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Post by Admin on Oct 5, 2014 22:36:11 GMT
 Hong Kong students are currently protesting for more political freedom and have been using umbrellas to protect themselves from police pepper spray. The umbrellas became a symbol of the movement and gave it its nickname, the Umbrella Revolution. Though protest leaders say their campaign is not a revolution but a civil disobedience movement, the name Umbrella Revolution has stuck. The movement was initiated by a group called Occupy Central with Love and Peace, led by Hong Kong University law professor Benny Tai. Tai’s original agenda was to stage a sit-in on Oct. 1 in Central — the city’s financial district — but he decided to begin a few days earlier to capitalize on political momentum after several students were pepper-sprayed and arrested. That heavy handed police action also spurred parallel sit-ins in Causeway Bay and across the water in Kowloon.  There are also student groups separate from Occupy Central but with very similar aims. The two main ones are Scholarism, led by a precocious 17-year-old, Joshua Wong, and the Hong Kong Federation of Students, led by Alex Chow, 24, and his deputy Lester Shum. The main demand is full democracy. Protesters want the right to nominate and directly elect the head of the Hong Kong government, known as the Chief Executive. China, which resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong after it stopped being a British colony in 1997, wants to screen who can stand for office. Beijing insists that candidates for the Chief Executive position must be vetted by an electoral committee of tycoons, oligarchs and pro-Beijing figures. As a secondary demand, protestors want the current Chief Executive, Leung Chun-ying, to resign, which he has flatly refused to do. Leung is widely disliked because he is seen as prioritizing China’s interests over Hong Kong’s. He was also indirectly elected by an electoral college of just 1,200 voters, of which 689 voted for him. He is mockingly referred to as “689” after this feeble tally. The Communist Party insists on maintaining political control. It isn’t about to let China’s most international city—which is already highly porous—choose its own leader, in case an opponent of the Communist Party gets elected as Chief Executive and becomes an advertisement to the rest of China of the possibility of democratic change. At the same time, Beijing is aware that Hong Kong, because of its past as a British territory, is a special case. Hong Kong has an independent judiciary, common law, freedom of information and movement, a reasonably free press, and so on. The Communist Party thinks this semi-autonomy should be enough for Hong Kong, but a well-educated and well-traveled generation of young Hong Kongers wants more. They have always enjoyed Western-style freedoms and want the political enfranchisement that comes with it. They feel little in common with Mainland Chinese and want Hong Kong to become politically autonomous—almost independent. These are the people at the forefront of the Umbrella Revolution. |
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Post by Admin on Oct 8, 2014 22:40:18 GMT
Despite China’s best efforts to censor them, Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are finding ways to talk to one another and organize without Wi-Fi access or going through a central network. Instead they’ve been creating their own with a phone app that lets nearby devices communicate under the radar. Droves of protesters have turned to an app called FireChat, run by Open Garden, which links smartphones to create mesh networks, or temporary Internet networks to circumvent outages and government monitoring. More than 100,000 protesters have gathered since Sept. 26 in Hong Kong’s major through-ways in response to China blocking once promised democratic elections for Hong Kong’s top officials. Protesters used Instagram to broadcast and organize the demonstrations and the violent police response to peaceful protests, until China partially blocked the photo-sharing site Monday. China also tried to contain news reports by shutting down media outlets and television channels that attempted to show footage of the pro-democracy protests.  But FireChat bypasses China’s censorship firewall. FireChat works by letting users within 70 meters (230 feet) of each other send messages back and forth through the smartphones’ built-in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth hardware, creating a mesh network. Mesh networks aren’t new, and have been useful in crises, emergency situations and protests where Internet access is scarce. Ad hoc mesh networks use a host router that connects to a hot spot through an antennae or a paid subscription to an ISP. People with host routers then open up their networks, which can potentially deliver wireless access to a several block radius or further, siphoning off traditional ISP access shared through one or more paid accounts. Other local mesh networks are decentralized, and privately connect a series of computers. Neighborhoods and communities can use this private network to create their own social networks and trade messages within the group. These decentralized models remove big telecommunications companies from the equation and make it much harder for the government to access. They are also more secure; in order to shut down a mesh network, you’d need to shut down every single node on every device in the network, rather than one central server.  People in Taiwan and Iraq have used FireChat to combat unreliable Internet access and government restricted, respectively. Another mesh network in Athens, Greece supports about 1,000 community members through a series of rooftop Wi-Fi antennae and routers that’s virtually off-the-grid, undetectable by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to a Mother Jones report. Mesh networks, whether through an app or with routers and cables, have become critical in filling service gaps that ISPs can’t. Big telecommunications providers like Verizon and Comcast frequently are unable to build infrastructure to carry the Internet closer than 300 feet of customers’ homes. That can lead to sluggish upload and download speeds.  Anyone can set up infrastructure for a mesh network to link computers directly to one another without using a big name ISP. But many are community based, and simply run by opening one house’s Internet access to an entire neighborhood. That way residents who may not be able to pay close to $100 a month for Internet can perform simple tasks such as checking email or reading the news with plenty of bandwidth leftover to share. But mesh networks’ chief accomplishment has been allowing people to communicate when there’s a widespread Internet outage due to natural disasters and emergencies. After Hurricane Sandy ripped up the East Coast in 2012, the Red Hook community in Brooklyn, New York relied on mesh networks to give citizens a way to communicate when central cellphone and ISP (Internet service providers) towers or Wi-Fi nodes were down. » |
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Post by Admin on Jul 30, 2019 21:57:44 GMT
 As activists waved American flags and appropriated “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a protest song, a China Daily editorial published that day reiterated Beijing’s verdict on a protest movement that has brought parts of the semi-autonomous city to a standstill since demonstrations began in June. “Judging from the preparation, targeting strategies, riot tactics and abundance of supplies, it takes naivety akin to simplemindedness to truly believe these activities are not being carefully orchestrated,” the state-run newspaper’s editorial said.  It further stated that the demonstrations are a “color revolution” orchestrated by local opposition politicians in collusion with foreigners, namely the US.  The term is a reference to various pro-democracy movements, some of which adopted a specific color or flower as their symbol, that erupted in several countries of the ex-Soviet Union in the early 2000s that toppled unpopular regimes with the backing of student activists and Western-financed civil society groups. |
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Post by Admin on Aug 12, 2019 18:03:17 GMT
Hong Kong International Airport cancelled all departures on Monday, as thousands of anti-government protesters occupied and caused disruption. Passengers have been told not to travel to the airport, which is one of the world's busiest transport hubs.  In a statement, officials blamed "seriously disrupted" operations. Many of those protesting are critical of the actions of police, who on Sunday were filmed firing tear gas and rubber bullets at close range. |
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Post by Admin on Aug 17, 2019 1:37:17 GMT
US President Donald Trump has expressed his concern about the risk of a Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong, as he suggested that President Xi Jinping should take the extraordinary step of sitting down with protesters as a way to help de-escalate the situation.  Trump issued the statement on Thursday, as China warned that Beijing would not "sit by and watch" as the unrest in the semi-autonomous Chinese city continues. "I am concerned," he told reporters in New Jersey late on Thursday before travelling to a campaign rally.  Trump urged Xi to negotiate directly with pro-democracy protesters, saying: "I would be willing to bet that if he sat down with the protesters... I'll bet he'd work it out in 15 minutes." Rory Green, a China specialist at TS Lombard economic and political research group, however, dismissed Trump's suggestion, adding that a compromise between the protesters and China is unlikely. Trump also told reporters that a phone call was scheduled for him to talk soon with President Xi. |
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