Massive Pro-Democracy Protest Tells The World That Hong Kong Is Ready For Universal Suffrage...

Larger than expected crowds marched peacefully in Hong Kong protesting the government's and China's insistence that the people here are not ready to vote for their own leaders.

The message of Sunday's crowd, estimated by organizers at 250,000 and by some independent analysts at 100,000 or more, was clear.

"We want universal suffrage," legislator Ronny Tong, of the pro-democracy Article 45 Concern Group, said, adding that it was a historic day in Hong Kong's quest for democracy.

In 2004, China ruled that Hong Kong will not have the voting rights expected in some interpretations of the Basic Law agreement between Britain and China hammered out before the return of the territory to Chinese rule.

China has ruled out full and direct democratic elections for Hong Kong's legislature in 2008 and for the Chief Executive in 2007, prompting fears that the territory's promises of a "high degree of autonomy" are fast being eroded, RFA's Mandarin and Cantonese services report.

The Standing Committee of China's parliament, the National People's Congress (NPC), issued a ruling saying that universal suffrage wouldn't be used to elect Hong Kong's chief executive in 2007 or the territory's legislature a year later, effectively postponing any consideration of full and direct elections until 2012.

"Universal suffrage is not a free lunch," NPC Standing Committee deputy secretary-general Qiao Xiaoyang told a meeting with Hong Kong legislators when the decision was announced. "It is far more courageous to say, with an eye on Hong Kong's actual situation and long-term interests, that there should not be direct universal elections in 2007 and 2008."

Gateway Pundit has a round-up here. Glutter has photos here, a quick report here and the debate on how many people were actually marching.

EastSouthNorthWest on the number of protesters here and round-up of the estimates of marchers from various news organizations.

Spike's take.

The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor.

Simon World.

Al Jazeera, that may have been wondering why no one blew themselves up.

Reuters, who was hoping that someone would blow themselves up so that they could call them freedom fighters.

Xinhua, that decided that the march wasn't newsworthy enough to report on their website and instead headlined it with some French cooperation agreement. China Daily also 'forgot' to include the march on their website. However, Xinhua did release an article, here, noting the inconvenience that public bus riders had to endure and leads the reader to believe that many in protest believe in the government's current approach-that is dragging their feet-on the universal suffrage issue.

and 82 public buses had to alter routes because of the march.

Some bystanders told press that they support the government's constitutional development proposals and held that the most important thing for Hong Kong now is to maintain stability and keep economic growth.

Please note that the Xinhua article give a precise figure of 82 public buses that had to endure the route change and probably delays in the Hong Kong readership's busy day while unable to give such a precise figure on the number of protesters involved in the march. I wonder how they can get such figures so quickly???

More later! I find this all fairly exciting.