The problem is that these protests are complicated. They involve different
groups of people with different motivations. There has been a good deal if
interference by the US government, similar to that in Venezuela, Bolivia, and
Nicaragua. There are people who were carrying American flags and British
colonial flags. Some of the protestors were, indeed, protesting their poor
economic conditions and lack of political influence, but many others were
influenced by the National Endowment for Democracy and other anti-China groups.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Tuesday, July 7, 2020 11:16 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Hong Kong protests defy Beijing’s drive to tighten
grip
Hong Kong protests defy Beijing’s drive to tighten grip
https://themilitant.com/2020/07/04/hong-kong-protests-defy-beijings-drive-to-tighten-grip/
BY TERRY EVANS
Vol. 84/No. 27
July 13, 2020
In largest protest in Hong Kong this year, thousands rallied July 1 to
commemorate 23rd anniversary of end of British colonial rule and reknitting of
ties to China. Defying police attacks, they marched to press demands for
political rights in opposition to new “security” law imposed by Beijing.
AP/VINCENT YU
In largest protest in Hong Kong this year, thousands rallied July 1 to
commemorate 23rd anniversary of end of British colonial rule and reknitting of
ties to China. Defying police attacks, they marched to press demands for
political rights in opposition to new “security” law imposed by Beijing.
Defying a ban by Hong Kong authorities thousands joined the biggest
demonstration in the city in many months, on the July 1 anniversary of the end
of British colonial rule and the territory’s return to Chinese sovereignty in
1997.
They voiced opposition to a national security law imposed days earlier by
Beijing that widens its authority to jail working people and others who have
organized strikes and taken to the streets to fight for greater political
rights.
Cops arrested over 300 at the action, including nine people they accuse of
violating the new law, which prohibits calls for “secession.” At least two of
those arrested carried signs urging Hong Kong’s independence from China.
“We demanded the same things we have been calling for over the past year,”
Daniel Chan told the Militant. He had joined a thousands-strong protest at Hong
Kong’s Causeway Bay that day. They chanted, “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong
Kong,” and “Five demands, not one less.”
Voiced by hundreds of thousands during the yearlong protests, those demands
include calls for direct elections of the city’s chief executive officer and to
its legislature and the release of all those arrested at demonstrations.
“The government wants to shut us up,” Roy Chan told Reuters at a protest of
several hundred in the city days earlier on June 28, “We must stand up.”
That demonstration had also been banned by Hong Kong police.
On June 30 the top decision-making body of the Chinese parliament adopted the
security law, which echoes restrictions imposed by Beijing to suppress
political opposition elsewhere in the country. Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau
Affairs Office claimed the new law is a “guardian angel” to protect freedom and
ensure peace. It went on to say that Beijing will now decide how to “generate
the necessary deterrent force”
to enforce the measure.
The Chinese government has already said it would establish a Hong Kong-based
security bureau tasked with rooting out violations, including political
“crimes” like “subversion” and “separatism.” Over the course of the last year,
more protesters have raised demands for Hong Kong independence.
For more than 20 years, working people have turned out in large numbers for
annual July 1 marches. Last year over half a million attended the event, many
protesting the city government’s now withdrawn bill that would have authorized
Beijing to extradite political activists for trial.
Cops claim the ban they imposed on this year’s march was necessary because of
the coronavirus outbreak.
In fact, there has been no epidemic of COVID-19 in Hong Kong, largely due to
measures carried out by the political opposition, writes Zeynep Tufekci in The
Atlantic magazine. She says protest groups set up brigades to distribute masks,
especially to those with little resources and to the elderly, and delivered
free sanitizer in crowded working-class tenement buildings. The government had
in fact banned wearing masks, a measure aimed at the demonstrators. Only seven
people have died from COVID-19 in Hong Kong.
The government has rescinded many of the restrictions it imposed earlier.
Museums, libraries and schools are opening up. But protests remain banned.
“Police are using the pandemic to suppress the public’s rights to march and
rally,” July 1 march organizer Jimmy Sham Tsz-kit, of the Civil Human Rights
Front, told the South China Morning Post. The Chinese rulers are determined to
contain the protests in Hong Kong, as well as prevent resistance to their rule
from spreading elsewhere in China.
Working people across the country face deepening hardship from rising
joblessness, severe limits on unemployment relief and from bosses’
attacks on wages. The Chinese Labor Bulletin reported that in the last week of
June workers staged protests demanding bosses pay wage arrears at a coal mine
and a construction site in Beijing, and at an auto plant in Nanjing.
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Breonna Taylor, and others!’
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$132,300 Weekly audio version of ‘Militant’ available online Books of the Month
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___
Richard Dawkins
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all
decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this
sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running
for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from
within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation,
thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this
very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the
natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons
and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people
are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find
any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has
precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
