Umbrella unfurling for demanding suffrage in Hong Kong

October 8, 2007 5,580 Hong Kong citizens participated in a umbrella unfurling campaign, which was organized by the pan-democrats in order to support having full universal suffrage in 2012. The participants gathered in Victoria Park and unfurled yellow umbrellas forming the numbers 2012 against a background of blue umbrellas.

The organizers had prepared 10,080 umbrellas, 3,144 in yellow and 6,936 in blue. However, since the event was not as popular as expected, about four thousand blue ones were left undistributed. Nevertheless, Ronny Tong, an organizer from Civic Party, said he was satisfied with the turnout.

Anson Chan, the former Chief Secretary and one of the candidates of the upcoming by-election in the Legislative Council, also participated in this event.

Currently, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong is elected by a election committee of 800 people, and most of them heavily favour PRC government. Also, only half of the seats in Legislative Council is directly elected, and another half is elected by less than 5% of citizens. Therefore, the pan-democrats in Hong Kong demand to have universal suffrage in the next elections in 2012.