No. 5: Hong Kong Protests Rock China and Luxury

It began as resistance to a proposed extradition bill, but quickly snowballed into a citywide reckoning over political freedoms and struggle over the identity of Hong Kong. The protests that kicked off in June have unfolded extraordinary scenes from a city that has long-prided itself on being a gleaming, safe and efficient business hub. The protests turned malls and university campuses into fierce battle zones, jammed the city’s airport and its famously efficient metro system for days at a time, its marches at times drawing as many as two million protesters — or a quarter of the city’s eight million people. Incidents of violence from both pro-democracy protesters and Hong Kong’s police force have shocked the former British colony, with the protests claiming directly at least two lives. With hundreds arrested over the course of the last six months, Hong Kong has reached a level of political division that recent memory cannot recall. This year’s purposefully leaderless social movement manifested in a much more mercurial manner and seemed to reach every district of Hong Kong at one point or another, in contrast to the Occupy protests in 2014, which had activists camping out in the street, more or less concentrating the effort

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