HK extradition law: Chinese official urged Hong Kong villagers to drive off protesters before violence at train station
It was reported that the director of the local Central Government Liaison's office asked the community to chase activists away
A front view of the village of Nam Pin Wai, where groups of suspected attackers at the Yuen Long train station were surrounded by police.A week before suspected triad gang members attacked protesters and commuters in Yuen Long last Sunday, an official from China’s representative office urged local residents to drive away any activists.
Li Jiyi, the director of the Central Government Liaison’s local district office, made the appeal at a community banquet for hundreds of villagers in Hong Kong’s rural New Territories.
In a previously unreported recording from the July 11 event obtained by Reuters, Li addresses the large crowd about the escalating protests that have plunged Hong Kong into its worst political crisis since it returned to Chinese from British rule in 1997.
Li chastises the protesters, appealing to the assembled residents to protect their towns in Yuen Long district and to chase anti-government activists away.
“We won’t allow them to come to Yuen Long to cause trouble,” he said, to a burst of applause.
“Even though there are a group of protesters trained to throw bricks and iron bars, we still have a group of Yuen Long residents with the persistence and courage to maintain social peace and protect our home.”
Repeatedly, Li spoke of the need for harmony and unity between the traditional villages and the government, “especially when there is wind and rain in Hong Kong”.
The banquet was attended by a Hong Kong government district officer, Enoch Yuen, and many of the city’s rural leaders. Yuen gave no immediate response to Reuters’ questions on Li’s speech and its impact on village representatives.
Last Sunday, after anti-government protesters marched in central Hong Kong and defaced China’s Liaison Office, over 100 men swarmed through Yuen Long train station, attacking black-clad protesters, passers-by, journalists and a lawmaker with pipes, clubs and lampstands.
When some protesters retaliated, the beatings escalated as men and women were hit repeatedly on their heads and bodies by the masked men, who wore white shirts.
Video footage showed victims fleeing the mayhem amid screams, and floors of the train station streaked with blood. Forty-five people were injured, one critically.
China’s Liaison Office did not immediately respond to Reuters questions about Li’s speech, and Li could not be reached for comment.
Johnny Mak, a veteran Democratic Alliance district councillor in Yuen Long who witnessed the train station bloodshed, said he believed Li’s remarks had been an explicit call to arms against protesters.
“If he didn’t say this, the violence wouldn’t have happened, and the triads wouldn’t have beaten people,” he told Reuters in his office close to the station.
Ching Chan-ming, the head of the Shap Pat Heung rural committee which hosted the banquet that night, said he thought Li’s speech was positive and held no malicious intent.
“How could he (Li) make such an appeal like that?,” Ching told Reuters. “I don’t think it was a mobilisation call. His main message is that he hopes Hong Kong can remain stable and prosperous.”