Sunday, 5 May 2024

Protesters in Hong Kong Block Road and Surround Police Headquarters

HONG KONG — Thousands of protesters blocked a thoroughfare outside Hong Kong’s government offices and surrounded the police headquarters on Friday, adding new pressure on the city’s leader to withdraw an unpopular bill that has thrown the territory into a political crisis.

The demonstrators, mostly teenagers and people in their 20s and dressed in black, first held a sit-in at a concourse in front of the legislative chambers. Many of them then poured onto a main road by the complex, blocking traffic while chanting calls for the government to withdraw the legislation that would allow extraditions to mainland China.

Demonstrators strung up a large, white banner declaring “This is Hong Kong, not China” along the side of a pedestrian bridge.

Kenneth Kwan, a 19-year-old student, said he agreed with the protesters’ decision to abandon a sedate sit-in and instead shut down a major road, because he thought it would make a larger statement.

“It’s a helpless feeling, and we don’t know how to make our government respond to our needs,” he said through a face mask while standing in an eastbound lane of Harcourt Road. Protesters, he said, needed to keep pressure on the government until their demands were met.

The protesters have vowed to continue demonstrations after a set of demands, chief among them the full withdrawal of contentious legislation that would allow extraditions to mainland China, went unmet by Thursday. They also called for the resignation of Carrie Lam, the city’s chief executive, the release of people arrested during clashes with police last week and an investigation into the police’s use of force against protesters.

Other protesters descended on the headquarters of the city’s police force, not far from the legislative chambers, where they set up steel barricades blocking the entrance and demanded a meeting with the police chief. “Shame on dirty cops,” they chanted.

Eddie Chu, a pro-democracy lawmaker, led chants urging Stephen Lo, the police chief, and John Lee, the secretary for security, to resign.

The police urged the protesters to disperse, saying they were obstructing officers’ ability to respond to emergencies. The police would send a team of negotiators to persuade the protesters to leave, Yolanda Yu, a police spokeswoman said at a news conference steps from where the protesters had gathered.

“The police is not clearing the grounds,” Ms. Yu said. “We respect the people to express their views in a peaceful manner.”

The protesters have felt emboldened since Mrs. Lam indefinitely suspended the extradition bill last week and organizers contend that as many as two million protesters poured onto the streets of downtown Hong Kong on Sunday.

[These aerial images show you the scale of last Sunday’s protest.]

Those protests prompted Mrs. Lam to deliver a personal, televised public apology for having proposed the bill in the first place.

But she did not agree to resign or withdraw the bill entirely, as many protesters have demanded. Instead, she said that so long as there was a public dispute over the bill’s content, work on it would not resume in Hong Kong’s legislature.

As calls for protesters to gather on Friday around the Legislative Council circulated on social media and in messaging groups, the government shut down its headquarters for the day, citing security concerns. It was not immediately clear if the sit-in would disrupt scheduled meetings of the legislature on Friday.

The extradition bill would allow the authorities in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous territory, to send people suspected of crimes to jurisdictions such as mainland China, with which it does not have an extradition agreement. Opponents of the bill fear that, if it becomes law, it would open a door for Beijing to take anyone from Hong Kong — including dissidents — into the mainland’s opaque judicial system, which is controlled by the Communist Party.

[As the fight over Hong Kong’s future raged, the city’s tycoons waited and worried.]

China’s Communist Party under President Xi Jinping has increasingly tried to exert control over Hong Kong, which has its own laws, independent courts and news outlets, and a vocal community of pro-democracy activists and lawmakers. Beijing has steadily eroded those liberties over the last several years, including by trying to silence critics and stacking Hong Kong’s leadership with its supporters.

Many protesters have expressed seething anger at Beijing’s encroachment on their rights, most strikingly when hundreds of thousands of people, or as many as one million, descended on central Hong Kong on June 9 in the first of three major demonstrations over the past two weeks. The protests have largely remained peaceful although the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets during skirmishes on June 12 with a large group of protesters, some of whom had thrown bricks and bottles at riot police.

Perhaps wary about provoking a greater backlash, Mr. Xi’s government has so far been muted in its response to the protests. Its Foreign Ministry has said it still supports the bill, and criticized “foreign forces that interfere” in Hong Kong’s affairs.

Ezra Cheung contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Alan Yuhas from New York.

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