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GIDEON RACHMAN: Tens of thousands of people have gathered here in Yuen Long for yet another demonstration in what's turning into a whole summer of demonstrations here in Hong Kong. This one is particularly worrying for the authorities here because it's an illegal demonstration. They haven't got a permit, and yet tens f thousands of people have assembled here.
Some of the demonstrators here in Yuen Long have just broken through a fence and are approaching police riot lines. The police are trying to protect a village that the protesters are angry with because they say the anti protest demonstrators who attacked them last week came out of there, but generally, the whole situation is very tense. And in the context of what's been going on near here for three months in Hong Kong, shows how, from the authorities point of view, the situation is deteriorating.
They've been hoping that after a couple of months, these demonstrations would peter out. That was essentially what happened in 2014 with the Occupy Movement, but instead, they seem to be intensifying, to be getting more tense, and potentially more violent. Plus, the actual demands of the demonstrators are escalating.
- We wish to urge the US, but Washington to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democratic Act to put force on the Hong Kong government that to let us have universal suffrage.
[CROWD CHANTING]
GIDEON RACHMAN: Here in the metro station where the demonstrators have been pouring out for a couple of hours now, you could hear chants of "free Hong Kong, time of revolution." And that's the kind of chant that will send a chill down the spines of the authorities in Beijing. But what do they do? There's been discussion in the media here in Hong Kong, and in the official media in Beijing that perhaps the time is coming when the Chinese government would even deploy the People's Liberation Army, the Chinese army, to try to break up the demonstrations.
But that would be such a massive escalation with the obvious risk of violence, and the risk that you would essentially have a collapse in the civil order in Hong Kong, and at a time when there's a trade war with the United States, also an intensification in international pressure on China. On the other hand, what do they do? Because the other strategy, which is to wait for this stuff to die down isn't working, or it doesn't seem to be working for now. The whole mood of protest, and the demands of the protests are escalating, creating a big dilemma for the government in Hong Kong and for the government in Beijing.
