Hundreds of Hong Kong police forcibly removed kicking and screaming protesters from the Central business district on Wednesday, holdouts of a mass rally demanding greater democracy from Communist Party rulers in Beijing, Reuters reported. The pro-democracy march on Tuesday, which organisers said attracted more than 510,000 people, and a subsequent sit-in by mainly student groups could be the biggest challenge yet to China which resumed control over the former British colony on July 1, 1997. Many of the more than 1,000 protesters linked arms in a bid to resist efforts to remove them but they were taken away one at a time, in some cases by three or four police, as activists kicked, screamed and punched before being bundled on to buses.
