Observation 2 / Hong Kong
Stand and be counted
Getting an accurate idea of turnout at protest marches is vital to our understanding of the public mood. We meet the people with the clickers.
On a sweltering Sunday in the humidity of the Hong Kong summer, thousands of people descend on Hennessy Road, a major thoroughfare in the city’s Wan Chai district. The crowd move slowly, ebbing westward towards the government headquarters in Admiralty. The people carry handwritten banners, chant and hold smartphones aloft, trying to capture the size of the throng they’re marching with.
Demonstrations are a regular feature of Hong Kong life and they are seldom about one thing: universal suffrage, freedom of speech and a call to return to British…
