WHY THE PROTESTS FAILED

THE PROTESTERS WON NEXT TO NOTHING

The students did not achieve any of their central demands. Hong Kong’s top leader, Chief Executive Leung Chun- Ying, remains in office . The prodemocracy camp’s quest to win genuine universal suffrage from Beijing appears to have little chance of being realized. The student organizations that mobilized the protest are now attempting to hold talks with Hong Kong’s government , but it’s unclear how much they’ll be able to gain from it.

THE RESTRAINT AND PATIENCE OF THE AUTHORITIES

The main catalyst of the protests was the overreaction of Hong Kong’s government and police: first in briefly detaining 17- yearold student leader Joshua Wong on Sept. 26 and, two days later, firing 87 rounds of tear gas on protesters . This heavy- handed action galvanized a critical mass of Hong Kongers and immediately placed the events in an unwelcome historical frame: that of Beijing’s 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

But in the days thereafter, as the protests swelled , the authorities behaved with calm and patience, opting to wait out the protesters, many of whom were bound to return to their jobs and classes .

A LACK OF LEADERSHIP

The protest movement was characterized by its decentralized nature, and there was no focal figurehead around whose moral authority the protesters could rally.

Frequently last week, protesters complained of not knowing what they were working toward ; others said they would not follow various directives if they disagreed with them. Leadership matters — not just for the sake of building a movement, but also to give it credibility and momentum. The latter, at least, seemed to fade quickly on the streets of occupied Hong Kong.

LOSS OF POPULAR SUPPORT

The protests closed some of Hong Kong’s central arteries, snarling the city’s traffic, shutting down tram lines and scrambling the commutes of hundreds of thousands of ordinary residents. Student occupations came up against frustrated locals, many of whom had no qualms with the students’ political convictions but resented the harm done to their livelihoods. Once it became clear that the police would not initiate any sort of heavy- handed crackdown, the protesters had to fight an uphill battle to retain public sympathy.