Hong Kong (CNN)Hong Kong’s protest movement grabbed the world’s attention with million-strong rallies and city-stopping unrest. But it won big on the weekend by staying silent.
The landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates in Sunday’s district council elections is a stinging rebuke to the city’s government — and an example of what protesters can achieve given the opportunity.
By avoiding unrest and trusting voters to support them, protesters scored a bigger victory than if they had disrupted the polls. They also demonstrated that far from devolving into anarchy, as some on the government side have claimed, the protest movement can — unlike the police, Beijing or the city’s leaders — control when and where the unrest takes place.
