FRANCE 24 English published this video item, entitled “China Communist Party anniversary: Hong Kong silenced as Beijing celebrates centenary” – below is their description.
Cannons roared, bands played and fighter jets soared overhead as thousands of carefully selected participants gathered in #Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square Thursday for a ceremony marking the centenary of the ruling #CommunistParty. Meanwhile, #HongKong held its own annual commemorations of its 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule, given added significance this year by the party centenary and the arrests of political activists and journalists following Beijing’s imposition of a sweeping national security law on the city last year. FRANCE 24’s Oliver Farry tells us more.
FRANCE 24 English YouTube Channel
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In This Story: Hong Kong
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (HKSAR), is a metropolitan area and special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta of the South China Sea. With over 7.5 million residents of various nationalities in a 1,104-square-kilometre (426 sq mi) territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after the Qing Empire ceded Hong Kong Island at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898. The whole territory was transferred to China in 1997. As a special administrative region, Hong Kong maintains separate governing and economic systems from that of mainland China under the principle of “one country, two systems”.