As political wrangling in Hong Kong continues over changes to how the city’s chief executive will be selected in 2017, Beijing marks the 25th anniversary of the promulgation of the Hong Kong Basic Law the Special Administrative Region’s constitutional document. A recurring theme both in the electoral reform debate and in the Basic Law celebrations has been the supposed novelty
For almost three months in late 2014, what came to be known as the Umbrella Movement amplified Hong Kong’s bitter struggle for the democracy its people were promised when China assumed control of the territory from Britain in 1997. Originally a civil disobedience movement led by Occupy Central with Love and Peace, the pro-democracy movement began on September 28 when
This week, we saw the release of the official government “Report on the Recent Community and Political Situation in Hong Kong.” It concluded: It is the common aspiration of the Central Authorities [in Beijing], the [Hong Kong Special.
They are not looking for someone else to bring into implementation those promises. They are saying “we are the generation which has grown up after the handover in 1997.” Some of them were only a few years old, but they are looking to a future and they say, “the future belongs to us. Things have not been going very well, democracy has been put off again and again, and we are now going to fight for our future and our own way.” So, for me, it is a very exciting thing, the old generation going out and the new generation coming in with a very strong sense of a Hong Kong identity, with a sense that Hong Kong has core values, which need to be preserved so that they can have the kind of future they want in that community. And I see them in