The aftermath of a mass gathering is not always pretty, be it the Woodstock festival or annual July 1 pro-democracy march in Hong Kong. To some extent, disorder and litter are inevitable.

So after the march in Hong Kong on Sunday to register opposition to the pro-democracy movement called Occupy Central with Love and Peace, what attracted the most attention was not the images of trash-strewn streets, but of the messy exchange of money for the apparent drudgery of participating in the march.

In separate reports on local television news channels, unidentified people were seen handing out cash to marchers — on a tour bus, on the street and in a park. In another instance, a member of a mainland Chinese chamber of commerce was videotaped slipping a total of 400 Hong Kong dollars, about $50, to two undercover journalists, saying, in Mandarin Chinese, “mei shi” (no worries) in a restaurant before a van ferried them to Victoria Park, where the march began. One of the television stations reported a man telling marchers to keep quiet about the money they received.



Such scenes fed suspicions that many of those who marched on Sunday against Occupy Central, which has threatened to stage a sit-down in Central, Hong Kong’s financial district, if their demands for opening up the nomination process for the city’s next leader are not met, were paid in an effort to boost turnout.

Besides these tales of money changing hands, anecdotes circulated about clueless marchers bused in from the Chinese mainland, including a woman speaking in Mandarin and heavily accented Cantonese who told Hong Kong’s Cable TV that she was in Victoria Park to “shop” before a man grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the camera, saying, “We don’t accept interviews.”

The man was later identified as the chief executive of a publicly-traded Hong Kong manufacturer that has five factories on the mainland.

“We can all see this is an orchestrated attempt to oppose Occupy Central,” said Anson Chan, the former No. 2 official in Hong Kong and a vocal supporter of the city’s democratic movement. “They’d done it with inducement, they’d done it by twisting arms and they’d done it by importing people from the mainland. This is not a genuine reflection of people’s views.”

But Robert Chow, an organizer and spokesman of the anti-Occupy Central campaign, when asked about what seemed to be a large number of marchers who were affiliated with mainland Chinese groups or speaking Mandarin, rather than the Cantonese of Hong Kong, noted that Mandarin-speaking marchers could be Hong Kong residents, and said that mainlanders should have the right to protest an “unpatriotic” movement.

“Have you asked them if they had a Hong Kong I.D.?” he said. “We’re all Chinese. We’re all Chinese nationals. If you have a Hong Kong I.D. card, you’re a Chinese national. I don’t care whether they’re older folks or younger folks. We’re all Hong Kong Chinese. That doesn’t make them any less of a Hong Kong person than anyone else.”

Besides the presence of marchers of mainland Chinese origin, many seen being unloaded into Victoria Park by the busload, another striking element was the ethnic diversity. Indonesian and Filipino domestic helpers were waving Chinese flags in the park, largely avoiding questions by reporters. (One told Oriental Daily that she been given 200 Hong Kong dollars to take part.) A group of Indian and Pakistani workers was on hand clad in the orange T-shirts of a Fujian Province association. One member of the group, who refused to give his name, said he “didn’t know” what the march was for, while another said flippantly it was “for democracy,” declining to answer further questions. A marcher from Kenya said he didn’t know what the Chinese characters on his polo shirt stood for. (It was the name of a society in Shanwei, a city in Guangdong Province.)

The Alliance for Peace and Democracy, the march’s organizer and an umbrella for several pro-Beijing groups, denied that it had distributed cash to encourage turnout, and said such incidents could be smear tactics employed by its rivals.

The march Sunday was by far the most public display of opposition against Occupy Central, and the number of people who took part is being compared to the tallies for the July 1 pro-democracy march.

A University of Hong Kong polling group, the Public Opinion Programme, estimated that a maximum of 88,000 people marched on Sunday. That is about half of the 172,000 the group had calculated participated in the July 1 march. Paul Yip, a statistician at the same university, put out a separate estimate of 57,000, and said that many participants did not continue on the march after they left Victoria Park.

By contrast, the Hong Kong police department’s estimate for Sunday’s march — 111,800, based on a count of people leaving Victoria Park, was higher than its figure of 98,600 for the July 1 march.

The rivalry between the two camps is heating up ahead of a decision by China’s legislature on how much leeway Hong Kong will have in drawing up voting procedures for the 2017 election, to be announced later this month or early next month. Chinese officials overseeing Hong Kong’s electoral affairs will meet with the territory’s legislators in the mainland city of Shenzhen on Thursday.

About 60 percent of respondents in a recent poll, released on Monday by scholars at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that they would not accept voting procedures for the 2017 election that would permit screening to prevent candidates with dissenting political views from running for chief executive. A similar percentage of respondents said that the legislators should veto such a proposal. And that’s possible: Pro-democracy leaders who back the Occupy Central movement have enough seats in the 70-member legislature to scuttle any electoral proposal they object to.

Another subject of comment in Hong Kong, reflected in local newspapers on Monday, was that the streets in the city’s Central financial district appeared more ravaged than in the aftermath of the July 1 march. The sight of banana peels, peanut shells, empty water bottles, by the curbs and piled up outside overflowing trash bins, was also evocative of the city’s tourist hotspots popular with mainland Chinese visitors. Well represented in the litter were the small Chinese flags that just moments earlier were proudly waved by the demonstrators.