HONG KONG (REUTERS) - A pro-Beijing lawmaker has called for a "Clean Hong Kong Day" on Saturday (Sept 21), urging supporters to pull down Lennon Walls of anti-government graffiti across the Chinese-ruled city, a possible flashpoint in more than three months of unrest.
The Lennon Walls are large mosaics of Post-it notes calling for democracy and denouncing perceived Chinese meddling in the former British colony and have cropped up in underpasses, under footbridges, outside shopping centres, at bus stops and universities and elsewhere across the territory.
Legislator Junius Ho, who has taken a tough stand against the protests, has called for cleanups of 77 Lennon Walls from 9am to 4pm on Saturday, with 100 people called to each location.
"Man up! Sign Up! Clean Up!" he says on his campaign flyer.
The Lennon Walls are named after the original John Lennon Wall in communist-controlled Prague in the 1980s that was covered with Beatles lyrics and messages of political grievance.
Lennon's 1980 Double Fantasy album has a track called Cleanup Time.
The walls have occasionally become flashpoints in recent weeks. Three people were wounded in a knife attack by an unidentified assailant near a Lennon Wall in the Tseung Kwan O district of the New Territories in August.
"You can erase our posters, but not our minds," read some graffiti at a Lennon Wall at Hong Kong University.
Hong Kong's Jockey Club cancelled all races on Wednesday after protesters said they would target the Happy Valley racecourse where a horse part-owned by Mr Ho was due to run.
Mr Ho, who once described the protesters as "black-shirted thugs", on Thursday pulled the horse, "Hong Kong Bet", from all races until the protests are over. Mr Ho said the horse should not be "deprived of its right to race".
Anti-government protesters, many of them masked and wearing black, have caused havoc around the city in recent weeks, throwing petrol bombs at police, storming the Legislative Council, trashing metro stations, blocking airport approach roads and lighting fires on the streets.
Police have responded with tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets.
Hong Kong returned to China in 1997 under a "one country, two systems" framework that ensures freedoms not enjoyed on the mainland, including right of assembly and an independent judiciary.
Demonstrators are angry about what they see as creeping interference by Beijing and the protests have broadened into calls for universal suffrage.
China says it is committed to the "one country, two systems" arrangement and denies interfering. It has accused foreign powers, particularly the United States and Britain, of fomenting the unrest and told them to mind their own business.
