Hong Kong protests: pro-democracy rallies remain as national holiday begins – as it happened

Protesters have been stockpiling supplies and erecting makeshift barricades ahead of what some fear may be a push by police to clear the roads before Chinese National Day, Reuters reports.

On the eve of Wednesday’s anniversary of the Communist Party’s foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, crowds poured into central districts of the Asian financial hub, near where National Day festivities are scheduled to take place.

Rumours have rippled through crowds of protesters that police could be preparing to move in again, as the government has vowed to go ahead with celebrations.

“Many powerful people from the mainland will come to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government won’t want them to see this, so the police must do something,” Sui-ying Cheng, 18, a student at Hong Kong University’s School of Professional and Continuing Education, said of the National Day holiday.

“We are not scared. We will stay here tonight. Tonight is the most important,” she said.

Student leaders have given Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying an ultimatum to come out and address the protesters before midnight on Tuesday, threatening to escalate action in the next few days to occupy more government facilities, buildings and public roads if he fails to do so.

The protest continued to be meticulously prepared. Organisers have been handing out food, t-shirts, megaphones, goggles and have even established a recycling system for rubbish.

The organisers of the protests say it could be widened to include strikes and occupying government buildings as they set out arrangements for Wednesday’s sit-in to mark China National Day.

At a press conference, Alex Chow from Hong Kong’s Federation of Students said more protesters were preparing to swell the streets, Harbour Times reports.

He said the movement was hoping to “force a response” from the government.

And that if the authorities failed to meet their demands the demonstrations could be widened to more areas, and could include strike action and sit-ins in government buildings.

Another protester leader, Chan Kin-man announced the protests sites in downtown Hong Kong as “Democratic Square”, journalist Tom Grundy reports.

The organisers said “humanitarian corridors” were being planned to allow the emergency services to reach anyone injured in the protests, DPA’s Joanna Chiu reports.

These days no protest movement is complete without a wedding in the heart of the demonstrations.

In 2011 there was a marriage in Cairo’s Tahrir Square ahead of the ousting of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak.

Last year a Turkish couple invited all the protesters involved in the Taksim Square protests in Istanbul to their wedding ceremony.

Newly weds also took to the barricades at the height of the protests in the Ukrainian capital Kiev earlier this year.

Now a couple in Hong Kong have tied the knot during the current demonstrations.

The happy couple were named by AP Vivian Lo and Ka Sing Fung.

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Guardian readers in Hong Kong have been submitting their stories and photos of the protests to GuardianWitness.

Here’s a selection of some of the latest contributions from Graham Cook under the user name Finefox:

The office of Germany’s chancellor has expressed sympathy for the Hong Kong protesters.

Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seiber , said the German leader is following events closely. My colleague Jana Harris translate him saying:

Freedom of speech has a long tradition in Hong Kong and it is secured by law.

It is a good sign, that so many people have voiced their opinions. Our hope is it that government forces in Hong Kong react with consideration, so that the rights of the citizens are upheld and their opinions can be voiced freely.

Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, expressed similar sentiments.

Protesters in Hong Kong have been spreading the word about the demonstration all over the city – on flyovers, abandoned buses, road signs and walls.

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David Cameron said that he is “deeply concerned” about the situation in Hong Kong. Speaking to Sky News he added that he hopes the stand off between the authorities and the protesters can be resolved.

Cameron’s LibDem deputy Nick Clegg was more forthright. On Monday he expressed sympathy for the “brave” protesters and their key demands.

China’s online censors have had their busiest day of the year so far, Foreign Policy notes.

China’s small army of online censors burst into action in China’s digital public square, quickly deleting related photos and comments posted to Weibo, a Chinese social platform with 46 million daily active users. Weibo censorship hit its highest point this year at 152 censored posts per 10,000, according to Weiboscope, an analytics project run by the University of Hong Kong. (“Hong Kong” and “police” were the day’s top censored terms.) To put that in perspective, the Sept. 28 censorship rate was more than double that on June 4, the 25th
anniversary of the crackdown on the Tiananmen student movement -- an event so meticulously censored in both traditional and social media that many of China’s younger generation are largely ignorant of the event.

But so far the censors have allowed searches for the phrase ‘Umbrella Revolution’ – one of the names for the movement after protesters used umbrellas to shield themselves from pepper spray and teargas.

But it may not be long before that term is also blocked, Reuters suggests.

It was unclear why the “Umbrella Revolution” search remained open on Sina Weibo while it was blocked on Tencent Weibo, another popular microblogging service.

On Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, search results for “Occupy Central”, a catch-all phrase for the Hong Kong protests, showed a page that said “according to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results are not displayed”.

Anson Chan, Hong Kong’s former chief secretary, has condemned the way the China and the Hong Kong government have handled the protests and said it showed that the principal of one country, two systems was not working.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Chan said it was “sad spectacle” to see force being used against those demonstrating. She said:

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw fully kitted out riot police firing teargas and pepper spray and wielding batons against unarmed protesters, many of whom were young people. They were totally defenceless, they had no arms, they were protesting peacefully. There is no need to use this kind of force against Hong Kong people.

I see this as evidence that both the SAR [specially administered region] government and Beijing are determined to keep a tight grip over Hong Kong. They should ask themselves what has led to this state of affairs. They have denied the Hong Kong people a legitimate request of asking Beijing to honour its promise to give us genuine universal suffrage for the election of the chief executive in 2017.

Beijing promised the people of Hong Kong one man one vote. What they are now claiming is that you can have one man one vote but only after we have pre-screened the candidates [to] make sure the outcome is 100% controlled.

We see blatant interference form Beijing, we see repression. This kind of thing may be tolerated on the mainland but it is not our way of life.

Welcome to our continuing live coverage of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, where it is mid afternoon on the fifth day of the demonstrations.

The protests began with a student strike last week and escalated over the weekend with a call to action from the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement.

There has been widespread condemnation of police attempts to disperse the protesters using tear gas and pepper spray. The protests have continued to grow ahead of a public holiday on Wednesday, despite a call from Hong Kong’s beleaguered chief executive Leung Chun-ying for an end to the demonstrations.

Leung’s resignation is one of the key demands of the protesters together with free and fair elections in 2017 after Beijing announced that it planned to vet candidates.

The organisers of the protest the Occupy Central movement are urging supporters to take part in a large sit-in to mark China’s National Day on Wednesday.

Here’s a summary of the latest developments:

• Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, urged protest leaders to immediately withdraw demonstrators from the centre of the city on Tuesday, as they continued to call for his resignation. Thousands remained scattered across Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mongkok. Numbers dwindled overnight – after peaking in the tens of thousands – but by lunchtime on Tuesday more were arriving at the scene again.
  
• Protesters are stockpiling supplies and erecting makeshift barricades, fearing that authorities might crack down on the protests before Wednesday’s public holiday. Leung maintained that the People’s Liberation Army will not intervene to end the demonstrations, but said the “illegal” protests will not change Beijing’s decision to vet Hong Kong leadership candidates.
• Protest organizer Benny Tai has acknowledged that Occupy Central had incomplete control over the movement. Since the protests began, 41 people have been wounded, including police, and 78 arrested, according to officials. Police have used pepper spray and tear gas and displayed weapons.