Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going to talk about something slightly different, Hong Kong.

The protest there are now well into their second month and we're going to try and make sense of who the protesters are and what's at stake for both sides, not just for the people in Hong Kong but for the government in Beijing as well.

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I've got two people here with me who are going to help us understand this. Hans van der Ven is Professor of Modern Chinese History here in Cambridge and Angus Huay is a journalist with extensive experience in Hong Kong and as we're going to hear I think in a second, some personal contacts as well with some of the people who are leading these protests.

We're going to get to the history of this where this comes from, how it feeds into some stuff that's been going on in Hong Kong for a long time.

But we thought we'd start by just trying to work out who the protesters are because we've seen it. I mean, I've just been for myself here.

I've seen it on TV. There are kind of two presiding images for me here. One is the mass protest.

So these are demonstrations that have brought different numbers but hundreds of thousands of people, maybe as many as half a million or more onto the streets.

But we also had in the last week a much smaller group of people who are in some sense leading on this.

They occupied the legislative chamber. Some things happen there which we can talk about. It's a young group primarily.

So just tell us about them first Angus. Who are the people who occupied the chamber last week?

Well, I think most of them were teenagers or just youngsters. So they're mainly students. I just read some news coverage.

There are some disciplines that got into the legislative council chamber who is just 14 years old.

Yeah, yeah. I'm not quite sure he or she, but he or she just told the newspaper that she did this decision after Fairy Caval consideration.

So she or he was not manipulated by anybody. They decide to go there because they think there is an urgency to get into the chambers to show that this content and to escalate the protest.

Are these young people, teenagers and students, do they see themselves as leading on this? What's their role? What are they trying to do by escalating it?

I think one of the features of this protest is that most of the participants, they think that they have no leaders in this movement.

So everyone have their own decision and everyone respect other decisions. And that's why they just think that perhaps they do what they think is right.

And other protesters, we respect the decision. That's why they want to escalate the protest because the day that they got into the legislative council was on 1st of July.

And actually the first massive rally was on 9th of June. That the government refused to have a direct response to the public demands.

And without having a very good answers to protest, it decided to escalate the protest in order to have an immediately response from the government.

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