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August 5, 2019 02:36 pm PDT

From Tiananmen to Occupy Central to the Umbrella Movement to today's General Strike: understanding the Hong Kong uprising

Today, Hong Kongers are staging a general strike, the latest peak in a series of escalating protests over democratic reforms in the face of increased pressure from Beijing and its autocrat-for-life, Xi Jinping.

Writing in the London Review of Books, Chaohua Wang -- an exiled leader of the pro-democratic student uprising that was crushed with the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square -- provides a history of the pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, showing how the Tiananmen massacre only hardened the resolve of the surviving activists, and how that spirit has been nurtured in Hong Kong, with successive waves of protesters adapting their tactics to survive the increasingly brutal suppression that Beijing has visited upon Hong Kong.

It's a vital piece of historical context, illuminating the long history that has led to this moment, while also demonstrating just how brave, smart, principled and resourceful today's strikers have been. It shows the lessons that Hong Kong's pro-mainland puppet regime were too arrogant to learn, and explains how Beijing has been caught flat-footed by the uprising.

The protests have not diminished over the last two months. They have instead become ever more confrontational, vis vis the police, the Hong Kong government and even the central governments liaison office. Yet public support has not waned. There is a silent consensus that the not-yet-named protest movement is a collective vote of no confidence in Beijing. Beijing must understand this, more or less, but it has not acknowledged as much. Its first press conference on the current situation in Hong Kong was given by the Hong Kong Macau Office of the State Council in Beijing on 29 July.

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Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/QuEIcSiZJGo/the-people-have-long-memories.html

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