The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Tuesday expressed strong regret over the shooting of an 18-year-old student by Hong Kong police during protests in the territory the same day, denouncing what it said was an excessive use of force.
The council in a statement said that it regrets the social disturbance and clashes between police and protesters that broke out on Tuesday, and criticized the “unnecessary and excessive use of police force” in the shooting incident.
It said that if the Hong Kong government continues to suppress democracy with uncontrolled state violence, it would only create a vicious cycle.
“The repeated use of guns and ammunition without reason to rob people of their freedom will only exacerbate dissension and discord,” the statement said.
The council urged the Hong Kong government to listen and respond to the public’s demands, as that is the best approach to restoring stability to Hong Kong, and also called for all sides to remain calm and to act with restraint.
Massive protests have been regularly held in Hong Kong since early June, at first demanding the withdrawal of an extradition bill that could have subjected people in Hong Kong to China’s opaque and arbitrary legal system.
The movement has since morphed into calls for closer scrutiny of the police, an end to describing protests as “riots” and universal suffrage.
On Tuesday, the 70th anniversary of communist rule in China, Hong Kong protesters set out on a “national grief” march, even though it was barred by police, to oppose what they see as Beijing’s growing encroachment in the territory.
They held gatherings in multiple districts throughout Hong Kong, culminating in the bloodiest clashes between police and protesters the movement has seen so far, leading to the first shooting of a protester by live ammunition.
Hong Kong Police Force Commissioner Stephen Lo (盧偉聰) late on Tuesday told a news conference that police officers fired six shots in different areas to protect their lives when their warnings were ignored, insisting that they were acting “lawfully and appropriately.”
The protester who was shot, confirmed to be a student at Tsuen Wan Public Ho Chuen Yiu Memorial College, has undergone surgery and is in a stable condition.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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