Protest organisers inflate figures to expand cause, says academic
Academic says protest turnout estimates are being inflated in bid to boost bargaining power
Protest organisers inflating the numbers to push their cause could explain growing discrepancies in turnout estimates - between organisers, police and academics - for mass rallies, says one academic.
The remark, by University of Hong Kong social administration professor Paul Yip Siu-fai, came after the release of wildly varying figures for the January 1 protests - both for and against Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying.
Yip said that since academics and the police had not made any change to their methods of assessing the turnout, the discrepancies might be "because organisers have puffed up the figures more and more".
"Protests are supposed to be about expressing demands. A larger turnout may help organisers boost their bargaining power, but if they are excessively overblown it may make the estimate meaningless," said Yip, who has been doing turnout estimates on the July 1 march since 2003.
The Civil Human Rights Front claimed some 130,000 people took to the streets on Tuesday calling for Leung to step down. That was five times the police estimate. The University of Hong Kong's Public Opinion Programme put the figure at between 30,000 and 33,000.