By Dana Trif| Cluj Napoca & Ho Ming-sho| Taipei
Five years have passed since the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the ‘Occupy Central with Love and Peace’ civil disobedience campaigns that brought tens of thousands onto the streets of Hong Kong. Back in 2014, the protesters’ demands were focused on genuine universal suffrage for the election of the Special Administrative Region’s (HKSAR) Chief Executive (CE) and of the members of the Legislative Council, Hong Kong’s Parliament.
By Alexandru Bălășescu | Hong Kong
On 20 April, barely a week into settling in Hong Kong, my attention was captured by the front page of a local newspaper, featuring a photo-collage with a handcuffed wrist and Trudeau on the background of the Chinese and Canadian flags (see photo). But without understanding the writing, the meaning was anybody’s guess.
Mine was that it was related to the arrest of Mrs. Meng, the CFO of Huawei in Canada (because I was coming from Vancouver, where I had spent the prior 5 years). I sent the picture back to my friends in Canada, and one of the answers was: “It’s funny to see Trudeau as bad boy.” I also asked for a translation, and it seemed that the intention was to portray Trudeau rather as a sad boy, caught in the possible conundrum that the now-infamous Hong Kong extradition bill would generate.
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the state of liberal democracy in the former communist bloc is “probably worse than we hoped but better than we feared”, thinks Thomas Carothers, interviewed in this issue of Eastern Focus. He looks at the good, the bad and the ugly of post-1989 transition and says that three decades later, we are still in an intermediate state.