Canadian police took down a Hong Kong protester. Here’s what happened
- The man who was tackled to the ground and handcuffed in a Richmond mall, in footage widely seen on Weibo, was Chinese political refugee Yang Kuang
- But other perspectives show a complex scene: protesters are taunted, rival groups close in and police try to keep sides apart to avoid physical clashes
But the takedown last Saturday in Richmond, British Columbia – celebrated by the video uploader, who decried the “poison” of the Hong Kong protesters – was part of a complicated mini-drama with many moving parts, other footage shows: mutual taunting with pro-China opponents, supporters of both camps closing in on the scene, and plain-clothes and uniformed police trying to keep both sides apart. Police would later describe people “aggressively trying to incite” their rivals.
In the middle was Yang Kuang: a Chinese-flag-burning political refugee who was once arrested in Beijing for trying to visit the wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Yang was granted asylum in Canada in 2015.
And unseen in any of the multiple videos showing his Richmond “arrest”, Yang was released by police about 20 minutes after, and left the scene pushing his young daughter home in her stroller.
His only regret was that he did not get to “do some exercise” – a euphemism for getting physical with his opponents – he later said on Facebook in Chinese, illustrating his post with smiley faces.
The quiet resolution to the noisy incident underscores Canadian police efforts not to inflame the tensions between the two sides, as supporters of the Hong Kong protest movement mount weekly events that are frequently met with Chinese-flag-waving counterprotests.
