The News Minute| July 2, 2014| 03:35 pm IST

Hong Kong: The Hong Kong police cracked down on a rally of protestors and arrested over 500 people. The protestors were marching for democracy that is free from China’s interference. The group staged a sit-in the Financial District in order to ‘occupy’ the street.

The police said that 98,600 people had joined while organizers maintained that 5,10,000 turned up, the highest estimates in a decade. A total of 511 demonstrators - 351 men and 160 women - were arrested on charge of unlawful assembly. The police added that they were preventing the police from carrying out their duties.

The march has become an annual affair held on the anniversary of the day China took over Hong Kong from Britain on June 1, 1997 with the promise to give the city a high degree of autonomy for 50 years. Some three weeks back, Beijing released a ‘white paper’ that said that Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy is not inherent but authorized by the central governmental in Beijing. This had aggravated public discontent further.

The Chinese media did not report the occurrence and comments about the protests and arrests were deleted from social media sites and blogs. The Facebook accounts of those who spoke about the March on the social networking site were blocked.