A Hong Kong court has began the trial of 13 people over the storming and ransacking of the city’s legislature in 2019, which was an unprecedented challenge to the Beijing-backed government. It was the most violent episode in the initial phase of the huge pro-democracy protests that shook Hong Kong that year, with millions marching and staging sit-ins for weeks. Hundreds of protesters broke into the legislature on the night of 1 July 2019 – the 22nd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China – smashing windows and…
Tag: Protest
Surge in strikes at Chinese factories after Covid rules end
Protests in China are often small- scale. On 17 May, a handful of workers at an air-purifier factory in Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian province, south-east China, gathered to demand the payment of wages that, they said, were in arrears. The protest was quiet, but it was one of nearly 30 similar demonstrations this month alone. With China’s factories reopened and draconian coronavirus measures abandoned, workers are also going on strike at a remarkable rate. This year in China there have already been at least 130 factory strikes, more…
Tiananmen Square books removed from Hong Kong libraries in run-up to anniversary
Books about the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protest movements, and other subjects deemed politically sensitive by Beijing have been removed from the former British colony’s public libraries in the lead-up to the 34th anniversary of the killings. Hong Kong media have reported a marked increase in the number of book and documentary removals, which have been growing since the authoritarian clampdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and the introduction of the national security law in 2020. It has resulted in a major curtailing of political freedoms in the city,…
Moment protester throws cake at Volkswagen chair during AGM – video
Protesters threw what appeared to be cake at the Volkswagen chair, Hans Dieter Pötsch, at a shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday. Pötsch can be seen ducking to avoiding being hit. About 10 activists also interrupted the speech by Volkswagen’s chief executive, Oliver Blume, protesting against the carmaker’s plant in China’s north-western Xinjiang region by waving banners that read: ‘End Uyghur Forced Labour at VW’ The Guardian
Boris Johnson became suspicious of Sue Gray during Partygate inquiry, says ex-adviser – UK politics live
From 2h ago Boris Johnson became ‘suspicious’ of Sue Gray as she carried out her inquiry, says Guto Harri Good morning. With the coronation over, politics is back in spades after three days where it has been effectively marginalised. There is plenty around. But let’s start with the latest instalment of the Boris Johnson Tory psychodrama. Guto Harri, Johnson’s communications director when Johnson was PM, is launching a new podcast about his time in No 10 and, in an article for the Daily Mail, he claimed that Johnson and King…
Explainer: China’s covert overseas ‘police stations’
The FBI this week arrested two men accused of running a covert overseas police operation in New York on behalf of Chinese authorities. The charges followed a raid on a Fujianese community centre in Chinatown in October 2022. Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping, both US citizens, are accused of using the premises to run an “unofficial police station”. Police in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada have opened investigations into similar allegations in their countries. On Wednesday, Chris Philp, a UK home office minister, said the outposts were “of…
Hong Kong court jails Tiananmen anniversary vigil organisers
A Hong Kong court has jailed three former members of a group that organised annual vigils to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in China. Chow Hang-tung, 38, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and former vice-chairperson of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, was among those convicted by a magistrate’s court. The two others were Tang Ngok-kwan and Tsui Hon-kwong. The three were jailed on Saturday for four-and-a-half months for not complying with a national security police request for information. Speaking before sentencing,…
Detained activist fears for missing zero-Covid protesters in China
The detained human rights activist Ding Jiaxi has expressed concern for the young protesters who have disappeared since participating in the “blank paper” protests against zero-Covid that stunned China last year. At least 16 of them are still in police detention, according to names gathered by activists, while Ding himself has been detained for more than three years. On Friday he met his lawyer, Peng Jian, via video link. It was the first time the two had met since Ding was awarded the US state department’s global human rights defender…
Thin blue square: video shows apparent Chinese police drill against protester
How many police officers does it take to neutralise a single unarmed protester? According to a video purported to be from China, it takes at least 10 highly disciplined members of law enforcement, as well as some bespoke blue banners. In footage that emerged on Thursday, black-clad officers are shown practising a drill to surround a single person holding up a white piece of paper – an item that became the symbol of the anti-lockdown protests that rocked several major Chinese cities at the end of last year, and the…
Wuhan welfare protests escalate as hundreds voice anger over health insurance cuts
Crowds of hundreds of older people took to the streets in the Chinese cities of Wuhan and Dalian on Wednesday in escalating protests against changes to the public health insurance system. The protests were sparked by cuts to monthly allowances paid to retirees under China’s vast public health insurance system. The changes, gradually introduced since 2021, come as local government finances are strained following years of strict and costly zero-Covid policies. On Wednesday, a crowd of demonstrators rallied in front of a park in the central Chinese city of Wuhan…