https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Hong_Kong_prot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
It’s worth noting that a lot of the “Hong Kong police” that were involved in breaking up protests seemed to come from the mainland and only spoke mandarin, not cantonese.
Edit: https://twitter.com/AmyWong01217912/status/11822963227720908... is one of many sources
During covid a lot of people were isolated. I doubt anyone mainlanders wanted to risk life to confront the protestors. Note how docile Chinese mainlanders are when they travel around the world.
Where are the evidences of such government-sponsored activities? As I said, normal Chinese mainlanders usually don't have much impetus to confront others, even if they wholeheartedly stand against the counterparts, in this case, most mainlanders would be against HK protestors. Then these people are organized by CCP, then what are the evidences?
> complete hearsay...
Um, what? How do you go from video evidence to "complete hearsay"?
The incumbent government of Myanmar WAS the military, just in a less overt fashion. They were the ones in charge of almost everything, the main change is now they don’t have a facade of democracy.
The HK police force was riddled with corruption in the past (1940s to 1970s), but then (after the creation in 1974 of the Independent Commission Against Corruption) turned around and became highly professional, trusted, and respected, I'd say ("Asia's finest").
However, with the 2014 umbrella movement, they were necessarily pitted against the pro-democracy protesters, having to do the government's bidding, and things got polarised. Polarisation got worse with the 2019 (until now) Anti-Extradition Law protests: restaurants etc. declared themselves "yellow" (pro democracy, pro protesters) or "blue" (pro police, pro Beijing). [1]
And, yeah, things got so heated then that the cohesion slipped away and, I think, the HK police did more than "what they had to" while pushing back against the protesters, particularly after Chris Tang's appointment as the Commissioner of Police in November 2019.
Police brutality, excessive force, refusal to show identification (as required by law) [2], maybe even falsification of evidence have severely deteriorated trust.
Now, with the total crackdown by Beijing, using the courts and the police as their tool, things are only getting worse [3]. :-/
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/yellow-or-blue-i...
[2] https://hongkongfp.com/2019/06/21/hong-kong-activists-compla...
[3] https://hongkongfp.com/2021/01/04/explainer-how-the-national...
(I live in HK)
Both are extraordinary, it's not obvious to me who should win the "most well-behaved protest movement" award
It's also not a competition, nobody is trying to diminish the US protests, but I don't think that events of a similar magnitude would have gone down as peaceful in the US.
It's also about the culture of police violence. In the US citizen life is cheaper (and one would guess, in China too), judging from the number of police shootings alone, and the excessive police force used for everything and anything, that to have deaths in a protest/riot etc is kinda taken as granted or "the way things are". This extends to protest cop behavior.
In some countries mild or even heavy violence would be tolerated, but a single death in a demonstration could cause resignations or bring down a government. So there are countries with tons of protests for decades involving 10s or 100s of thousands without a single death (mine didn't have a protest death for ages, despite tons of protests and violent clashes and supression by the police), and countries where a protest can turn into deadly suppression almost immediately (e.g. some Latin American countries).
I'm actually sad that the one country two systems experiment looks like it's over, at least the political side, not the economic side. But you can't run a city if there are months of people rioting on the streets.