Chinese officials moved quickly Monday to control news reports of the pro-democracy demonstrations that began in Hong Kong over the weekend and by Sunday night had turned into the largest street clashes in decades between civilians and the territory’s police force.
A directive from the central propaganda department in Beijing ordered websites to delete any mention of the unrest. The mainland news websites that did discuss the protests mostly posted a short article from Xinhua, the state news agency, that gave few details of what was unfolding down south. Some sites published editorial essays from Global Times, a state-run populist newspaper, taking a typically hard-line stand.
In one area of central Beijing, members of a neighborhood committee went around to shops on Monday telling the owners not to put up any posters with images of Hong Kong, even patriotic ones. The members took away an
official poster with an image of Hong Kong that had been previously distributed to merchants to post on their walls ahead of the National Day holiday on Wednesday. Posters showing the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square
were handed out.
Starting Sunday night, officials overseeing Internet censorship blocked Instagram, the popular photo-sharing social network, presumably to ensure that images of the rallies would not spread. Only Internet users who had software to leap over the online control system known as the Great Firewall could get on Instagram, and the blocking of the site ignited outrage among some Chinese Internet users who might have been previously unaware of the Hong Kong protests. The action by censors was consistent with earlier moves against other Western-based social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube; those bans were put in place during recent periods of political turmoil, and they still endure.
The words “Occupy Central,” the name of the broad Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, and other similar terms were banned on Monday from searches on Sina Weibo, China’s biggest microblog platform.
There was erratic censorship on Weixin, or WeChat, a cellphone networking application popular in China — some articles were not blocked, and users could forward them. Not all of the articles were supportive of the protesters: One essay making the rounds said Hong Kong residents were ungrateful, in the same language that Chinese officials often use to speak of Tibetans and Uighurs.
But Chinese political observers said they had the sense that many ordinary mainland Chinese were not closely following the events unfolding in Hong Kong, in part because of previous censorship of detailed political news about that city. “Many people don’t care about Hong Kong’s current situation and think it’s none of their business,” said one person at a party media organization.
That person said many journalists in his newsroom did not clearly comprehend what was happening in Hong Kong. Even those aware of the situation did not understand exactly why Hong Kong residents had supported the student protests or started the Occupy Central rallies, he said.
Some people at media organizations were tracking the situation closely, though. One person working at a state-run online media company sent an associate a text message that said, “Hopefully this doesn’t get worse.” A second message from the same person said: “I don’t want our government to start shooting again” — a reference to the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy civilian protesters in Beijing and other cities.
Some Chinese news organizations reported on the Hong Kong protests, but strictly from the Communist Party perspective. China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, had a front-page article on the events, with a photograph of protesters carrying open umbrellas confronting lines of police officers. There was no explanation of why people had the umbrellas (they were used to protect against pepper spray). The headline and article focused on condemnation of the protesters by the authorities. The English-language print edition of Global Times published a similar front-page photograph and article.
One editorial by Global Times in Chinese and English accused radical opposition forces in Hong Kong of “ruining Hong Kong’s street image” and said the earlier decision by mainland officials on the 2017 elections, labeled unacceptable by democracy advocates in Hong Kong, would not be reversed. A more incendiary Chinese op-ed published in Global Times by Wang Qiang, a scholar at the Shanghai Institute of Armed Police, said that if the Hong Kong police could not control the situation, the Chinese military would intervene. By early afternoon, those essays had been deleted from the newspaper’s Chinese website, though they had been published in the morning print editions, and the English version of the unsigned editorial remained online.
There was no indication, though, that Chinese leaders were seriously considering that option. Leung Chun-ying, the leader of Hong Kong who is allied with the Chinese Communist Party, said Sunday that the Chinese military would not be called in. After the bloody military crackdown around Tiananmen Square in 1989, leaders of the People’s Liberation Army decided that the army should not get involved in controlling civilian protests. That job in mainland China has fallen to the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary organization.
Besides its short article on the protests, Xinhua did post a story online about Hong Kong’s preparations to welcome mainland tourists for the National Day holiday week.
But by Monday morning, some mainland tourist agencies were grappling with the question of what to do about their tours to Hong Kong this week.
Among those Chinese who were following the protests, news spread via semiprivate social media networks and by word of mouth, with scores of supporters shaving their heads as a show of solidarity or making plans to travel to Hong Kong to take a closer look, according to telephone interviews and social media messages.
On Sunday afternoon, Ou Biaofeng, a resident of Zhuzhou in Hunan Province, posted pictures of himself with a shaved head on his Twitter account and on Weixin, his fingers raised in a “V” for victory.
By Monday, Mr. Ou, who said he was an independently employed social activist, said the “Going Bald for Hong Kong” movement, though small, had spread, with 30 or 40 others shaving their heads in several cities, including Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hefei. Many of those supporters had posted on Weixin what they said were photographs of themselves with bald heads.
“I think we’ll get over 100 soon,” Mr. Ou said. “Our goal is to support Hong Kong people in their protest for real democracy, for elections where they have a real choice. This protest is an encouragement for our own democratic ideals.”
Yet weighing on many minds were the memories of the violent suppression of democracy demonstrations in Beijing and other Chinese cities in June 1989, in which hundreds or possibly thousands of civilians were killed by soldiers at the orders of party leaders.
“People are very worried, too,” Mr. Ou said. “They worry that this may turn into what happened 25 years ago.”
Some people planned to show up in Hong Kong to support the protests, said Li Xiaoling, a resident of nearby Guangzhou. More than 10 people she knew, most of them living in Guangzhou, wanted to travel to Hong Kong, she said.
Ms. Li estimated that more than 90 percent of people in China were unaware of the events in Hong Kong, even though the protests were being prominently covered by foreign news organizations.
“The media can’t report this, as they have to follow the central propaganda orders and can only publish what the government wants them to, and they would never spread this news,” Ms. Li said. “So no one can watch it on TV or online.”
“But this kind of violence is awful,” she added. “Hong Kong has always been such a peaceful place.”
In Macau, the former Portuguese colony near Hong Kong, and in Taiwan, the self-governing island off China’s east coast, democracy advocates have made plans to hold solidarity rallies on Wednesday. Coinciding with China’s National Day, that was the date originally set by the organizers of Occupy Central to begin protests, before enthusiastic Hong Kong students held their own rallies last week and, on Friday, spontaneously ignited the current widespread occupation of the city’s streets.
Jess Yu contributed research from Beijing.