AFP :
Chinese state-run media on Monday called for a “tougher line” on democracy protesters in Hong Kong as it denounced a “terroristic” attack on a state news agency during another weekend of violence in the semi-autonomous city.
Hardcore demonstrators in the financial hub smashed the windows of the official Xinhua news agency’s regional bureau on Saturday, capping another weekend of unrest that also saw scores of arrests and a gruesome attack on a pro-democracy lawmaker.
“Vandalizing a news agency is as terroristic as challenging the bottom line of civilization,” Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily said in a Facebook post.
The post was accompanied by a video of a man being beaten and stripped of his clothing by people the publication called “rioters” in the Mong Kok area.
“Intensifying violence in Hong Kong calls for tougher line to restore order,” the state-run China Daily, an English-language mainland newspaper, said in the headline of an editorial.The protesters “court the indulgence extended to them by friendly local and Western media outlets, while seeking to silence those trying to put the protests in the spotlight of truth,” the article said.
“They are doomed to fail simply because their violence will encounter the full weight of the law.”
China has run Hong Kong under a special “one country, two systems” model, which allows the city liberties not seen on the mainland, since the financial hub’s handover from the British in 1997.
But public anger has been building for years over fears that Beijing has begun eroding those freedoms, especially since President Xi Jinping came to power.
The nationalist tabloid Global Times called in an editorial on Sunday for “Hong Kong’s law enforcement agencies to bring the mob to justice as soon as possible” for vandalising Xinhua’s office.
Chinese state-run media on Monday called for a “tougher line” on democracy protesters in Hong Kong as it denounced a “terroristic” attack on a state news agency during another weekend of violence in the semi-autonomous city.
Hardcore demonstrators in the financial hub smashed the windows of the official Xinhua news agency’s regional bureau on Saturday, capping another weekend of unrest that also saw scores of arrests and a gruesome attack on a pro-democracy lawmaker.
“Vandalizing a news agency is as terroristic as challenging the bottom line of civilization,” Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily said in a Facebook post.
The post was accompanied by a video of a man being beaten and stripped of his clothing by people the publication called “rioters” in the Mong Kok area.
“Intensifying violence in Hong Kong calls for tougher line to restore order,” the state-run China Daily, an English-language mainland newspaper, said in the headline of an editorial.The protesters “court the indulgence extended to them by friendly local and Western media outlets, while seeking to silence those trying to put the protests in the spotlight of truth,” the article said.
“They are doomed to fail simply because their violence will encounter the full weight of the law.”
China has run Hong Kong under a special “one country, two systems” model, which allows the city liberties not seen on the mainland, since the financial hub’s handover from the British in 1997.
But public anger has been building for years over fears that Beijing has begun eroding those freedoms, especially since President Xi Jinping came to power.
The nationalist tabloid Global Times called in an editorial on Sunday for “Hong Kong’s law enforcement agencies to bring the mob to justice as soon as possible” for vandalising Xinhua’s office.
