Thousands of protesters returned to the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday ahead of a contentious vote this week on a China-backed election proposal.
Pro-democracy groups held large-scale protests last year to advocate against the election measure, which would require candidates for the city’s chief executive to receive approval from a committee stacked with Beijing loyalists. Demonstrators say the proposal fails to fulfill China’s promise of allowing Hong Kong to freely elect its own leaders by 2017.
Protesters are urging sympathetic lawmakers to vote against the proposal when it is introduced on Wednesday:
To get the two-thirds majority in the Legislative Council needed to pass the proposal into law, the Hong Kong government needs to coax at least four of the pro-democratic legislators to vote for it. In talks leading up to the vote so far, the government has failed to convince even one of them to change their mind.
"If the bill is passed somehow miraculously, there will be huge demonstrations and possibly very ugly clashes with the police," said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a history and China Studies professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
In light of the possible confrontations, officials have put up metal fences around the entrances to the Legislative Council’s building. On Saturday, the police confiscated wood, nails and glass bottles from the dozens of protest tents that still remain standing near the government buildings to prevent those items from being used as weapons by "radicals" during protests this week.
"Police will not tolerate any violent and illegal behavior and will take resolute actions to restore public order," Cheung Tak-keung, Assistant Commissioner of Police, said in a press briefing on Friday.
As the vote nears and polls suggest waning public support for the proposal, Beijing has shown no sign of yielding to the protesters’ demands. On the other hand, three top Beijing officials overseeing Hong Kong affairs told legislators last month that their "principles and bottom lines are unwavering."
Some Hong Kong residents have previously raised concerns that China could send its troops into the streets to violently disperse the demonstrators. Beijing has between 8,000 and 10,000 soldiers stationed in the city.