The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong are essentially over. Yahoo/Reuters

The leaders of the movement, along with a Catholic Cardinal, surrender to the police. Yahoo/Reuters. 

Hong Kong's Occupy Central protest movement seems to be grinding to a halt as the leaders of the movement surrendered to police for their role in the protests. Yahoo/Reuters. The move comes after the three leaders called on students to abandon their protests due to fear of violence. The three men, Benny Tai, Chan Kin-man and Chu Yiu-ming filled out forms for the police and were allowed to leave without charges. The leaders spoke of surrender being a central aspect of civil disobedience, and called for peace. Some students and other followers of the Occupy Central movement vowed to continue their protests but their numbers, once as many as 100,000 has dwindled to as little as a few hundred. All of the protesters are united for democracy and for preventing China from choosing who can be nominated but there is little agreement on what their tactics should be. 

My Comment:

I'm not too surprised that Occupy Central failed. Their goals, while modest were completely unacceptable to the Chinese government. The only reason they lasted as long as they did is because they were centered in Hong Kong, which has a very large Western media presence. China did not want another Tianamin square style incident, especially in Hong Kong. You would think that a more restrained response that the protesters would have an advantage but it looks like they squandered it with infighting. 

A political movement can't both be a non-violent civil disobedience movement and a riot. Either they should have fought the police or surrendered to them but they couldn't do both. Plus, protests movements like this usually burn out in areas with high employment. People have to get back to work and go back to school. In short, these people had too much to lose and too little to gain. If they were all hungry and unemployed their motivation would be stronger. Of course protest movements have survived without poor economic conditions but the combination of the two factors. 

And it is important to note that unity for protest movements are a must. Occupy Wallstreet failed because it started as a protest against banks and ended up as a protest against everything that wasn't "progressive". Every leftist movement on Earth, your communists, your anarchists, your feminists, all of them tried to push their agendas on the movement and pushed anyone who was right-libertarian, or who didn't care about identity politics, right out of the movement. As soon as the movement became divided by political lines it was doomed to fail. That wasn't quite what happened in Hong Kong but the schism between the violent and non-violent factions was enough to doom the movement. For now at least. Expect the issue to crop up again at the next election.