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HONG KONG: The Hong Kong government risks reigniting last year’s political unrest by pushing a controversial bill banning insults to China’s national anthem, opposition lawmakers said on Tuesday, May 12.
Lawmakers warned that history was repeating itself, noting that speeding up a bill last year to allow extraditions to the authoritarian continent was the spark that ignited seven months in a row of protests.
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On Tuesday, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, a designated person in favor of Beijing, said the national anthem bill will now “take precedence.”
But opposition figures said such a move would inflame anger in a city still divided by divisions after last year’s protests.
“We urge (Lam) to revisit the whole thing and learn a lesson and hopefully reconsider and reconsider if this is an appropriate time to discuss these sensitive political issues at this time,” lawmaker Tanya Chan told journalists at an opposition meeting. legislators
Chan added that the city is now in a “very delicate and delicate situation.”
Next month marks the first anniversary of the start of the large protests that convulsed Hong Kong and soon turned into weekly battles between the police and protesters.
READ: Hong Kong Police Chief admits ‘undesirable’ behavior towards media in protest
The extradition bill was belatedly withdrawn, but at that time swaths of the city rebelled against the Beijing government after years of mounting fears that the city’s liberties would be stifled.
Since then, more than 8,000 people have been arrested, many of them high school students.
Both Lam and Beijing rejected protesters’ demands for an amnesty for those arrested, an investigation into police conduct and universal suffrage.
The mass arrests and the coronavirus pandemic ushered in four months of enforced calm, but in the past two weeks small protests have erupted as the city makes impressive progress against the virus and facilitates measures of social distancing.
On Sunday, two days after virus restrictions were reduced in meetings and bars and gyms were allowed to reopen, riot police arrested 230 people wandering through shopping malls and on the streets for flash singing protests. mob.
Disrespecting or insulting the national anthem is prohibited in China.
Beijing wants Hong Kong, which maintains certain invisible freedoms on the mainland, to pass a similar law, particularly after city soccer fans regularly booed it in games.
The current draft would prohibit distorting, disrespecting and insulting the national anthem with up to three years in prison and fines for criminals.
