in Yuen Long for yet another demonstration in what's

turning into a whole summer of demonstrations

here in Hong Kong.

This one is particularly worrying for the authorities

here because it's an illegal demonstration.

They haven't got a permit, and yet tens of thousands of people

have assembled here.

00:00:23,490 --> 00:00:25,470 Some of the demonstrators here in Yuen Long

have just broken through a fence and are approaching police riot

lines.

The police are trying to protect a village that the protesters

are angry with because they say the anti-protest demonstrators

who attacked them last week came out of there,

but generally, the whole situation is very tense.

And in the context of what's been going on

near here for three months in Hong Kong,

shows how, from the authorities' point of view,

the situation is deteriorating.

00:00:52,950 --> 00:00:55,140 They've been hoping that after a couple of months,

these demonstrations would peter out.

That was essentially what happened in 2014

with the Occupy Movement, but instead, they

seem to be intensifying, to be getting more tense,

and potentially more violent.

Plus, the actual demands of the demonstrators are escalating.

We wish to urge the US, Washington, to pass the Hong

Kong Human Rights and Democratic Act to put force on the Hong

Kong government to let us have universal suffrage.

00:01:27,750 --> 00:01:30,000 Here in the metro station where the demonstrators have

been pouring out for a couple of hours now,

you could hear chants of "free Hong Kong, time of revolution."

And that's the kind of chant that

will send a chill down the spines

of the authorities in Beijing.

But what do they do?

There's been discussion in the media here in Hong Kong,

and in the official media in Beijing

that perhaps the time is coming when the Chinese government

would even deploy the People's Liberation

Army, the Chinese army, to try to break up the demonstrations.

But that would be such a massive escalation

with the obvious risk of violence, and the risk

that you would essentially have a collapse in the civil order

in Hong Kong and, at a time when there's

a trade war with the United States,

also an intensification in international pressure

on China.

On the other hand, what do they do?

Because the other strategy, which

is to wait for this stuff to die down isn't working,

or it doesn't seem to be working for now.

The whole mood of protest, and the demands of the protests

are escalating, creating a big dilemma

for the government in Hong Kong and for the government

in Beijing.