Police are prepared to use escalating levels of force to dislodge tens of thousands of pro-democracy protestors from the central business district of Hong Kong, says the son of a former senior official.
Bao Pu, who has lived in Hong Kong since his father was deposed from power during the Tiananmen protests of 1989, said Beijing authorities would leave the People's Liberation Army and paramilitary forces in their barracks because they were confident that police were sufficiently loyal to do whatever was necessary to assert control.
"I was told the Hong Kong police have been training to expect a staggering number of arrests and that they have all sorts of plans to put down the civil disobedience," said Mr Bao, in a phone interview from Hong Kong, citing discussions with senior officers.
"Hong Kong police were prepared for the use of force; the escalating use of force is all according to the plan."
The "Occupy Central" civil disobedience movement has taken aim at Beijing's recent moves to assert control over key institutions of civil society and to define a promise of "universal suffrage" in exceedingly narrow terms.
The number of protestors swelled from a few hundred on the weekend to as many as 80,000 overnight on Sunday as riot police attempted and failed to disperse protestors with tear gas and baton charges before dawn.
It was the first time tear gas has been used in Hong Kong since 2005.
Mr Bao has a unique perspective on the movement because he was a protestor in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when his father, Bao Tong, was sacked and arrested together with his boss, general secretary Zhao Ziyang, for refusing to support martial law.
Bao Tong has remained under house arrest in his apartment near Muxidi, where some of the worst bloodshed took place 25 years ago. Bao Pu has became a prominent publisher and human rights activist in Hong Kong.
Mr Bao said both authorities and protest leaders had learned from the tragic events of 1989.
Military and paramilitary forces would be confined to their barracks, he said, despite conspicuous shows of force and a state media report this morning that paramilitary forces were poised to cross the border.
Similarly, he said protestors did not have naïve hopes of short-term political concessions like they did in 1989. Rather, they were playing a very long-term game.
"I was in my senior year in college [in 1989], studying science, and had thought very little about various social political issues - so it changed my life," Mr Bao said .
"Similarly, these young people will carry on this memory to help them to solidify their ideas, provide training and harden their resolve for the time to come.
"Nobody expects Beijing will change its mind, but nor can they arrest everybody.
"They're not playing for today but for their children. It's a fight for the future not the present. There's no mistake there: either you die kneeling down or standing up, and they're choosing to stand."
