The U.S. should keep out instead of encouraging student unrest!
~~~~~~~~~
An unlikely hero of last year’s Hong Kong protests demanding free elections, the slender 18-year-old with a bowl haircut and black-framed glasses laughs off Beijing propagandists’ claims that he is in Los Angeles this week for military training by his U.S. paymasters.
“Some people in mainland China might think I get funding from the U.S. government, but I don’t think anyone believes I have come here for army training,” the diminutive protest leader said with a laugh, spreading his scrawny arms to emphasize their dearth of muscle. “To get training like that, I’d have to be a lot stronger and taller.”
“As in every movement, the more mistakes the government makes, the more chances we have to get support from the general public,” Wong said in an interview during his week-long visit to Los Angeles. He was invited here by UCLA to take part in a seminar on democracy movements.
Wong, a co-founder of the student protest group Scholarism, became possibly the best-known face of the so-called umbrella protests that brought parts of Hong Kong to a standstill for nearly three months last year.
For Wong, the election protests were only the latest chapter in a youth spent organizing on Hong Kong’s crowded streets, beginning with demonstrations he joined at age 13 against a proposed high-speed rail line linking Hong Kong to the mainland. At 15, he helped rally more than 90,000 demonstrators against a new “patriotic education” curriculum that extolled the virtues of one-party rule and branded democracy as a path to chaos.
Hong Kong citizens enjoy broader rights and freedoms than their mainland countrymen under the “one country, two systems” principle that has guided political reintegration of the former British territory since its return to Chinese rule in 1997.
Heavy-handed efforts by the Communist Party leadership to weaken Hong Kong’s autonomy have galvanized protest, Wong said.
But standing up to authorities’ attempts to assimilate Hong Kong into the mainland’s monolithic power structure exacts a toll on those brave enough to join the protests, and on those who care about them.