Frustration over Hong Kong’s staggering wealth gap and pro-business establishment has helped fuel protests calling for free elections, forming a strong undercurrent to the student-led democracy campaign. As the WSJ's Kathy Chu reports:

One target of the protesters’ frustration is the city’s tycoons, a handful of families and colonial era conglomerates that control most of the real estate, many of the retailers and nearly all of the utilities and buses. “Tycoons don’t need sympathy, but they’re between a rock and a hard place,” said Jean-Pierre Lehmann, a visiting professor in the University of Hong Kong’s business...