People all over the world continue to demand real liberty, not the phony "freedom" offered by dictators and despots of various kinds. The Chinese rulers have been forced to change a bit for the better in recent years, but the rule of the gun is never far away.
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Hong Kong yesterday to protest against new anti-subversion laws in the biggest display of discontent anywhere in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Six years after Britain returned the territory to China, a mass gathering of the former colony's middle classes and professionals called on the government to drop the proposals which many say mark the "real handover", and quit.Posted by Alan at July 2, 2003 11:51 AMCritics say the government has gone further than it needed to, and that there are few common law systems in which the checks and balances of power have been replaced by ultimate loyalty to a Communist dictatorship. There is particular concern about clauses which allow the government to ban groups judged by Beijing to be a threat to national security, and which make it an offence to reveal state secrets - a broad category in China.
The government is almost bound to get its way, as the legislative council has an inbuilt pro-Beijing majority. But it may be shocked by the size of yesterday's protest. Police estimated 350,000, but organisers said as many as 500,000 people took to the narrow streets beneath the city's skyscrapers, far more than the 100,000 predicted.