Joseph Yu-shek Cheng approached me in the ballroom of the Shangri-La Hotel in Jakarta, proffered his business card and thrust a leaflet into my hands.
‘People think everything is good in Hong Kong but we have to fight for our democracy,’ he said.
The bespectacled professor of political science, a member of the executive committee of Hong Kong’s Civic Party, was among more than 600 delegates from 110 countries who were in town last week to attend one of the world’s largest gatherings of democracy activists.
Like many of the attendees at the sixth bi-annual assembly of the World Movement for Democracy, a non-partisan initiative funded by the US Congress, Cheng was keen to draw attention to his particular cause: the lack of genuine democracy in Hong Kong since it reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.
But, with many delegates from countries in much more dire straits than Hong Kong (Burma, Haiti, Iran and Zimbabwe, to name a few), Cheng accepted that he might struggle to be heard above the democratic din.
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