Will Hong Kong’s new national security law really put a stop to street violence and beatings?
- Yonden Lhatoo breaks down Beijing’s promise that new legislation tailor-made for the city will ensure people ‘can speak the truth on the street without fear of being attacked’
One of the most appalling, distressing and unstomachable aspects of Hong Kong’s great “revolution of our times” has been the mob beatings on the streets.
Anyone foolhardy enough to openly express the slightest objection to what those of the militant persuasion among anti-government protesters may be doing, whether it’s throwing petrol bombs, causing traffic chaos or vandalising public property in the name of fighting for our freedoms, is instantly set upon and beaten into a bloody pulp.
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Hong Kong’s Law Society reveals a member was assaulted and condemned the attackers
As in so many of these brazen attacks, in broad daylight and in full public view, the victim ended up on a hospital bed with severe injuries while the rabble who put him there got away scot free, there being no sign of police until it was all over.
I tried to reach out to Chan, a member of the Law Society, through a friend who knows him personally but was told that he would not talk to the media for fear of his family being targeted as well by those who nearly killed him to “liberate” Hong Kong.
So you not only get beaten comatose on this city’s streets for complaining about their fascist brand of democracy, you dare not open your mouth about it afterwards in case they mete out the same sort of vigilante justice to your loved ones as well.
“For the majority of citizens, the legislation will give them more protection,” deputy director Zhang Xiaoming said this week. “They can be free from the fear of violence. They can ride the trains and go shopping freely. They can speak the truth on the street without fear of being attacked.”
For so many Hongkongers, sickened and jaded by such lawlessness, it certainly sounds like wishful thinking. There are already a dozen laws in place to prevent what happened to Chan, and yet it happened anyway and no one can do much about it. Adding one more law to the mix will magically put a stop to this barbaric nonsense?
What would make more sense is not to expect an immediate impact, but rather a longer-term one. The law will go after the network of enablers of these extreme mob rampages, the people who are funding the civil unrest in collusion with dodgy Washington-financed NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy, America’s useful idiots who openly invite Western interference in this city’s affairs, the apologists for anarchy who travel regularly to the US, Britain and Europe to brainstorm with China-hating politicians and governments on ways to undermine, sabotage and subvert the system here.
Speaking of, I spotted dial-a-quote darling of the Western media Joshua Wong Chi-fung earlier this week at an upscale bar in Tsim Sha Tsui. It was a night when protesters were out in the streets of Hong Kong Island, and he was across the harbour on the Kowloon side having a quiet one with a lady friend. The food and drinks were not exactly cheap at this place, which did make me contemplate how lucrative political activism must be these days.
Maybe the new law will at least shed some light on this sort of discrepancy when it comes into effect, if not stop the street violence right away.
Yonden Lhatoo is the chief news editor at the Post
