The Hong Kong government stirred up a political squabble yesterday by claiming just 7,600 people had turned out to protest Beijing's assertion of control over electoral reforms -- a much lower number than demonstrators and police had used.
University of Hong Kong statistics lecturer Paul Yip (葉兆輝) said releasing such a figure days after Sunday's march would play no useful role in police crowd control and he suggested the government had a hidden political agenda.
"It shows that there is a very deep distrust between the government and the public," Yip told RTHK radio.
The protesters marched to China's liaison office to demand that Beijing reverse its binding ruling, issued last week, that any political reforms in Hong Kong must get advanced approval from the central government.
Rally organizer Jackie Hung said 20,000 people had turned out, and a human rights group that said it had conducted an independent count put the figure at 17,000 or more. Police estimated the crowd at 10,000.
Hong Kong officials released their smaller figure on Tuesday night. They did not say who conducted the government survey, but said they might produce similar crowd counts at future rallies on a "case by case" basis.
Elsewhere, pro-democracy protesters were involved in scuffles with police yesterday as they rallied against a leading Chinese figure's criticism of the protest, police and reports said.
A handful of activists from the radical April Fifth Action Group were dragged away from a police station as they chanted anti-China slogans, reports said.
Police said there were no arrests and that the encounter was "largely peaceful."
The gathering had been called to denounce Xu Chongde (許崇德), a Chinese legal expert who criticized a 15,000-strong protest against China on Sunday. Xu said the marchers had been "disrespectful" to the Chinese leadership.
Wednesday's protesters carried banners urging Xu be given an award "for making the most absurd comment of the year," local radio reports said.
The April Fifth Action Group, led by colorful campaigner Leung Kwok-hung (
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS