The Hong Kong Protest is probably one of the biggest world news stories of 2019. Here’s my understanding of it.

The Hong Kong Protest is a current event that I’ve been hearing about a lot. When I first saw the headlines on a news site, I kinda ignored it because it wasn’t something that affected me personally –I wasn’t living in Hong Kong nor was I Chinese. I just didn’t find it to be that important to me.

But then I kept seeing it all over. I would go onto Twitter and it would be trending. I would go onto Facebook and there would multiple posts about it. And a bunch of news sites were headlining it. “This must be an important story,” I thought to myself. So I started researching it so that I can get make sense of what was going on.

The first thing I did was go to YouTube to find some videos on it.

Why are they protesting?

I came across a video from The Economist that clearly (and digestibly) explains why the protests began.

Okay, so from this video, the protests began because of a proposed extradition law that could potentially give China more power in Hong Kong. It also shows that this is the root of the protests.

But why doesn’t Hong Kong want China to have more power?

One Country, Two Systems

According to this article from The Guardian, Hong Kongers fear that the law would allow authorities to target “political enemies” – people who criticize the government and protest against it.

“China has often used allegations of non-political crimes to target government critics, and there are fears that Hong Kong officials would not be able to reject Beijing’s requests.”

Additionally, if this were to happen, Hong Kong could potentially lose the “one country, two systems” policy (or it would be corrupted by the mainland), which gives them rights that other Chinese provinces don’t get.

This policy was set in place back in 1997 when Britain handed Hong Kong back to China. From 1841 to 1997, Hong Kong was colonized by England and was a British Colony. Since then, Hong Kong has been its own territory, enjoying its own set of laws, even though it’s a Chinese territory.

China’s Treatment of the Uighurs People

A big argument that is used against China’s potential takeover is that the nation doesn’t care about human rights. Protestors often refer to China’s brainwashing of Uighurs as examples.

The Uighurs (or Uygur or Uyghur) are a group of about 10 million people from Northwestern China and the majority of them are Muslim. In a data leak from 2019, it was revealed that the Chinese authority has unlawfully detained hundreds of thousands of Uighur people. These detainees are placed into prison camps, where they are brainwashed.

Via The BBC:

“The Chinese government has consistently claimed the camps in the far western Xinjiang region offer voluntary education and training. But official documents, seen by BBC Panorama, show how inmates are locked up, indoctrinated and punished… The investigation has found new evidence which undermines Beijing’s claim that the detention camps, which have been built across Xinjiang in the past three years, are for voluntary re-education purposes to counter extremism.”

There are other cases that are used too, but this one is a big one.

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Currently, the issue is still unresolved. There are still protests going on and it feels like it is only going to swell with time.

So that’s my understanding of the Hong Kong Protest and the sources that I used. Did I miss anything? Let me know. Also, do you have a better understanding of the event now? Share your thoughts in the comments.