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Beware the Waking Dragon
A train attendant poses next to a high-speed train during its trial operation along the Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou High-speed Railway at Zhegao Railway Station in Chaohu City, east China’s Anhui Province, May 27, 2020. The Hefei-Huzhou section of the Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou High-speed Railway entered a trial operation phase on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Liu Junxi)
Source: Xinhua
Image copyright EPAHong Kong International Airport cancelled all departures on Monday, as thousands of anti-government protesters occupied and caused disruption.
Passengers have been told not to travel to the airport, which is one of the world’s busiest transport hubs.
In a statement, officials blamed “seriously disrupted” operations.
Many of those protesting are critical of the actions of police, who on Sunday were filmed firing tear gas and rubber bullets at close range.
Some protesters wore bandages over their eyes in response to images of a woman bleeding heavily from her eye on Sunday, having reportedly been shot by a police projectile.
In a statement on Monday afternoon, Hong Kong’s Airport Authority said they were cancelling all flights that were not yet checked in.
More than 160 flights scheduled to leave after 18:00 local time (10:00 GMT) will now not depart.
Arrivals already heading into Hong Kong will still be allowed to land, but other scheduled flights have been cancelled.
Officials are now working to reopen the airport by 06:00 on Tuesday, a statement said.
Helena Morgan, from the UK, said she was set to return to the UK to get her exam results on Thursday. “I’m hoping we get back for them and we’re not on a flight,” she said.
But others were more understanding of the protests. “I was expecting something, given all the news,” one arrival, Gurinda Singh, told Reuters news agency.
As rumours spread that police plan to move in on protesters on Monday evening, thousands opted to leave on foot. There are large backlogs for transport back into the centre, local reports say.
The BBC’s Stephen McDonell, who is at the scene, says the airport has effectively shut down while authorities work out how to deal with the crisis.
Hong Kong’s mass demonstrations and unrest show no sign of abating, more than two months after they were sparked by a controversial extradition bill.
Beijing officials have strongly condemned Sunday’s violence and linked violent protesters to “terrorism”.
Image copyright REUTERSOn Sunday afternoon, a peaceful rally in the city’s Victoria Park led to clashes when protesters moved out of the area and marched along a major road despite a police ban.
There were confrontations in several central districts and police used rubber bullets in an attempt to disperse the demonstrators.
In the bustling central Wan Chai district, petrol bombs and bricks were thrown at police, who responded by charging at protesters.
A number of people, including a police officer, were injured in the clashes.
Videos on social media also showed officers storming enclosed railway stations and firing tear gas.
Footage inside another station showed officers firing what appeared to be rubber bullets at close range and several police officers beating people with batons.
Local media outlets reported that suspected undercover police officers had dressed-up as protesters to make surprise arrests.
While protests in the city have turned increasingly violent, there were no reports of arrests during the three previous days of the airport sit-in.
On Monday the Chinese authorities, who have not yet physically intervened to quell the unrest, used their strongest language yet to condemn violent protesters.
“Hong Kong’s radical demonstrators have repeatedly used extremely dangerous tools to attack police officers, which already constitutes a serious violent crime, and also shows the first signs of terrorism emerging,” Yang Guang, a spokesman for the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office (HKMAO), said at a press briefing.
“This wantonly tramples on Hong Kong’s rule of law and social order.”
Elsewhere, Cathay Pacific has warned staff they could be fired if they “support or participate in illegal protests” in Hong Kong. The development comes days after Beijing mounted pressure on the airline and a #BoycottCathayPacific campaign began to spread.
Hong Kong police have also unveiled a water cannon vehicle as a new tool to combat the protests.
Image copyright AFPAmnesty International has previously warned that the tool could cause serious injuries and inflame tensions.
Demonstrations started in June in opposition to a proposed extradition bill, which would have allowed suspected criminals to be sent to mainland China for trial.
Critics said it would undermine Hong Kong’s legal freedoms, and could be used to silence political dissidents.
Although the government has now suspended the bill, demonstrators want it to be fully withdrawn.
Their demands have broadened to include calls for an independent inquiry into alleged police brutality, and an amnesty for all arrested protesters.
Hong Kong is part of China but its citizens have more autonomy than those on the mainland.
It has a free press and judicial independence under the so-called “one country, two systems” approach – freedoms which activists fear are being increasingly eroded.
Source: The BBC
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Thousands of people marched on Hong Kong’s parliament on Sunday to demand the scrapping of proposed extradition rules that would allow people to be sent to mainland China for trial – a move which some fear puts the city’s core freedoms at risk.
Opponents of the proposal fear further erosion of rights and legal protections in the free-wheeling financial hub – freedoms which were guaranteed under the city’s handover from British colonial rule to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
Early estimates suggested several thousand people had joined the march along Hong Kong Island from Causeway Bay to the council in the Admiralty business district.
Veteran Hong Kong activist and former legislator Leung Kwok-hung said the government’s move risked removing Hong Kongers’ “freedom from fear”.
“Hong Kong people and visitors passing by Hong Kong will lose their right not to be extradited into mainland China,” he said. “They would need to face an unjust legal system on the mainland.”
Lam left Hong Kong for Taiwan last week, saying he feared being sent back to the mainland under the new laws and his experienced showed he could have no trust in China’s legal system.
A group of 33 followers of Falun Gong, a religious sect banned in China, flew from Taiwan to Hong Kong on Saturday to join the march but were refused entry to Hong Kong, RTHK reported.
Sunday’s march comes amid renewed calls for deeper electoral reforms stalled five years ago after Occupy protests.
Four leaders of the movement were last week sentenced to jail terms ranging from eight to 16 months, part of a group of nine activists found guilty after a near month-long trial.
Source: Reuters
Freda Bedi lived an unusual life. Born in a small town in England, she moved to India for love and ended up joining the independence movement. Her biographer, Andrew Whitehead, writes about her remarkable story.
“There are things deeper than labels and colour and prejudice, and love is one of them.”
These were the words of Freda Bedi, an English woman who overcame prejudice to marry an Indian Sikh and went on to challenge Indian notions about the role of a woman and a wife.
Freda and her boyfriend, Baba Pyare Lal Bedi (his friends called him BPL), met at Oxford where both were students.
This was the early 1930s and romances across the racial divide were rare – almost as rare as a girl from Freda’s background securing a spot at a top university. She was born, quite literally, above the shop in the city of Derby in England’s East Midlands, where her father ran a jewellery and watch repair business.
Freda could barely remember her father. He enlisted during the First World War and served in the Machine Gun Corps, where casualties were so high it was known as the “suicide club”. He died in northern France when his daughter was just seven years old. “This death shadowed my whole childhood,” she recalled – it shaped her political loyalties and prompted her lifelong spiritual quest.
Her years at Oxford were “the opening of the gates of the world”, as Freda once put it. She was part of “the Depression generation” – those who were students at a time of global crisis, mass unemployment and the rise of fascism.
She made firm friends at her college with young women who were rebellious by nature, and went with them to meetings of the Labour Club and the communist October Club.
Driven by curiosity and by sympathy with those struggling against the Empire, she also went along to the weekly meetings of the Oxford Majlis, where radicals among the university’s small number of Indian students asserted their country’s case for nationhood. BPL Bedi, a handsome and cheerful Punjabi, was a regular there. A friendship developed into intellectual collaboration and, within months, Freda and BPL were a couple.
In the early 1930s, women’s colleges at Oxford were obsessed with sex or rather with preventing it. If a male student came to have tea in a female student’s room, a chaperone had to be present, the door left wide open and the bed had to be taken into the corridor. Freda’s college did its best to derail her relationship – she was disciplined for visiting BPL without a chaperone in what she was convinced was a case of racial discrimination.
But she was fortunate in her student friends. Barbara Castle, who later became a commanding British woman politician of her era, was thrilled when Freda confided that she intended to marry her boyfriend. “Well, thank goodness”, Barbara exclaimed. “Now at least you won’t become a suburban housewife!” Freda’s mother didn’t see things that way though. Her family were sternly disapproving, until BPL made a visit to Derby and managed to charm them.
Freda commented that the engagement caused “a minor sensation” in Oxford. That was an understatement. She believed she was the first Oxford woman undergraduate to marry an Indian fellow student. Some didn’t hide their disapproval. The registrar who conducted the marriage ceremony pointedly refused to shake hands with the couple.
From the moment she married, Freda regarded herself as Indian and often wore Indian-style clothes. A year later, husband and wife and their four-month old baby, Ranga, set off by boat from Trieste, Italy, on the two-week journey to the western Indian city of Bombay (now Mumbai). “The nightmare was to get milk for myself to drink because I was feeding the baby”, Freda recalled. “And I remember the millions of cockroaches that used to come out at night in the ship’s kitchens – I used to go in and attempt to get milk.”
The couple had already been marked out by the British authorities as revolutionaries and potential trouble makers because of their student activism. When they disembarked in Bombay, their bags and cases were inspected for seven hours to check for left-wing propaganda. “Even Ranga’s little napkin was taken off and searched,” recalled Freda, “because they thought I might be carrying messages in it”.
The key test of Freda’s marriage was still to come – the first meeting with her Indian mother-in-law, a widow and matriarch known in the family as Bhabooji. From Bombay, the Bedis travelled non-stop for a couple of days to reach the small Punjabi city of Kapurthala, arriving at the family home close to midnight. Freda was wearing a white cotton sari – “not the ideal travelling dress, and nursing Ranga had not improved it”.
BPL bowed to touch his mother’s feet in the traditional expression of respect. “I copied him, feeling a little awkward,” Freda said, “but all my shyness disappeared when she smiled at us both with tears in her eyes, and embraced us and the child as if she could not hold us close enough.”
Although Freda was determined to fit in with her Indian extended family, her lifestyle was anything but conventional. BPL’s political stand extended to rejecting any share in his family’s wealth. They made their home in Lahore, one of the largest cities in Punjab, in a cluster of thatched huts without power or running water, keeping hens and a buffalo. It can’t have been the sort of life Freda had expected – nor would she have been used to the idea of sharing the household with her mother-in-law.
“Nowhere had I seen a white woman trying to be a typical Indian daughter-in-law”, commented Som Anand, a frequent visitor to the Bedis’ huts. “It surprised me to see Mrs Bedi coming to Bhabooji’s hut in the morning to touch her feet. In household matters she respected the old mother’s inhibitions. Her mother-in-law was an equally large hearted person; despite all her conservatism she had accepted a Christian into the family without a murmur.”
When World War Two broke out, both BPL and Freda were outraged that India was being dragged into supporting the British war effort. BPL was detained in a desert prison camp to stop him sabotaging military recruitment in Punjab. Freda decided to make her own stand against her motherland.
She volunteered as a satyagrahi, a seeker of truth, and was among those chosen by Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi to defy emergency wartime powers. She travelled to her husband’s home village of Dera Baba Nanak and announced that she would “break the law by asking the people not to support the military effort until India became democratic”. The authorities didn’t know how to respond to a white woman staging such a protest – they hurriedly sent an English police inspector to the village, deeming it inappropriate for an Indian policeman to arrest an Englishwoman.
Freda was brought before a visiting magistrate that same morning – she has left her own account of the trial:
It was finished in 15 minutes. The man on the other side of the table was quite young still, and looked as though he had been to Oxford. His face was red.
“I find this as unpleasant as you do,” he murmured.
“Don’t worry. I don’t find it unpleasant at all.”
“Do you want the privileges granted to an Englishwoman?”
“Treat me as an Indian woman and I shall be quite content.”
She was sentenced to six months in jail, which was fairly standard, and also to hard labour, which she regarded as vindictive.
That turned out to be no more onerous than supervising the prison gardens, where women imprisoned for criminal rather than political offences – many were locked up for killing their abusive husbands – did most of the work.
“It was my destiny to go to India,” Freda asserted. It was her destiny too to make history as an English woman who went willingly to jail in support of India’s demand for freedom.
The Bedis’ political prominence persisted after independence, when they moved to Kashmir – Freda joined a left-wing women’s militia and worked with the radical nationalists who gained power there. In the 1950s, her life changed utterly when, during a UN assignment in Burma, she encountered Buddhism for the first time and became an enthusiastic convert.
When thousands of Tibetans fled across the Himalayas in 1959 to escape Chinese oppression, Freda devoted herself to helping these “brave and wonderful” refugees. She became steeped in Tibetan spirituality. And once she felt that she had fulfilled her role as a mother (the film star Kabir Bedi is one of her three surviving children), she broke convention again by taking vows as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. In her sixties, she travelled relentlessly to spread the word about Buddhist teachings but never returned to live in the West.
“India is my womanhood and my wife-hood,” she once declared. “I too am ‘dust that England bore, shaped and made aware’. Yet I am living in an Indian way, with Indian clothes, with an Indian husband and child on Indian soil, and I cannot feel even the least barrier or difference in essentials between myself and the new country I have adopted.”
Throughout her life, Freda was determined not to be constrained by barriers of race, religion, nation or gender. She delighted in challenging convention and confounding expectations – that is what makes her story so beguiling.
Source: The BBC
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
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