Christmas in Hong Kong was “ruined” by renewed unrest, according to the city’s embattled chief executive, as pro-democracy activists staged demonstrations and police carried out mass arrests across the city’s main shopping districts.
After several weeks of relative calm, the territory was again rocked by violent clashes between an increasingly aggressive police force and a smaller but radicalising protest movement that spread through shopping malls and crowded streets on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Human rights groups accused the Hong Kong police of a disproportionate response as they carried out random searches of shoppers in busy malls, fired numerous rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets and detained scores of people in indiscriminate mass arrests.