The Legal Crisis Behind the Hong Kong Protests

On February 8, 2018, a nineteen-year-old Hong Kong Chinese man, Chan Tong-kai, took his girlfriend, Poon Hui-wing (who was twenty years old) to Taipei for a Valentine’s holiday. Whilst there, in their hotel room, Hui-wing told Tong-kai that her pregnancy was courtesy of another man. Then, in a characteristic contemporary use of her electronic device, she showed him a video of herself having sex with another man. It is not clear from reports whether this man was the father of the child or someone else. This sort of impromptu provocation would have been much more difficult to organise twenty years ago.

Tong-kai’s reaction was to smash Hui-wing’s head against a wall, grab her from behind and strangle her. After shoving her to the ground he succeeded after ten minutes in causing her to expire. He then placed her body in a bag, took the local MTR five stops out of town and threw the bag onto some waste ground near the station. He stole her HSBC credit card, a Casio digital…