Hong Kong: Protesters storm and deface parliament on handover anniversary
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This is clearly planned violence and destruction and raising a foreign colonial flag does not look like a smart thing to do.
I understand that the protesters are said to be very young and may not fully understand what they are doing here.
"The movement is now beyond the bill," he said. "It's about the autonomy of Hong Kong."
To my most cynical take, perhaps this is CCP supporters encouraged by Beijing to provoke an "entirely necessary, but regrettable restriction of movement within Hong Kong. We had no choice".
Worth considering: breaking into the building is reported to have taken hours, and police was apparently absent while that was going on, with TV cameras rolling. This concept may apply:
It's a common strategy to let a protestation movement burn itself and that's why discipline and well-thought out strategy is important.
I did not understand the objective either, but it turned out okay I think.
The breaking into the building is definitely by force, and such use of force caused serious push back among the protestors (some legislative members who support the protest tried to stop them in vein).
The use of force was in part in response to the no-response from the government throughout June, and in part because of some recent desperate suicides due to no-response from government (two cases on 30 June, the day before 1 July).
But I think they remained civil except for breaking into the building: they left money for the drinks in the fridge, and labeled artifacts for protection (in Cantonese [1]).
Since the whole protest is largely done in a decentralized fashion, sometimes you see incoherent actions here and there.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/hksidestories/posts/245385840131281...
The protestors made a declaration [1] for their demands inside the chamber (apparently some Hong Kong media caught the declaration, see [2] in Chinese).
The five demands were voiced out at least two weeks ago, and got effectively no response from the government. There were cases of desperate suicides because the government did not make any response [3], right before 1 July. Such break-in was arguably inevitable in this atmosphere, but the damage was targeted to the political figures inside the Legco building, that is, the protestors were making political statements, which did not stand out in foreign reporting.
[1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FTzmq2geL58epc7-pxK591DJv8h...
[2]: https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/ch/component/k2/1466090-20190701.h...
[3]: https://shanghaiist.com/2019/07/01/third-suicide-by-an-anti-...
Democracy and the rule of law is not to "make demands" then riot and storm the local parliament, with people flying foreign flags.
Foreign media tend to actually be very sympathetic to the pro-democracy movement but in this case however positively they tried to paint the protesters the pictures spoke for themselves.
What most people don’t realize is that Hong Kong does not have true democracy: both the Chief Executive and the Legislative Council are not elected from universal suffrage (the Chief Executive is nominated and elected by 1200 people out of a 7M population, while half of the Legislative Council--the Functional constituency--do not have broad representation), far from it. Also, some opposition members were disqualified after winning the election under Beijing’s influence.
One rationale behind storming the Legislative Council--which still had support after the event--is to make the point that the Legislative Council does not sufficiently represent public opinion. This claim is supported by the fact that, even though the pro-democracy group had far more votes, they had far less seats in the Legislative Council, partly due to Functional constituency. And many bills have been passed in the Council despite strong opposition from public opinion, where the extradition law would be the most recent example if the people did not protest in June. The lack of representation from the Legco is point 6 in the declaration [1].
I agree democracy is not to make demands then riot, but Hong Kong does not have democracy yet. And in the past month, a million went to the street peacefully, but the government did not respond to the voice of the million. It is indefensible that the government is not democratic. As for rule of law, one demand is to have an independent council to inquire the use of excessive force in the protest in June (point 8 in [1], see the news article [2]), but this demand was rejected by the government, which partly fueled this escalation.
I am sure Hong Kong people would consider better alternatives, if there actually is one. After the Umbrella protest in 2014 and the anti-extradition protest in June 2019, people learned that the government would not respond to a million on the street if there is only peaceful demonstration.
[1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FTzmq2geL58epc7-pxK591DJv8h...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/world/asia/did-hong-kong-...
Regarding the flag, the flag is not a foreign flag, it was the flag of Hong Kong before the handover in 1997. Arguably the flag is related to the Sino-British Joint Declaration which protects the autonomy of Hong Kong from too much Beijing’s inflence, which the Britain just responded to [2].
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition-brit...
It is sad that the media could only report the pictures but not the message. It is like reporting that there was a war leading to 4 July without mentioning the declaration of independence, and saying that the war was indefensible.