Hong Kong riot cops attack protesters as ONE MILLION march over chilling extradition law to send prisoners to China
RIOT police in Hong Kong attacked protesters as one million people took to the streets to protest a law that would allow extradition to mainland China.
Authorities in the territory have sought to suppress opposition to the proposed law, which critics say would erode Hong Kong’s judicial independence.
Hong Kong has been a semi-autonomous region since 1997, when a 99-year lease held by Britain expired.
Violence broke out after police equipped with riot gear, batons, and pepper spray, moved on peaceful protesters outside the parliament and government headquarters.
A procession of people almost two miles long marched for seven hours through central Hong Kong on Sunday.
A group of protesters had planned to stay outside the government headquarters until the extradition bill undergoes its second reading on Tuesday, but police moved in after a permit to protest expired at midnight.
Chinese state media blamed “foreign forces” for the unrest, though did not specify who those foreign forces might be.
The new bill would create a system for case-by-case fugitive transfers between Hong Kong and China.
The Hong Kong government says the bill is a necessary step in its fight against crime, and that China is an important strategic partner, but opponents fear that it would not resist politically-motivated requests by China.
Fears were bolstered last month when a member of China’s politburo, the ruling body of the Communist Party, revealed that the country’s targets included foreigners who had committed crimes against Chinese national security outside China.
HONG KONG HISTORY
Hong Kong became a British colony with the end of the First Opium War in 1842.
The British fought the war to preserve the right of the East India Company to sell opium into mainland China.
The establishment of the colony gave Britain control over a number of ports to which foreign merchants could deliver goods.
Britain obtained a 99-year lease for the territory in 1898, and relinquished control when that lease expired in 1997.
Hong Kong now operates as a semi-autonomous territory, with control over its own trade, tax, and immigration policy.
Under the terms of the 1997 handover, that status is protected until 2047.
What happens after then is currently undecided, but opponents of the Beijing government fear that China will seek to gain control of the territory.
Martin Lee QC, a pro-democracy figure and former legislator who helped organise the protests, told the Guardian: “If we lose this one, Hong Kong is not Hong Kong any more, it’s just another Chinese city.”
Since the end of British control, Hong Kong’s relationship with China has been governed by a principal of “one country, two systems” with China, and its citizens have broadly enjoyed more freedoms than those of its northern neighbour.
But there has long been a so-called "pro-Beijing camp", politically aligned with the China's Communist Party and supportive of Chinese nationalistic sentiment, and that camp has been the dominant force in the governance of Hong Kong since 1997.
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China has come under increasing international pressure recently over its arbitrary detention of Muslims in concentration camps in the northwest of the country.
It is estimated that one million Uyghurs, an ethnic minority in China, are being held in the camps, where they are subjected to torture, overcrowding, and a daily regime of party indoctrination.
DETENTION OF THE UYGHURS
Beginning in 2014, the Chinese government began building and opening massive internment camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China.
The region is populated chiefly by the members of the Uyghur Muslim minority, a Turkic people concentrated in China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey.
In the years since, reports have emerged that up to one million Uyghurs have been detained in the camps.
China acknowledges the existence of the camps, but maintains they are voluntary “vocational skills education and training centres”.
Former detainees have reported being physically abused, forced to sing Communist Party songs, and made to consume pork and alcohol, both prohibited in the Muslim faith.
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