Daredevil Alain Robert – dubbed the ‘French Spiderman’ climbed a Hong Kong skyscraper on Friday and unfurled a”peace banner” as the financial hub is rocked by historic political unrest. The 57-year-old adventurer, who specializes in unsanctioned ascents of tall buildings, shimmied up the 68-storey Cheung Kong Center in Hong Kong’s main business district in hot and humid conditions on Friday morning. During the climb, he attached a banner featuring the Hong Kong and Chinese flags, as well as two hands shaking.
Before the ascent, Robert put out a statement saying the message of his climb was to make “an urgent appeal for peace and consultation between Hong Kong people and their government”. “Perhaps what I do can lower the temperature and maybe raise a smile. That’s my hope anyway,” Robert said in his media statement. Hong Kong has been battered by 10 weeks of huge – sometimes violent – democracy protests. They were sparked by opposition to a plan to allow extraditions to the mainland, but have since morphed into a wider call for democratic rights.
The movement represents the greatest challenge to Beijing’s authority since the city was handed back by the British in 1997 under a deal that allowed it to keep freedoms that many Hong Kongers feel are now being eroded. So far neither Beijing nor the city’s loyalist leaders, have made any major concessions to the movement. Robert has regularly come to Hong Kong to scale buildings in a city that boasts the highest concentration of skyscrapers in the world.
He has climbed the Cheung Kong Center twice before. Last August he was banned by a Hong Kong court from making any more climbs after he was charged over a 2011 illegal ascent of the 27-floor Hang Seng Bank building. At the time he vowed to return to Hong Kong as soon as the ban expired. In January he was arrested after climbing a 47-storey tower in Manila.
