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1. A thread on the latest #HongKongProtests. Yesterday saw another huge rally, with tens of thousands marching. Their focus was engaging mainland Chinese tourists/shoppers, many of whom don’t know what’s going on here because news about it is censored. ft.com/content/e4f93f…
2. The crowd was diverse but their demands (listed on this poster) were the same. They include full withdrawal of the extradition bill (it has been suspended & is effectively dead) and an investigation into police violence. 
3. All of the people I spoke to thought storming the legislature last week (see below) was right. One middle aged couple said the government gave them no choice, saying chief executive Carrie Lam had not done enough. ft.com/content/edf5a2…
4. By contrast, business leaders say the protesters’ tactics have “gotten out of hand” as @suelinwong and @tmitchpk report. Given that Lam has backed down, they see more protests as damaging the city’s economy. ft.com/content/52a6c8…
5. Still Sunday’s demo attracted a broad cross-section of people. This included ‘Grandma Wong’, who appears at demos waving the British flag. Read more about her here reuters.com/article/us-hon…
6. People weren’t aggressive to mainlanders. “I believe if mainlanders have access to enough accurate information about what is really going on, they will understand,” a Hong Konger told my colleague @suelinwong
7. “Hong Kong wants democracy, Hong Kong wants freedom,” shouted some protesters.
7. A mainlander said: “Hopefully they won’t attack us. All they want us to do is listen to them...A lot of news in [China] is censored so we often just hear about how violent the protests are, we don’t really know what is truly going on.”
8. The protesters also used tech in clever ways, eg using AirDrop, which allows iPhone users to share files, to distribute info in Mandarin on censored events with mainlanders. See below for an example.
9. The use of tech is key to everything about this. Demonstrators use it to organise, journalists use it to report and even broadcast live via Twitter or Facebook. And everyone is photographing or filming each other.
10. Most of the protest petered out at the West Kowloon station, the end point of the march and from where high-speed trains link Hong Kong to the mainland. Police had set up barricades at the main entrance and stayed inside (their dogs were going a bit crazy).
11. Most demonstrators stopped there. But some - maybe 1000-2000 - continued to Mongkok, an area that was a centre of protest during the 2014 Occupy movement. It soon turned into a tense but relatively calm stand-off.
12. Admittedly, some of the protesters were walking by and just paused to have a look. #pullupyourshortsdude #putonashirtdude
13. I didn’t see tons of violence. The police did tackle some protesters and arrested five people.
14. But mostly it looked like the police wanted to isolate a group and clear the streets. Shortly after midnight, it seemed like they had achieved this.
15. What next? More protests are scheduled for the weekend. The government is pretty quiet. And who knows what Beijing thinks (maybe they’re as confused as everyone else). But this fight ain’t anywhere near over. (The poster says, ”Hong Kong, hold fast!”)
ends
I said this thread had ended but here’s a video of Grandma Wong from yesterday’s protests
