Global Voices Online

A total of over 200,000 people supposedly joined the Dec. 4, 2005 march in Hong Kong urging the government to create a clearer roadmap for granting universal suffrage to Hong Kong citizens to elect the special administrative region's Chief Executive and legislators. The march started in the Victoria Park , and ended at the Government Offices two-hours away. The once second highest ranking official in Hong Kong, former Chief Secretary Anson Chan attended the march, and drew a tremendous attention from around the world. Mrs. Chan has been called the Conscience of Hong Kong because she insisted on the interests of Hong Kong. She was forced to resign in 2001 by Beijing government.

The photo of Anson Chan was taken by Charles Feng

The bloggers in Hong Kong responded to the march very actively in versatile ways in the one day since. A very famous Chinese blog website named Independent Media which is run by some cultural critics in Hong Kong talked a lot about the march on Dec. 4. Some bloggers there and a blogger here (elder people, bigger march) said that they were moved by many elder people who made it in the two-hour-long march, and wondered why didn't the youth in HK join the march (in ZH, another similar blog). Some Independent Media bloggers also were strongly angry at a former Beijing official and professor in China who said that truth didn't depend on how many people spoke, and it wouldn't be the truth even if there were hundreds of thousands people who went to street to demonstrate (in ZH).

A blogger called Tricky guy's park was impressed by the rational and orderly behavior during the march. Police department said the total number of protesters was 63,000, but the organizer of the march said it would be 250,000. Many bloggers disagreed with the figure which was reported by government. Another famous blogger, Glutter implied that the government just want to mislead media. Glutter said that she was struck by the number of children there in a quick report about the march. Glutter put a lot of pictures in flickr related to the march. One active China blogger, t-salon, didn't talk about the march probably because of some technical problems with his blog; he gave some flickr pics instead.

The well know blogger, EastSouthWestNorth aggregated more than twenty sources reporting on the total number of protesters in a more academic style to indefatigably expound how many people were on earth then. A blogger named Letters from China reported the different discussions about the march by some blogs. The post looks a little bit like a news article.

Interestingly, all these bloggers aforementioned were joining the march for the different reasons. Some of them were supporting the democratic appeals, and some of them were just for objective observation. It seems that the bloggers do represent the democratic power of grass root.