A senior city official in Hong Kong told Reuters on Tuesday that China will not allow chief executive Carrie Lam to resign as protesters demanded, even if she wants to. Lam offered more unqualified contrition in her latest public statement but said she intends to remain in office.
The Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), the group organizing protests against a proposed extradition law in Hong Kong, announced that nearly 2 million people attended protests on Sunday, the largest recorded assembly in the history of Hong Kong, according to the Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP).
Twenty-two-year-old Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong was released from prison on Monday after serving one month of a two-month sentence for his role in the Umbrella Movement demonstrations of 2014.
The government of Hong Kong issued a statement Sunday apologizing to its people for triggering widespread protests with a proposed extradition bill many fear could result in the mass incarceration of pro-democracy Hong Kongers to communist China. The apology appeared to do little to quell calls for chief executive Carrie Lam to resign.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said on Saturday that a proposed extradition bill will be suspended, handing a stunning victory to thousands of protesters who packed the streets for a week to oppose legislation strongly desired by the mainland Chinese government.
Hong Kong’s resilient protest movement is “going dark” online even as demonstrations continue against proposed extradition laws they view as a fatal assault on the autonomy of their city. The protesters believe they will be spied upon if they use unencrypted Internet services. Some fear China will subject Hong Kong to the same pervasive surveillance and political oppression deployed against the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province.
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper condemned American critics of its attempts to colonize Hong Kong, including U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), as “trashy” for their defense of freedom in the autonomous economic hub.
Police and protesters battled again in Hong Kong on Thursday, followed by what observers characterized as an uneasy truce. Hundreds of demonstrators are still taking to the streets, but their numbers are far less than the tens of thousands reported on Wednesday or the hundreds of thousands last Sunday.
Encrypted messaging platform Telegram revealed a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyberattack targeting it for the past few days, perhaps not coincidentally beginning at the same time as the latest protest in Hong Kong against an extradition law favored by mainland China.
Pro-democracy groups in Taipei organized a solidarity protest Tuesday in front of the Hong Kong representative office in Taiwan’s capital against a proposed extradition bill that would grant China access to dissidents in the autonomous regime.
China’s Global Times newspaper defended the pro-Communist leadership of Hong Kong, and their decision to use tear gas and rubber bullets on pro-democracy protesters Wednesday, insisting that the thousands of mostly young students opposing a law that would allow their extradition into the mainland were “violent” extremists radicalized by the United States.
Another massive demonstration against Hong Kong’s controversial extradition bill was held as planned on Wednesday, with tens of thousands of demonstrators filling the streets.
A protest march on Sunday against Hong Kong’s controversial extradition bill drew hundreds of thousands of participants according to police, and over a million according to organizers, making it one of the largest public demonstrations since Hong Kong was returned to Chinese control in 1997.
Hong Kong’s government will push ahead with new extradition laws despite massive protests Sunday that convulsed the former British dependent territory.
Hong Kong’s streets were flooded with tens of thousands of protesters Sunday, angry at a proposed extradition law allowing suspects to be sent to China for trial.
Commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre is only possible in two semi-autonomous cities in China: Hong Kong and Macau. Hong Kongers stepped up with an enormous candlelight vigil for the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on Tuesday.
Thousands of protesters demonstrated in Hong Kong on Sunday to demand accountability for the untold number of people murdered by the Chinese Communist government in Tiananmen Square thirty years ago.
The battle in Hong Kong over a bill that would make it easier to extradite people to other countries, notably including China, became quite literal over the weekend as representatives pummeled each other in the legislature, sending one lawmaker to the hospital.
Huge demonstrations filled the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday as people enraged by the jail sentences recently handed down to democracy movement leaders turned out to protest an extradition agreement with China.
Watchdogs groups have accused Apple of censoring music that mentions the Tiananmen Square Massacre and democracy in China.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen made a stopover in Hawaii on Wednesday after visiting several of Taiwan’s Pacific allies. From there she held a teleconference with the Heritage Foundation in which she praised the Trump administration’s support for Taiwan and its positive response to a request for more advanced weapons to hold China at bay.
China’s creepy “social credit system,” a vast surveillance network that rates both companies and individual citizens for “good behavior” and has a variety of tools for punishing those who behave badly, is also proving useful for accumulating socioeconomic data. A report released this week by China’s National Public Credit Information Center used data from the social credit system to determine that a large percentage of “untrustworthy businesses” are operating in China’s wealthiest regions.
The Chinese government on Monday unveiled its “Greater Bay Area” project to unite the semi-autonomous cities of Hong Kong and Macau with nine mainland cities into a tech and financial hub on par with Silicon Valley, its collective economy worth over $1.5 trillion.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a think tank linked to the Communist government, issued a report this month declaring that many of the world’s largest companies are using “incorrect labels” for Taiwan and Hong Kong, by which CASS means describing them as anything but territories of China.
Taiwanese people who recognize the sovereignty of their nation “would be classified as war criminals that must be punished if the Chinese mainland is forced to deal with the Taiwan question by force,” Lieutenant General He Lei of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) told reporters on Wednesday.
The government of Hong Kong is considering a bill that would criminalize disrespect for the Chinese national anthem, reports revealed Wednesday.
New Year’s Day brought thousands of demonstrators to the streets of Hong Kong to denounce China’s oppressive policies and to demand respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Members of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China dressed in Santa Claus outfits spent the Christmas holiday mailing cards to political prisoners and the Chinese officials who imprisoned them.
Hundreds of Christians dressed completely in black for church services in Hong Kong Sunday to protest the intense crackdown on Christian churches by the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping.
The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its battle group arrived in Hong Kong on Wednesday, a friendship visit widely interpreted as an easing of tensions between the U.S. and China just a few weeks after the Chinese refused to allow a U.S. warship to dock in Hong Kong.
