Chinese paramilitary exercises near Hong Kong seen as threat

By The Associated Press
August 16, 2019 | 4:31 AM

HONG KONG (AP) — Members of China’s paramilitary People’s Armed Police have been seen marching and practicing crowd-control tactics at a sports complex across from Hong Kong, in what some have interpreted as a threat against pro-democracy protesters.

Hong Kong’s government has refused to talk with demonstrators who have protested since early June to demand expanded political rights and the scrapping of legislation that could have seen criminal suspects sent to China.

Vehicles belonging to the paramilitary People’s Armed Police were arrayed Friday in Shenzhen, a city just across from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong police officers said Thursday they weren’t aware of plans for Chinese forces to join efforts to quell the demonstrations.

The protests have been marked by increasing violence and shut down the Hong Kong airport earlier this week.

Analysis: The world Washington built is fraying. What comes next?

By J.J. Green
August 20, 2026 | 8:57 PM

The United States is confronting a global security environment that increasingly resembles the outcome its Cold War adversaries once hoped to produce: a divided West, weakened alliances, economic exhaustion, multiple simultaneous wars and declining confidence in American leadership. That does not mean today’s crises were orchestrated according to some surviving Soviet master plan. The Soviet Union is gone, and the threats facing Washington now come from several different states with different interests. But the strategic effect is strikingly familiar. Early NATO assessments of Soviet intentions warned that Moscow sought to weaken the democratic powers, deny the West a secure European base and ultimately exhaust North America economically. Now, NATO says Russia is again trying to reconfigure the Euro-Atlantic security order through military force, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion and disinformation. The difference is that much of the pressure now confronting the West is occurring simultaneously — and some of the damage to alliance cohesion is self-inflicted.

Related Stories