Don’t Write Off Hong Kong’s Radicals
Beijing can’t afford to demonize and repress the young activists on the extreme edge of the city’s massive protests.
Obviously a political statement, not just vandalism.
Photographer: Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images
When several hundred young Hong Kong activists symbolically vandalized the city’s Legislative Council last week, moderates in the democracy movement feared they were handing China’s central government a propaganda coup. Sure enough, Chinese state-controlled media and diplomats, who had been playing down the recent discord in Hong Kong, quickly went on the offensive. They dubbed the young protesters “ultra-radicals” who were bent on “wanton” destruction and “trampling” on the rule of law. Arrests have begun.
Beijing is obviously hoping it can isolate the “troublemakers” and cripple the broader movement by association with these supposed radicals. The proximate cause of the invasion of the Legislative Council, as well as three huge peaceful protest marches in the last month, is a now-suspended bill which would have, for the first time, allowed Hong Kongers to be extradited to mainland China. The deeper driver of discontent is the erosion of the freedoms China promised to Hong Kong for 50 years after the British handed over the former colony in 1997.