The Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Protests
Hong Kong protested for seven months in 2019 against a bill that was withdrawn in September. The extradition bill would have allowed transfers to mainland jurisdictions on a case-by-case basis, and it was proposed after a Hong Kong man murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan and could not be sent back. The objection was that Hong Kong's separate legal system — the substance of one country, two systems — depended on there being no route into the mainland courts. A march on 9 June drew organisers' estimates of a million people and a second on 16 June of two million, out of a population of seven and a half million. The movement's method was drawn from a Bruce Lee line about being water: no leaders, no fixed plan, decisions taken on encrypted group chats, occupations that formed and dissolved before the police arrived. It occupied the legislature in July and the airport in August. The demands grew to five, of which the central one was an independent inquiry into the policing, and the confrontations grew harder — tear gas in residential streets, sieges at two universities in November, and attacks by masked men at Yuen Long station that the police were slow to answer. Carrie Lam withdrew the bill in September and refused everything else. Beijing imposed a national security law directly in June 2020, and the opposition has since been prosecuted, disqualified or has left. The district council elections in November 2019, held in the middle of it, produced a turnout of seventy-one per cent and gave pro-democracy candidates 388 of 452 seats. It is the last free vote the territory has had.
- Year: 2019 CE
- Category: Political
