Hong Kong: Thousands of anti-government protesters began a march in Hong Kong Sunday that will end outside a controversial train station linking the territory to the Chinese mainland, as activists try to keep pressure on the city’s pro-Beijing leaders.
The rally is the first major large-scale protest since last Monday’s unprecedented storming of parliament by largely young, masked protesters — a move which plunged the international financial hub 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 law that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China.
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 city.
Thousands mustered at the rally’s start on Sunday afternoon at a park in Tsim Sha Tsui, a harbourfront district of the city popular with Chinese tourists. Organisers have billed the march as an opportunity to explain to Chinese mainlanders in the city what the protest movement is about.
Inside the China, where news and information is heavily censored, the Hong Kong protests have been portrayed as a primarily violent, foreign-funded plot to destabilise the motherland, not a mass popular movement over Beijing’s increased shadow over the semi-autonomous hub.
Protesters are demanding the bill be scrapped entirely, an independent inquiry into police use of tear gas and rubber bullets, amnesty for those arrested, and for the city’s unelected leader Carrie Lam to step down.
Beijing has thrown its full support behind Lam, calling on Hong Kong police to pursue anyone involved in the parliament storming and other clashes.
Sunday’s protest plans to end at West Kowloon, a recently opened multi-billion-dollar station that links to China’s high-speed rail network.
Local politician Ventus Lau Wing-hong, one of those organising the rally, said they would “protest in a peaceful, rational and elegant way”. (AFP)
