Opinion | Hong Kong people deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for their dignified protests against China’s iron grip

The mass movement – distinct from the small group of violent protesters – should be honoured for its peaceful call for freedom and democracy. It’s time for Beijing to listen, and give Hongkongers a chance to prove how sensible they can be

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Where else can nearly a third of the population march more than 3km on a sweltering day through a busy commercial district without breaking a single shop window, overturning a car or burning a tyre? Photo: Robert Ng

Published: 9:00am, 11 Jul 2019Updated: 9:12am, 11 Jul 2019

Let’s not squabble over who most deserves this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. It belongs to the millions of Hongkongers who marched peacefully on separate occasions to oppose the now dead extradition treaty with mainland China. Who else has a better claim to it? Certainly not US President Donald Trump.

I wrote that Trump deserved the prize for reaching out to North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un. He is on the 2019 list, nominated last year by US and Norwegian legislators, even though his denuclearisation efforts with Kim have since become mere photo-ops.

Not on the list are Occupy student leaders Joshua Wong Chi-fung, Nathan Law Kwun-chung, and Alex Chow Yong-kang, who made last year’s list. They’re yesterday’s democracy heroes. The new face of Hong Kong democracy is the mass, yet leaderless, movement, which has shown what peace really means.

Where else can nearly a third of the population march more than 3km on a sweltering day through a busy commercial district without breaking a single shop window, overturning a car or burning a tyre? If peace is the overriding Nobel criterion, then surely the recent mass yet peaceful protests have more than met it.

I can already imagine the scornful looks within the loyalist camp. Didn’t protesters attack police with makeshift weapons on June 12? Didn’t crazed mobs storm and trash the legislature on July 1? Didn’t marchers clash again with police just last Sunday?