Police got a foretaste of what the Occupy Central movement's planned civil disobedience campaign may look like when people who had joined yesterday's protest march stayed behind and practised their moves.
They tried out body positions that would hinder police arresting them. And g roups of radicals disrupted traffic and impeded the flow on pedestrian walkways by walking up and down.
Traffic on Pedder Street and Des Voeux Road nearly came to a standstill after the demonstrators began walking slowly back and forth on zebra crossings.
League of Social Democrats lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung led one such group. Police repeatedly warned protesters against blocking traffic but they responded by walking even more slowly.
Benny Tai Yiu-ting, an Occupy organiser, said he welcomed diverse ways of expression as long as they were non-violent.
Earlier in the evening, people from a group calling itself the Hong Kongese Priority, some of whose members forced their way into the Central Barracks of the People's Liberation Army last Thursday, had planned to throw tomatoes on Pedder Street but were stopped by police. Four members were arrested.
One of them, Tin Ki-yau, 17, was detained for disorderly behaviour, police said, after she ran onto the street draped in a colonial Hong Kong flag. The three others arrested, all male, were held for theft. Police said they had stolen Airport Express trolleys.