Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters yesterday rallied outside a train station linking Hong Kong to China, the latest mass show of anger as advocates try to keep pressure on the territory’s pro-Beijing leaders.
The rally was the first major large-scale protest since Monday last week’s unprecedented storming of the Hong Kong Legislative Council by largely young, masked protesters — which plunged the territrory further into crisis.
Hong Kong has been rocked by a month of huge marches as well as a series of separate violent confrontations with police, sparked by a bill that would allow extraditions to China.
Photo: AP
The bill has since been postponed in response to the intense backlash, but that has done little to quell public anger, which has evolved into a wider movement calling for democratic reforms and a halt to sliding freedoms in the semi-autonomous territory.
Organizers said about 230,000 people snaked their way through streets in the harbor-front district of Tsim Sha Tsui, an area popular with Chinese tourists.
Police said 56,000 turned out at the protest’s peak.
The march was billed as an opportunity to explain to Chinese in the territory what their protest movement is about.
Inside China, where news and information are heavily censored, the Hong Kong protests have been portrayed as a primarily violent, foreign-funded plot to destabilize the motherland, not a mass popular movement over Beijing’s increased shadow over the semi-autonomous territory.
“We want to show tourists, including mainland China tourists, what is happening in Hong Kong and we hope they can take this concept back to China,” Eddison Ng, an 18-year-old demonstrator, told reporters.
Hong Kongers speak Cantonese, but protesters were using Bluetooth to send leaflets in Mandarin — the predominant language in China — to nearby smartphones, hoping to spread the word by digital word of mouth.
“Why are there still so many people coming out to protest now?” one man said in Mandarin through a loudspeaker. “Because the Hong Kong government didn’t listen to our demands.”
Many protest banners were written with the simplified Chinese characters used in China, not the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
A Hong Kong lawmaker coached crowds how to chant “Students are not rioters” using standard Mandarin pronunciation.
Protesters were demanding that the postponed extradition bill be scrapped entirely, an independent inquiry into police use of tear gas and rubber bullets, amnesty for those arrested, and for the unelected Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) to step down.
In an interview with the BBC yesterday, Chinese Ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming (劉曉明) said the extradition bill was needed to “plug loopholes” and that Beijing has “full confidence in the Hong Kong government.”
The protest began on the waterfront — the first time a rally has taken place off Hong Kong’s main island — and made its way to West Kowloon, a multibillion-dollar station that links to China’s high-speed rail network.
Police placed the glass-and-steel structure in virtual lockdown. Long lines of water-filled security barriers surrounded the station, while only those with previously purchased tickets were being allowed in.
COMBINING FORCES: The 66th Marine Brigade would support the 202nd Military Police Command in its defense of Taipei against ‘decapitation strikes,’ a source said The Marine Corps has deployed more than 100 soldiers and officers of the 66th Marine Brigade to Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport) as part of an effort to bolster defenses around the capital, a source with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. Two weeks ago, a military source said that the Ministry of National Defense ordered the Marine Corps to increase soldier deployments in the Taipei area. The 66th Marine Brigade has been tasked with protecting key areas in Taipei, with the 202nd Military Police Command also continuing to defend the capital. That came after a 2017 decision by the ministry to station
ALL-IN-ONE: A company in Tainan and another in New Taipei City offer tours to China during which Taiwanese can apply for a Chinese ID card, the source said The National Immigration Agency and national security authorities have identified at least five companies that help Taiwanese apply for Chinese identification cards while traveling in China, a source said yesterday. The issue has garnered attention in the past few months after YouTuber “Pa Chiung” (八炯) said that there are companies in Taiwan that help Taiwanese apply for Chinese documents. Minister of the Interior Liu Shyh-fang (劉世芳) last week said that three to five public relations firms in southern and northern Taiwan have allegedly assisted Taiwanese in applying for Chinese ID cards and were under investigation for potential contraventions of the Act Governing
‘INVESTMENT’: Rubio and Arevalo said they discussed the value of democracy, and Rubio thanked the president for Guatemala’s strong diplomatic relationship with Taiwan Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Guatemala City on Wednesday where they signed a deal for Guatemala to accept migrants deported from the US, while Rubio commended Guatemala for its support for Taiwan and said the US would do all it can to facilitate greater Taiwanese investment in Guatemala. Under the migrant agreement announced by Arevalo, the deportees would be returned to their home countries at US expense. It is the second deportation deal that Rubio has reached during a Central America trip that has been focused mainly on immigration. Arevalo said his
‘SOVEREIGN AI’: As of Nov. 19 last year, Taiwan was globally ranked No. 11 for having computing power of 103 petaflops. The governments wants to achieve 1,200 by 2029 The government would intensify efforts to bolster its “Sovereign Artificial Intelligence [AI]” program by setting a goal of elevating the nation’s collective computing power in the public and private sectors to 1,200 peta floating points per second (petaflops) by 2029, the Executive Yuan said yesterday. The goal was set to fulfill President William Lai’s (賴清德) vision of turning Taiwan into an “AI island.” Sovereign AI refers to a nation’s capabilities to produce AI using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks. One petaflop allows 1 trillion calculations per second. As of Nov. 19 last year, Taiwan was globally ranked No. 11 for