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 of 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, Washington, to pass the Hong
Kong Human Rights and Democratic Act to put force on the Hong
Kong government to let us have universal suffrage.
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.