A simple police declaration and the refusal of the Chief Executive to concede to public demands led to a public outcry. In recent weeks, as much as two million, mainly young, people took to the streets of the former British colony their demand on Chief Executive Carrie Lam to scrap a controversial extradition bill, which would allow authorities to send suspected fugitives to mainland China to face trial. What started out peacefully took a turn for the worst, to the point where the Legislative Council has been ransacked and vandalized.
Hong Kong is no stranger to mass demonstrations. In the summer of 2003, on the sixth anniversary of the British handover back to China, people protested against the controversial national security law of then-Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa. Again in 2014, the so-called ‘Umbrella Movement’ paralyzed much of Hong Kong’s Central Business District, where demonstrators demanded for universal suffrage and free elections, yet the central government in Beijing did not bow down to the pressure.
On the eve of June 4, 1989, riot police, the military, and tanks were deployed to central Beijing to forcefully disperse pro-democracy student protesters, which they didn’t anticipate. The following morning, all that’s left were thousands of corpses crushed to death strewn all over the square. Ever since, China censors any online content referring to the massacre. With the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre still fresh on people’s minds, where China cracked down on pro-democracy activists, protesters fear for the worst as they accuse Beijing of encroaching on Hong Kong’s local affairs and way of life.
In the first few days, protests were relatively peaceful and orderly, until protestors blockaded Tim Wa Avenue and Harcourt Road, the main thoroughfares, and other narrow arterial roads leading to the Legislative Council, Hong Kong’s main policy-making body. Subsequently, police responded with rubber bullets and tear gas, arguing that protesters turned violent and attempted to storm the Legislative Council, hitting at police with metal barriers in the process, which Police Commissioner Stephen Lo declared a ‘riot’, to the anger of demonstrators. Under Hong Kong laws, anyone convicted of riot commits a criminal offence and can face a maximum of 10 years in prison.
However, the more tolerant approach of police in subsequent days has proven inadequate to quell public anger, who accused the force of ‘police brutality’. Demonstrators demanded several criteria to mend relations: that the police retract their declaration of the protests as a mass ‘riot’ and ultimately that leader Carrie Lam permanently scrap the extradition bill.
However, demonstrators recently stormed the Legislative Council, shattering the glass walls with metal poles and defacing the portraits of incumbent LegCo President Andrew Leung and former Presidents Jasper Tsang and Rita Fan.
Reaching the Council chamber, protesters momentarily erected the Union Jack and British colonial flag of Hong Kong. The city emblem wasn’t spared, where the Chinese characters for the People’s Republic of China was particularly blackened, but leaving out the name of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The colonial flag implies not a pro-UK approach but has often been a prop of anti-mainland sentiment in Hong Kong, as seen in the defacing of the HKSAR logo and the official name of China. Police visibly deliberately let protesters in, most likely to prove a point that these particular people were indeed rioting.
Public trust in Carrie Lam is at an all time low. Clashes in Hong Kong as violent as the storming of LegCo was definitely not normal and unseen before. Any sitting Hong Kong leader seem to be immune to peaceful protests, which led to a number of people taking a more radical approach to capture world attention to the issues which have largely gone unheard and unaccounted for by the administration.
Story by John Laurence Guzman
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