Shooting of student expected to galvanise Hong Kong protests
A police officer who fired a bullet into the chest of an 18-year-old protester may have inadvertently given new life to the months-long movement challenging Beijing’s authority.
Demonstrators took to the streets again on Wednesday after the release of videos showing the protester getting shot at close range after striking the officer with a metal rod.
The violent images, juxtaposed with a triumphant Chinese President Xi Jinping celebrating 70 years of Communist rule in Beijing, could now help drive momentum for the protests until local elections in November the next big date on the political calendar.
“People were expecting that the government and Beijing would have loved to see the end of everything by National Day,” said opposition legislator Alvin Yeung. “And it was a failure it was chaotic, and finally a real bullet has been shot at a student, which is a turning point.
“People are very angry, and you can imagine that the public, especially the younger protesters, will take their anger and turn it into real action, physical revenge,” he said.
Over the last few months, pro-democracy demonstrators have seized on violent incidents to rally supporters in a movement that began four months ago to oppose a proposed bill allowing extradition to China.
There was a high-profile suicide of a protester in June. A month later alleged triad members viciously attacked blackshirted demonstrators on the subway. Then in August a woman was reportedly hit in the eye with a non-lethal round, prompting other protesters to start wearing bloody eye patches and spray painting “an eye for an eye” while storming the international airport.
The anger was palpable during a protest in central Hong Kong on Wednesday, even as reports emerged that the shot protester was in a stable condition and expected to survive.
Police fired more than 1,400 rounds of tear gas on Tuesday more than half of the total fired since protests began on June 9 and fired six live bullets, five as warning shots.
“The police force should be disbanded and get sanctioned for what they are doing,” said a man surnamed Lee, who declined to give his full name as People participate in a flash mob to support an 18-year-old student who was shot in the chest by a policeman during clashes between protesters and police in Hong Kong. he chanted slogans with dozens of others. “We will fight on.”
The Civil Human Rights Front, which has organised some of the city’s largest peaceful gatherings, pledged a “largescale mobilisation” as a result of the shooting.
“We will be even more united, even more determined in our resistance,” the group said in a Facebook post. “From now on, October 1 will be an anniversary for the suppression of Hong Kong people with live rounds.”
So far no-one has been killed in the protests, a fact Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam called “quite remarkable” last week. She has defended the police force and commended officers for using restraint in the face of attacks by some protesters wielding hammers and Molotov cocktails.
While Lam withdrew the bill that initially sparked the protests in June, she has refused to give in to other demands by the protesters including an independent probe into police violence. That stance is backed by China, which has ruled out allowing Hong Kong to pick a ruler to stand in Beijing.
Samson Yuen, an assistant professor at Lingnan University who has conducted surveys among protesters including on Wednesday, said demonstrators are consistently saying they are motivated by the inability to choose their own political leaders rather than economic factors, as the government insists.
“People are concerned about the illegitimacy of the system,” he said. “The shooting will have a huge effect on the emotion among the protesters. And that the police have insisted it was a right and reasonable action, this will definitely lead to a backlash among the protesters.”
More recently, Lam’s Beijingbacked administration has set up town-hall-style dialogue sessions, including one on September 26. But critics have said she is not meaningfully engaging with the former colony’s populace, because she is unwilling to make any further concessions.
That approach digging in and hoping the protests die down could eventually prove successful if there is no major “intervening event” such as a fatality, Kevin Yam, a political commentator said.
“I tend to think the government’s strategy of waiting it out will work. And I mean ‘work’ in terms of the protests ebbing away, though obviously not working in terms of longer-term unresolved issues.”