Hong Kong police carry out crowd control drills at a local police college in Hong Kong on June 25, 2014 ahead of planned July 1 protests.
AFP
Political tensions continued to build in Hong Kong on Wednesday amid a debate over full democracy and continued judicial independence in the former British colony, ahead of an annual July 1 protest march marking the anniversary of the handover to Beijing.
Tensions are running high following a series of attacks in Chinese state media on an unofficial referendum on the democratic process, a massive cyberattack on the poll’s website, and a controversial white paper asserting Beijing’s ultimate authority over the territory, which was promised “a high degree of autonomy” under the terms of its 1997 handover.
More than 740,000 people have cast ballots since the mostly online PopVote poll, which was designed by the University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme, opened last Friday.
According to Young Wo-sang, one the poll’s technological consultants, up to 40 percent of the “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks on the PopVote servers have been traced to mainland Chinese companies with offices in Hong Kong.
