Hong Kong protesters defy calls to abandon camps

Pro-democracy protesters who have been occupying public streets in Hong Kong since September dug their heels in for a prolonged battle, one day after three of the movement’s leaders announced they would surrender to authorities and urged demonstrators to abandon their encampments.

Benny Tai, Chan Kin-man and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming on Wednesday entered a police station just two subway stops from their movement's main protest site in Admiralty to turn themselves over to police. After completing paperwork, the three leaders were allowed to leave without facing criminal charges.

"I hope we can show others the meaning of the surrender. We urge the occupation to end soon and more citizens will carry out the basic responsibility of civil disobedience, which is to surrender," said Tai, one of the most prominent protest leaders, after he left the police station.

Police said that 24 people aged between 33 and 82 had also surrendered for "taking part in an unauthorized assembly," and authorities would conduct follow-up investigations based on the information provided. 

The South China Morning Post reported Wednesday that at least 200 people have been placed on a list for investigation. Citing an unnamed police source, newspaper said that no action had been taken yet because the current focus was on clearing the remaining protest camps.

The mostly peaceful protests, led by a restive generation of students, have called for China's Communist Party rulers live up to constitutional promises to grant full democracy to the former British colony, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

Hong Kong is ruled under a "one country, two systems" formula, which allows the territory wide-ranging autonomy and freedoms and specifies universal suffrage for Hong Kong as an eventual goal.

But Beijing ruled on Aug. 31 that it would screen candidates who want to run for the city's chief executive in 2017, which democracy activists said rendered the universal suffrage concept meaningless. The protesters are demanding free and open elections for their leader.

On Tuesday the three protest leaders called on demonstrators, many of whom are students, to retreat from protest sites in Asia’s financial hub amid fears of further clashes with police.

Joshua Wong, leader of student protest group Scholarism, responded by calling on supporters to regroup and launch a hunger strike.

The students' defiance underscored the growing split between young protesters and veteran activists, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“We are on a hunger strike until the chief executive will agree to talks with students,” Wong said.

Two more members of Scholarism said Wednesday night they would join Wong in his hunger strike, the Journal reported.

In a statement issued late Wednesday, Hong Kong's chief executive’s office said the hunger strikes were "futile."

"Expressing views on constitutional reform through illegal and confrontational means is bound to be futile," the statement read. "We hope the students who are undergoing hunger strike could take good care of their health."

More than 100,000 people took to the streets at the height of the demonstrations in late September but numbers have dwindled to only a few hundred, mostly students. Public support has also waned as the protests continue to block key roads and disrupt business.

Jean Pierre Cabestan, an expert in Chinese politics at Hong Kong Baptist University, said Wednesday the movement was "in tatters."

"The trouble and one of the weaknesses of the movement is there's not much coordination between the Hong Kong Federation of Students and the pan-democrats," he told foreign correspondents in Beijing.

The protesters are united in their calls for democracy for the former British colony but are split over tactics, two months after the demonstrations, also branded illegal by Beijing, began.

Hong Kong returned to Chinese Communist Party rule in 1997 under a "one country, two systems" formula that gave it some autonomy from the mainland and a promise of eventual universal suffrage.

Al Jazeera and Reuters