END OF HONG KONG
&TVSXIWXVEPP].[IRXXSMR December 2019… with the &QIVMGERǼEKǼ]MRK
WHEN THE FROG HAD ENOUGH China has weathered past challenges in Hong Kong. Most recently, during the so-called “Umbrella Movement” in Hong Kong in 2014, where protestors occupied the downtown business district to demand free elections for Hong Kong’s leader. But support waned, and the protests ended after a bit less than three months. And the clock continued to tick... This time, in June 2019, the frog again said no más . The match that lit the bonfire was a bill proposed by the Hong Kong government – which answers to Beijing – to allow the extradition of suspected Hong Kong criminals to mainland China. As many as 2 million people (of a population of 7.4 million) hit the streets to protest the bill. Adjusted for population size, that’s like 86 million people in the U.S. (comparable
to the entire Midwest, plus Florida). It was Hongkongers of every age and stage, old people leaning on canes to families with kids in strollers, saying: Martians , you’re not going to boil us. But over the ensuing weeks and months, some of the protests morphed into a violent battle between the Hong Kong police and a smaller, increasingly radicalized core of protestors. Black-masked demonstrators used Molotov cocktails and bows and arrows against police, who responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. Almost everyone I met with when I was in Hong Kong last month had collected a small library of gruesome videos – distributed via social media app Telegram – of urban warfare on their phone.
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January 2020
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