700,000 votes, China, and Hong Kong.

So Occupy Central's unofficial referendum on the voting system to be used for future elections in Hong Kong is over, and the number of (unvetted, unobserved) votes are in - and it's quite a figure. If (and it is an "if", though probably not a big one) the figures are accurate, something like 15-20% of the eligible voters in Hong Kong voted in an unofficial poll that the Hong Kong government and their Beijing-based overlords have done everything in their power to disuade them from taking part in.

The take-away from this, just as in every other occasion when Beijing has attempted to put pressure on a free society, is that such acts are liable to back-fire by driving people to the other side. It is difficult to believe that so many Hong Kongers would have voted in this poll without all the free publicity that the (unloved, at least in Hong Kong) central government has gifted to Occupy Central, the intransigence of the latest white paper on Hong Kong being the most striking example of this.

I feel the Occupy Central organisers missed a trick, though, in not putting the central government-proposed system, but only "genuinely democratic" options on their ballot paper. Giving the voters the option to vote down the government's proposals would have made their message so much clearer.

[Picture: the leaders of the Occupy Central movement. Via Wiki]