Haven't you found it interesting that all of our media coverage has provided an extensive amount of coverage of the protesters, but almost nothing about the context of people outside of the protest? What percent of people support the protests? What are the average views on it? How has their day to day life changed if at all? Are they in support or against the transition to violence? So forth and so on. An immense amount of potential reporting material there, but it seems be being almost entirely neglected. "Almost" is a weasel word -- I'm not really able to find anything meaningful at all.

This seems odd. Like you, I'm not terribly fond of anecdotal evidence, so I went searching for some way to try to gauge what people might be thinking. One thing I came upon was this [1] survey from 2016 which was carried out following the protests of 2015. One of the questions that was asked was whether or not Hong Kongers would be in favor of separating from China once the "one country, two systems" agreement ends in 2047. If there is any bias in their numbers, one would expect it to err on the side of Hong Kong given the institution that carried it out. [2]

Only 17.4% of people said yes, 22.9% were ambivalent, and 57.6% were somewhat/strongly against it. I wonder what percent of the protesters are in that 17.4%? What are the views of the 82.6%? Why aren't these questions being asked, let alone answered, by our media? Whatever the case, it seems very safe to say that the vast majority of people in Hong Kong do not see the China as having an "oppressive authoritarian" government. And I think it goes without saying that views towards their government are going to be even more favorable in the mainland. So no you're not just talking about the Chinese government - you are talking about the Chinese people.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-china-survey-idU...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_University_of_Hong_Kon...