Hong Kong Extradition Protests

China is presented as Public Enemy #2 by the U.S. mainstream media (Public Enemy #1 being Russia). But in terms of the actual number of stories devoted to bogeymanness, China has Russia beat (which says a lot about who the U.S. governing elite really fear). A reader must therefore exercise great caution when it comes to stories tarring the Chinese government as an odious malefactor (i.e., the Xinjiang re-education camps). I must say though that when it comes to the recent protests in Hong Kong over a proposal to allow criminal extradition to mainland China, I find myself in that anti-China camp and on the side of the citizens in the street.

This was not the case during the Umbrella Revolution. Then I thought what the protesters were demanding -- open elections for Hong Kong's chief executive -- while fine in theory was a standard of democracy that citizens of the "indispensable nation" did not even enjoy, since our choices are filtered by the completely corrupt two-party system, and therefore not meriting the high dudgeon displayed in the Western media.

On Saturday Hong Kong's chief executive Carrie Lam announced that she was pulling the unpopular extradition bill. But this failed to mollify the protesters, who turned out two-million strong yesterday. Their demands are (see "Hong Kong Protesters Return to the Streets, Rejecting Leader’s Apology" by Keith Bradsher and Daniel Victor):

[T]he complete withdrawal of the bill, not just an indefinite suspension; an impartial investigation into the police use of force during Wednesday’s clashes with protesters; and the rescinding the official description of that protest as an illegal riot, which could expose anyone arrested during the violent demonstration to long jail terms.

Talk now is that Beijing is going to ax chief executive Lam, but it doesn't want to go through the public process for selecting her replacement. So she'll probably be kept around until the protests die down.