Exclusive | No protest requests in Hong Kong have been rejected since 2022: security chief Chris Tang
- Security chief says Hongkongers may have resisted protesting in recent years as authorities offered more effective channels for registering views
Hong Kong’s security chief has revealed authorities have not rejected a single protest application since 2022 as he argued the lack of demonstrations in the city was not a sign of civil society in retreat, but due to the availability of multiple channels to express opinions.
Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung told the Post that Hongkongers could have refrained from protesting in recent years because they had more effective channels to register their views and the government also now had a heightened “responsiveness” towards public opinion.
“We engage in a lot of discussions with different groups when they have an opinion, we listen and we react. Probably they consider [this as] better than, you know, just go out on the street and cry, because we have dialogue, we react,” Tang said, without disclosing how many protest applications had been made so far since 2022.
“I think you cannot just count the number of how many of those protests or [expressions] of opinion to reflect the level of freedom in Hong Kong.”
The city’s most outspoken rally organisers have disbanded in recent years. Both the Civil Human Rights Front, the umbrella activist group behind many of Hong Kong’s largest protests, and the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which organised the annual candlelight vigil for the Tiananmen Square Crackdown, disbanded in 2021.