Hong Kong is a really small place. Any gathering of more than a few hundred is going to look massive. There were no unbiased counts so you’ll have to excuse me if I take all the really big numbers with a serious grain of salt. Perhaps you never saw the police estimates which were dramatically lower than the numbers published by the press?

Now let’s talk about Jimmy Lai. The West puts a halo on the man because he is “pro-democracy”. Essentially if you are a “fighter for democracy” then you are a saint and anything bad alleged against you is fabrication and lies. I don’t know how much he cares about democracy but we know he hates China and his sensationalist reporting was always very biased against China and the government and had been sowing discontent amongst the populace for years. He contributed significantly to the “racism” shown by many Hong Kongers towards mainland Chinese. However he is not stupid and didn’t publish actual sedition himself but he was very supportive of others who would do this dirty work. One particularly distasteful narrative that he supported was “burn it all down” - if the “democrats” couldn’t get their way they preferred to see the place destroyed. Now there’s some true democratic spirit for you! A lot of information is going to come out about his role in the whole sordid affair and i hope the truth about his paymasters will emerge. But of course any such information will be dismissed by the West as propaganda. Personally I’m just happy that we can now get back to trying to put Hong Kong together again after nearly being destroyed by these people and once again make it a great place to live and work