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Note: This article represents the view of the authors and not the University of Hong Kong.

Many organizations called for rallies on New Year day and the one advocated by the democratic camp has attracted the greatest attention. However, after the tsunami disaster occurred in South Asia, various rally organizers joined hands to organize charity fund raising. Most of the rallies were thus called off; rather floods of fund-raising campaign for victims of the tsunami disaster were called. Yet, despite the cold weather, we, as a group of students being enthusiastic in research, have done some analysis of those remaining rallies, as well as numerical counts and observations on these rallies with the generous support of the Public Opinion Programme of the University of Hong Kong.

There were 4 rallies on 1 January 2005, and we chose the one held by the 'Defend-Hong Kong's Stability Alliance' and the one organized by the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Union with the theme of protecting labor's right as our study targets. As the latter was small in scale, the research team only did some numerical countings and did not go into detail of it. So the research members focused on the former rally and did lots of observations and analysis on it. The following paragraph will discuss our findings and observation in respect of the first rally.

Since the 1 July 2003 rally in which half of a million of Hong Kong people had gone on strike to express their grievances against the legislation of Article 23 of the Basic Law and Tung's administration, there have been various large-scale rallies organized such as the last June Fourth Candlelight Vigil, New Year demonstration and the second 1 July demonstration. And all of these rallies involved a great number of participants. Based on this observation, it seems that demonstrations have become a channel for people to express their demands for "one country, two systems" and democratic policies and to show their grievances against Government policies. These rallies were mostly organized by democrats and after extensive media coverage; these expressed demands became the so-called "mainstream opinion".

Another gang of people who do not like to use vigorous means like strikes to express their grievances, they choose to resort to more silent means to express their views. Since they have never organized any large-scale demonstration before to get the attention of the general public and mass media, and it seems that their voice was covered by the domination of the "mainstream opinion".

As this rally was organized by stockholders, it was crystal clear that participants were dominantly coming from the group of "non-mainstream opinion". Someone may attribute people's participation to the suspension of the Link listing which affected the participants' interest. From our observation, however, a considerable number of participants did not subscribe the Link share and had no interest in the Link. They took part in this rally just because they wanted to express their quest for Hong Kong stability and prosperity. The suspension of the Link listing was merely the spark that led this group of people, who were used to keeping silent, to go to the street. Different from the past, this time they adopted the "mainstream opinion's" usual method (i.e. rally) to voice out their opinions.

Will the power of "non-mainstream opinion" be consolidated through demonstrations? We think that it is unlikely to happen. It is because this group of people desire peace and stability, and think that demonstrations will undermine the prosperity and stability of HK. Also, they do not want to walk up the street in the name of some political parties. However, will these citizens give up silence, and used some relatively more aggressive way to express their opinion? We hope that this New Year demonstration can be a starting point for us to think about this issue.

From our analysis, the participants joined this rally mainly because of the chemical reaction between two elements, namely an incident that influenced the interest of the general public and the public thought that the incident was caused by certain democrats. Obviously, the Link incident contained these two elements. Firstly, since the incident influenced the interest of the stock exchange business and initiated people in this field to organize the rally systematically; secondly, it is generally conceived that the suspension of the Link listing was the stance of the whole Democratic Party. Even the behavior of several Democrats does not represent the whole Party, it is enough to rouse those silent 'non-mainstream public opinion' holders to use the 'mainstream public opinion' holders' usual means (i.e. rally) to express their opinion. Perhaps it reveals the resistance and irony against the mainstream opinion.

However, we think, the probability of two elements being merged together is very small, so the probability of those who are holding the "non-mainstream opinion" to join demonstrations in the foreseeable future would be small too. However, whether they will resort to any other means to express their opinions remains unpredictable at the present stage.