Carrie Lam, the pro-Beijing chief executive of Hong Kong’s government, dismisses the protesters filling the streets of the city this week as “stubborn children.”

Some children. As many as a million of Hong Kong’s people, an astonishing one in seven, have poured into the streets to demonstrate their opposition to a law that would erode their rights and bring them further under the long shadow of the Chinese government.

They are thoroughly mainstream: businesspeople, lawyers, civil servants and the like, not marginal dissidents or people under the influence of foreign powers, as Beijing would like the world to believe.

Their protests have grown all week, and on Wednesday they were met with strong resistance from riot police — billy clubs, tear gas and rubber bullets. These are the most vehement protests by Hong Kongers against threats to their traditional liberties in many years.

Canada has an important stake in the protests, as veteran democracy advocate Martin Lee told the Star’s editorial board during a recent visit to Toronto and Ottawa.

The biggest single group of foreign citizens in Hong Kong are Canadians. At least 300,000 Canadian citizens live there, and like everyone else in the territory they will be at the mercy of China’s arbitrary and highly politicized legal system if the Hong Kong government goes ahead with a plan to sign an extradition agreement with Beijing.

That prospect has brought hundreds of thousands of ordinary Hong Kongers into the streets all week in protests that forced the territory’s government, which is under the thumb of Beijing, to delay debate on the proposed extradition law.

But the threat remains, and it goes to the heart of the “one country, two systems” status that Hong Kong has lived under since it was handed over from Britain to China in 1997.

At base it amounts to a guarantee for citizens and investors alike that they will be protected by Hong Kong’s robust legal system and won’t be subject to the whims of China’s politicized courts.

Canadians understand all too well what that means, with two of our citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, held in Chinese jails in clear retaliation for the arrest in Vancouver of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.

The proposed new extradition law would make it much easier for Beijing to go after political critics or businessmen who failed to fall into line with Chinese policies. They could be arrested in Hong Kong and disappeared into China’s judicial system. Even visitors to Hong Kong would be exposed to that risk.

With the hardline government of President Xi Jinping pulling strings in the background, other measures have been taken that steadily chip away at Hong Kong’s traditional freedoms, which were supposed to be guaranteed for 50 years after the handover.

Pro-democracy members of Hong Kong’s legislative council have been disqualified from serving. Chinese law has been imposed in customs areas. Leaders of the 2014 “Umbrella Movement” pro-democracy protests have been sentenced to prison. And in the absence of an extradition law, people who run afoul of Beijing are sometimes whisked into China — essentially kidnapped by Chinese agents — to face legal charges there.

Taken together, Lee told the Star, it all means that “Xi Jinping is trying to rewrite the one country, two systems” approach. “He doesn’t want Hong Kong to continue as an international city.”

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Canada has spoken out against the erosion of rights in Hong Kong, as well it should as a country that stands for the rule of law. Along with Britain, it issued a statement last week warning about the risk to British and Canadian citizens in the territory, as well as to Hong Kong’s autonomy from China and fundamental freedoms.

Beijing has the upper hand, but Hong Kong’s people are showing they are in no mood to knuckle under. They deserve strong support from friends of democracy around the world.

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