Hong Kong police fire water cannons, gunshot, against protesters
The first gunshot and use of water cannons by Hong Kong police occurred today against protests opposed to increased Chinese rule over that former British colony.
Earlier Sunday, after thousands of people marched peacefully in pouring rain, a group of hardcore protesters erected makeshift roadblocks and threw bricks and Molotov cocktails at riot police. After firing tear gas in an attempt to dispers the crowds, police drove water cannon vehicles onto the streets for the first time during the protests, unfurling signs warning demonstrators they would deploy the jets if they did not leave. The jets were later fired down from the moving trucks down a road towards a crowd of protesters who ran away.
There were no immediate reports of injuries.
There is also no additional information about the gunshot, though it appears it caused no injuries.
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I can’t see this ending well…. China doesn’t have a great record of respecting human rights…. And the government there can have a short fuse….
The other side of the coin is that they know the whole world is watching… But that didn’t stop them in Tiananman square 30 years ago…
The politics involved here are labrinthine… It’s going to be “interesting” to see how it pans out….
Actually, it did stop them 30 years ago. The PRC held off on slaughtering the Tiananmen Square protestors until all the Western press which had been covering the demonstrations there had been expelled. I am unaware of any extant footage of the actual massacre.
But personal video technology has come a long way in 30 years. I think the PRC understands that if it slaughters people by the thousands again, the deed will be caught on some sort of device – many of them, actually – and will get out. The images would also spread within China. That probably worries Beijing more than the certainty of their dirty work being seen by foreigners.