Scale back protests and demands, mainland scholars urge organisers

Organisers of the Occupy movement should scale down their protests and try to negotiate with the Hong Kong government to seek an end to the stand-off and achieve their long-term goals, liberal scholars and political observers on the mainland say.

The analysts, who are familiar with Chinese politics and have called for a more open society on the mainland, are sympathetic towards the protesters' calls for more democracy, but say it is time for them to calm down and adjust their demands.

Speaking as protesters massed anew around government headquarters in Admiralty, Yuan Weishi, a retired reform-minded historian formerly based at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, said the movement's leaders had created a deadlock by demanding Beijing withdraw its proposals for the 2017 chief executive election in Hong Kong and by calling for Leung Chun-ying to step down.

"It is not possible for Beijing to accept these two demands and it makes things difficult to move on," he said. "For a movement to make progress, one should not just know what it wants, but also how the other side thinks."

Prolonged deadlock would widen the gap between those for and against the protests, and draw a backlash from the business community, Yuan said.

Zhang Lifan , a historian who formerly worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said a "soft ending" to the stand-off would be in the interests of Hong Kong and the central government.