Occupy Central barriers may be down but roads to progress are blocked

The past week was a roller-coaster ride for Occupy Central organisers as their efforts to search for a way out of the political impasse ran into one roadblock after another despite apparent help from pro-establishment figures.

A key obstacle was the government's refusal to compromise ahead of planned talks, but split views among the three protest organising groups and their inability to maintain support from allies and protest participants also factored in the aborted dialogue.

Leaders of the Federation of Students, one of the three organising groups, had been scheduled to meet Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor last Friday to thrash out a solution. Ahead of that meeting, the federation, Occupy Central and student activist group Scholarism made various concessions.

In an October 2 letter to Lam, the student leaders no longer insisted on Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying resigning and toned down their demand that the National People's Congress Standing Committee entirely scrap its framework for electoral reform. Both conditions are believed to go beyond what Beijing would be willing to concede.

But the students still asked that the public be able to nominate chief executive candidates in 2017 - an idea Beijing has banned repeatedly.

The protest organisers had also mulled whether to ask the government to submit a supplementary report to the Standing Committee that would mention the results of Occupy's civil "referendum" in June, in which almost 800,000 Hongkongers voted for a reform plan that would comply with world standards.