On October 28th, more than 300 members of China’s Central Committee gathered for a keynote meeting. The aim was to devise policy both in the short and longer terms. Unsurprisingly civil unrest in Hong Kong was high on the agenda. With me to talk about the meeting's implications on Hong Kong is Willy Lam, Adjunct Professor of the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Since the start of the protests in June, the police have fired around 6,000 tear gas canisters, often in tightly packed residential neighbourhoods. But this is a not highly target method of crowd control and tear gas can have long term effects on children and other vulnerable individuals. Last month, a group of Chinese University scholars posted a letter in the medical journal The Lancet. They questioned the widespread use of tear gas in densely populated areas and urged the government to provide guidelines for health protection and cleaning. The government wasn’t inclined to listen. Secretary for Health Sophie Chan dismissed the letter and has so far provided no advice to the general public. And tear gas is not the only chemical weapon the police have been using.
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