On This Day in History: March 15
The Hong Kong protests
Some called it the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. You probably know it as the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests. The former doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but it does give more insight as to what kicked things off, capturing the world’s attention.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 15, 2019--
In terms of places to live, China is . . . not the best. There is a reason people don’t pack themselves into horrific conditions in container ships to travel across the Pacific from North America to escape to China. It’s a wonderful land with wonderful people, but the government sucks. People keep complaining about there being only two viable political parties in the U.S. Try living in a one-party state. That, boys and girls, is called a dictatorship, and it’s the opposite of fun.
But Hong Kong has had its fun. Sure, it’s got those colonial roots from the British saying this shit is ours now and we’re gonna use it as a base of operations to flood enough opium into your country to mindfuck your population by the millions. At least the legacy they left was a much freer bastion of democracy huddled next to an overbearing giant of Do What We Fucking Say.
Hong Kong was handed back in 1997 and became a “Special Administrative Region” of China operating under a concept of “one country, two systems.” But a new bill amending extradition to allow accused criminals to be handed over from Hong Kong to China threatened the independence of Hong Kong’s legal system. And so, on March 15, 2019, a sit-in at the government headquarters in Hong Kong began to protest said amendment.
That initiated a chain reaction, and a few months later hundreds of thousands were protesting, and on June 15 the Hong Kong government said fuck it, fine, we’ll suspend the bill. And all the protestors said okay that’s good and they went home. Ha! Nope. They protested way fucking harder the next day saying fuck your bill. We don’t want it suspended. Cancel that bitch!
It wasn’t just that. The protesters wanted an investigation into the police brutality at previous protests, the arrested protestors to be released, for the government to retract referring to the protests as “riots,” and for universal voting rights. Oh, and there was this politician named Carrie Lam running Hong Kong. They wanted her gone.
They did not get what they asked for. The bill was formally withdrawn in October, but that’s it. And so, the protests continue. Other cities around the world have joined the Hong Kong protestors in solidarity.
Fight the motherfucking power.
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As a visitor to "colonial" Hong Kong I was devastated when China took over governing the territory. The place was fascinating and vibrant, now it's slowly turning drab and depressing.