Less than five years after the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong is back in international headlines. On June 9, over a million protesters dressed in white took to the streets to oppose a bill that would allow extraditions to China. The following Sunday, an estimated two million people — nearly 30 percent of the population — took to the streets again, this time clad in black.

Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing chief executive, Carrie Lam, claims that the extradition measure is needed to bring to justice a Hong Kong man wanted for murdering his girlfriend in Taiwan. But the bill has sparked immense opposition, with critics insisting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would use it to extradite activists or dissenting journalists to the Mainland. In other words, it would open the floodgates between the legal system of the Mainland and Hong Kong, and enable the CCP-sponsored kidnapping of Hong Kong citizens.

Police have responded to the demonstrations with force. When protesters initiated a peaceful sit-in on June 12, the original date for the second reading of the bill, police used rubber bullets, bean bag bullets, batons, pepper spray, and tear gas to disperse demonstrators. Footage of protesters shot in the head with rubber bullets and journalists beaten up by the police have leaked on the internet. To justify their crackdown, the Hong Kong government have claimed that the victims were unlawful rioters.