This week, the video journalist Raul Gallego Abellan captured remarkable scenes of what the protest movement looks like now. As the protesters have begun to fight back, they have adopted the Hong Kong actor Bruce Lee’s motto: “Water can flow or it can crush. Three weeks later, when the police failed to intervene as suspected members of local triad gangs beat protesters, images of the attack spread on social networks and fed the outrage. On July 1 - the date Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred from Britain to China in 1997 - emboldened protesters broke through the glass wall surrounding the legislature building and even scrawled the defiant message on its walls: “Hong Kong is not China.” When protesters blocked the city’s legislature on June 12, to prevent local lawmakers from voting to approve the extradition bill, the riot police enraged the public by firing tear gas, bean bags, and rubber bullets. One of the leaders of the Tiananmen protests, Chaohua Wang, pointed out last week in the London Review of Books that attempts to quell the latest protests by force have backfired dramatically, swelling support for the movement and encouraging protesters, many of them very young, to pick up rocks in self-defense. That’s when the former British colony was returned to China on the understanding that it would be permitted to run its own affairs in a democratic fashion.
Residents of the city, having just commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, took to the streets in the millions to stop the extradition bill from becoming law.įive years after the failure of the peaceful pro-democracy protests known as the Umbrella Movement, a huge swath of Hong Kong’s citizens were determined to stop the central government in Beijing from further eroding the “one country, two systems” promise it made in 1997.
Hong Kong’s not-yet-named protest movement began with mass demonstrations in June against a proposed change to the city’s extradition law, which would have given China more power to crack down on dissent in the autonomous region.