Entry permits, issued by mainland authorities, allow Hong Kong residents free travel over the border.
He acknowledges that those who have dug in their heels at the Occupy sites constitute a minority of Hong Kong’s 7.2 million population. “Only a small percentage of people are willing to pay the price to fight,” he says.
– Sydney Morning Herald
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