Campaign season is well underway in Hong Kong ahead of the upcoming March by-elections for seats in Hong Kong Island, New Territories East and Kowloon West.
And Demosistō — whose 21-year-old co-founder Agnes Chow is competing for the Hong Kong island seat — has ramped things up, releasing an intense anti-Beijing attack ad on social media yesterday.
The theme — the ousting of pan-democratic lawmakers last year, which is the reason for the by-elections — is far from subtle.
The video shows ousted lawmakers Nathan Law, Leung Kwok-hung aka Long Hair, and Lau Siu-lai in slow motion being slapped, held back, and throttled by mysterious figures as ballot papers with their names on them are torn.
As the music escalates, the numbers of votes the candidates received in the 2016 legislative council elections are splashed across the screen.
The violence appears to escalate, with Law shown with blood running from his nose.
And then suddenly, Chow steps and stops Law from being slapped.
“They are not the only ones suffering, Beijing’s tightened grip is a slap across the face, denying our right to election, our freedom, our autonomy, that of you and I, and all of Hong Kong,” Chow says, in a voice-over.
As the narration continues, Lau finally manages to throw off whoever is strangling her, and Leung roars as he manages to throw off two people who had been holding back his arms.
Chow then signs off on the video with: “We shall bring back what was stolen.”
Law, Leung and Lau were among four democratic lawmakers ousted in July after a court ruling that voided their oaths of office for reasons including speaking too slowly, inserting extra words, and using a tone deemed disrespectful to China.
The fourth ousted lawmaker, Edward Yiu, is standing in the by-election, and was one of the two lawmakers to win the pro-democracy camp primary election held two weeks ago for the two constituencies up for grabs, HKFP reported.
It has yet to be resolved whether his previous disqualification will bar him from re-election.
Two localist lawmakers, Sixtus Baggio Leung Chung-hang and Yau Wai-ching, were also stripped of their seats for oath-taking antics in November 2016.
Their exclusion followed on from a controversial interpretation of Hong Kong’s Basic Law by China’s parliament in November 2016, which ruled that lawmakers must swear allegiance to Hong Kong as part of China and deliver their oaths “sincerely” and “solemnly” or face disqualification.
Critics cited the ruling as further evidence of Beijing’s erosion of the high degree of autonomy Hong Kong is supposed to enjoy under the “One Country, Two Systems” model.
Of the six ousted lawmakers, only Yiu represented a functional constituency, the Architectural, Surveying, Planning and Landscape functional constituency.
The other five represented geographical constituencies and between them won 183,236 votes in the 2016 elections with Law — at the time the youngest lawmaker to be elected — winning a staggering 50,818 votes, making him one of the most popular candidates, the SCMP reported.
If elected in March, Chow would become Hong Kong’s youngest lawmaker.
Her first foray into activism came about in 2012 when she became the spokesperson for Joshua Wong’s student activist group Scholarism, which campaigned against the government’s moral and national education scheme.
She later became one of the faces of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests, even earning the nickname “Scholarism goddess,” but stepped down from the post of spokesperson during the protests citing “extreme confusion and fatigue.”
She later went on to co-found the political party Demosistō with Law and Wong.
