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Academic Benny Tai proves he is not all talk and no action

Benny Tai's social experiment and political movement has long shaken off its image of idealism and created more inclusive politics

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Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

Hongkongers could have been forgiven for dismissing Benny Tai Yiu-ting as just an intellectual with his head in the clouds when he raised the idea of a democracy push through civil disobedience in January last year.

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The newspaper article he wrote read like a research proposal, an idealistic social experiment that would not survive the rough and tumble of the city's politics.

But the University of Hong Kong constitutional law expert showed he meant business when, two months later, he started putting flesh on an Occupy Central movement, joined by the Reverend Chu Yiu-ming and Chinese University sociologist Dr Chan Kin-man.

"It is a mix of a social experiment and a political movement," Tai said.

"My research in the past few years has focused on how to resolve public disputes in a pluralistic society. This is a chance for me to put my previous thoughts into practice."

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As a pro-democracy scholar, Tai perceived a problem in advancing democracy. The city has been asking for universal suffrage as far back as the early 1980s. The handover came and went - and Hongkongers saw their goal pushed to 2007, then 2012, without any real achievement made.

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