The relationship between the two Occupies dates to 2011. “Central” is the name of Hong Kong’s main business district. And the term “Occupy Central”—which has gained international renown over the last week—was coined a few years ago when Occupy Wall Street was gaining steam. In October 2011, soon after protesters began sleeping in Zuccotti Park, several hundred Hong Kongers created their own encampment outside the headquarters of HSBC, the world’s second-largest bank. Calling their movement, “Occupy Central,” they remained encamped there until September 2012, thus comprising one of the longest-running Occupy protests in the world.

A few months later, in January 2013, a law professor named Benny Tai proposed that protesters descend upon Central again, in the movement that became Occupy Central with Peace and Love (OCPL). At first glance, this new effort has little in common with the movement that started in lower Manhattan. OCPL is demanding electoral democracy: the people’s right to choose the candidates who will run for chief executive of Hong Kong. Occupy Wall Street, by contrast, was born from frustration that America’s electoral democracy was a sham because the country’s radically unequal economic system concentrated power in the hands of financial and corporate elites.

But it’s worth remembering that Occupy Wall Street never formulated specific demands. Its message was broader: that unaccountable elites—“the 1 percent”—had created a political and economic system that denied ordinary people a voice in their government and a chance at a better life. It was the breadth of this message that helped Occupy spread rapidly across the globe, as local activists adapted it to their particular circumstances.

And that’s exactly what Hong Kong’s new Occupy movement is doing today. Tai and his allies are not merely protesting a rigged electoral system. They are protesting the way China’s government and Hong Kong’s economic elite work together to empower themselves at the expense of the region’s people. Earlier this year, when The Economist unveiled its “crony-capitalism” index—“the countries where politically connected businessmen are most likely to prosper”—it ranked Hong Kong number one. The territory also boasts one of the world’s highest Gini coefficients, making it among the most economically unequal places on earth. As Jeffrey Wasserstrom of the University of California at Irvine and Denise Ho of the Chinese University of Hong Kong recently observed in The Nation, “The grievances of Occupy Central have much in common with those of Occupy movements worldwide: Hong Kong is a vastly unequal society, and government policies are seen as favoring real estate development over affordable housing, shopping complexes over little remaining farmland, and low taxation over more equitable redistribution.”