Volume 138, Issue 24 Wednesday, February 26, 2020
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‘A dystopian way of coming together’: Students, staff speak on Hong Kong protests BEN WINIGER Staff Writer
It’s been almost a year since the start of the protest in Hong Kong — the semi-sovereign, coastal Chinese city. What started out as disputes over new laws steadily turned into large-scale, city wide resistance against the communist Chinese government and their continued authority over the largely independent region. The Hong Kong protests are not an insular series of events, however. Even on Rocky Top, there are those who’ve witnessed and thought about the protests. Mason Rucinski, a junior in mechanical engineering and pre-medical major, studied abroad last semester at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. As such, he saw the most active period of the protests. “When I got there, they were still very
peaceful protests. Everyone would talk about them going on, but everything [in the city] was still up and going,” Rucinski said. The protests emerged in March of last year, after the Hong Kong government proposed new legislation under the Extradition Bill. The new bill would allow the communist Chinese government to charge Hong Kong prisoners in Chinese courts. However, the real roots of the protests lie in Hong Kong’s past, with the city’s political history. Hong Kong was once a semi-independent British colony. This changed in 1997, when the British government officially gave Hong Kong back to the People’s Republic of China. As part of the so-called “handover,” the Chinese government agreed to maintain the city’s semi-independent status for up to 50 years. This let Hong Kong maintain a level of democratic and economic freedom far higher than other areas of the communist state. However, 2047 is approaching fast, mean-
ing Hong Kong has little time to sort out the issue of its transition from semi-sovereign region to full Chinese territory. According to UT Political Science Professor Yang Zhong, this issue is especially worrying for younger Hong Kongers. “At the time, very few people [in Hong Kong] were worried. But now that deadline is very realistic,” Zhong said. “It’s been 20 or so years already, now [they] have 20 or so years to go. Twenty-year-olds in Hong Kong are looking down the road and realizing that they’re going back to China. I think that worries them.” Zhong described the 2019 Extradition Bill as “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” with Hong Kongers seeing it as an infringement of Hong Kong’s rights as a semi-sovereign region. According to Rucinski, the protests began peacefully. However, as the months went on, they gradually turned more “violent.” He cited National China Day, Oct. 1, as a significant
turning point. “I remember it was National China Day. The people of Hong Kong feel very strongly about celebrating that holiday. They questioned why they should celebrate ‘China’ if they weren’t [part of] China. On that day, there happened to be a shooting, and that marked the spiral to where we are now,” Rucinski said. “After China Day, you couldn’t go out on the weekends because that’s when students would go out and protest. Often, the railway would shut down.” From these protests emerged concerns about police brutality and alleged violations of free speech. These concerns led to the “five demands” for the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, which are as follows: that the extradition bill be completely withdrawn, that arrested protestors be released and exonerated...
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