It was not a good day to be a drone in Hong Kong

It was the day that all the drones were grounded.

As China’s third-ranking leader began a three-day visit to Hong Kong on Tuesday, police responded with what they described as counter-terrorism measures. Officers pitched tents on the city’s iconic mountaintops to keep watch overnight for suspicious activities. Others cordoned off the Grand Hyatt Hotel with a six-foot-tall barricade and were screening all luggage at the hotel’s porte-cochère.

And should anyone attempt to disrupt the fanfare from above, authorities threatened to shoot any drones out of the sky.

The efforts were aimed at snuffing out any protest when Zhang Dejiang, head of the National People’s Congress standing committee, kicked off his three-day visit to the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. Yet, it seemed that nothing would deter Hong Kong’s determined demonstrators from trying.

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On the highway into town from the airport, Zhang’s motorcade was greeted with a funereal black banner printed with white characters that read: “End Communist Party Dictatorship.”

Just before the motorcade pulled into the Grand Hyatt’s driveway, demonstrators rushed up and broke through the police cordon. They were representing Demosisto, the political party co-founded by Joshua Wong, the best-known leader of Hong Kong’s democracy movement. Armed with only a sheet of paper with a protest slogan, Demosisto’s chairman, Nathan Law, was pinned to the ground by several police officers.

“We decided to resort to guerrilla tactics in order to express our demand for democracy in a way that shows our backbone and vigor,” said Law, after being released at the scene. Confining protest zones to nearby pocket parks far away from Zhang’s sight-line “is an insult to dissidents like us,” Law added.

While monitoring Zhang’s motorcade as it turned off from the highway, Wong said he was stalked by a dozen plainclothes officers and hemmed in by a phalanx of many more uniformed police.

“All we wanted was to ambush him and voice out our demand as Hong Kongers for autonomy and for self-determination,” Wong said. “Only by using confrontational tactics could we pierce the illusion that all is well here.”

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The former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” arrangement designed to protect many civil liberties nonexistent in the rest of the country. Under their own constitution, called the Basic Law, Hong Kongers are promised the right to democratically elect their top leader, the chief executive. But after a 2014 decision that called for candidates to be screened for party allegiance, the territory was engulfed by pro-democracy protests that became known as the Umbrella Movement.

Zhang’s visit was the first by any Chinese congressional leader since the movement ended in December 2014.

Although some Hong Kongers have found the “counter-terrorism” security measures to be excessive, orders likely came from the very top, according to Ching Cheong, a longtime local commentator and reporter on China’s politics.

“I’ve no doubt this stringent arrangement was at Beijing’s behest. All Hong Kong police did was to take the marching orders and follow the security protocol,” Ching said. “Even if Zhang meant to show goodwill, by putting the people in an antagonistic position vis-a-vis the visiting official was self-defeating.”

And it turned out, the mountaintop vigil by police was all for naught. The territory woke up Tuesday morning to find a canary yellow banner that read: “I want free and fair elections” flapping down from a hillside studded with luxury low-rise residences.

Law is a special correspondent

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