As authorities continue to crack down on Hong Kong’s protests, including against the postponed Legislative Council election, a former archbishop has urged residents to make themselves heard peacefully at home by literally banging on pots and pans.

Cardinal Joseph Zen, a retired bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong and a pro-democracy activist, urged the city’s residents to produce a minute of noise wherever they were on Sunday — the original date of the legislative election before it was postponed — to express demands for a new voting arrangement.

“No need to trouble the violent police,” he said in a web broadcast, urging residents to “sound the horn, bang on drums, gongs, surfaces, broadcast noise, broadcast music” instead of taking part in marches that would be deemed illegal by authorities.

On Sunday, Zen released a live broadcast of himself banging on a steel pot for a minute with the words, “repeal decision, restart elections” printed on the wall behind him.

Despite Cardinal Joseph Zen’s calls for at-home action, protests still broke out across Hong Kong on Sunday and were met with swift police action and dozens of arrests.

At least 90 people were arrested. By late afternoon, at least one protester was held on suspicion of breaching the national security law.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced last month that the LegCo polls would be postponed by a year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Democratic Party launched a campaign to call for an immediate resumption of voting. It criticized the government for moving ahead with universal COVID-19 testing — an exercise that would require people to remove face masks to get tested — while claiming it did not have the capacity to create a safe environment for the election.

“They just want to spare the pro-establishment camp the real prospect of losing,” said Democratic legislator Lam Cheuk-ting, who added that holding legislative elections every four years was enshrined in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, and that using the pandemic as an excuse to deprive residents the right to vote was akin to breaching the Basic Law.

“The longer you delay the elections, the deeper the rift in society will grow,” said Lam.

Residents who queued up to sign the party’s petition expressed similar views. A Mr. Chu said: “We need to keep pressuring the government. We cannot let them just get away with a simple announcement that they will delay the election for a year. We cannot let them get away with such an absurd arrangement.”

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