Hong Kong regional police chief Chris Tang Ping Keung warned Wednesday that protests in the area against the Chinese government’s crackdown on the coronavirus show clear signs of a «color revolution».
The protests, which have spread to China’s special administrative region, have grown in the wake of last week’s fire in the capital of the Xinjiang region in the northwest of the country, where ten people died due to the inaction of firefighters in the context of a severe restriction measures imposed because of the pandemic.
Tang has now said that demonstrations against the central government could be a violation of the controversial National Security Law, which activist groups and human rights advocates say infringes on the freedoms of Hong Kongers.
In this sense, he has warned that the demonstrations registered in streets and universities in Hong Kong are «largely organized» and has urged to prevent university campuses from becoming «battlefields» and venues for «black violence», a term used by the authorities during the strong wave of anti-government protests that took place in 2019.
Thus, he has indicated that the authorities have recently recorded an increase in anti-government activities at the local level, many of them «allegedly carried out on behalf of the victims of the fire in Xinjiang», as he has asserted in statements to the ‘South China Morning Post’ newspaper.
«We have noticed that these protests are increasing and have reached a stage similar to the beginnings of a color revolution,» he said before pointing out that «many demonstrations have taken to the streets with blank sheets of paper and banners announcing an abuse of power and calling for a revolution.»
Tang, who has insisted that these protests «are no coincidence,» has argued that there is a possibility that Hong Kong «will be plunged back into the chaos of 2019.» «I cannot wait until a Molotov cocktail falls or a university is set on fire. We have to do preventive work before something happens,» he said.
