A court in Hong Kong onThursdayhanded down a nine-month jail term to a protester who took part in the "fishball revolution" clashes last February in the city's Mong Kok district.
Chan Pak-yeung, a member of the activist group Civic Passion, was jailed after being found guilty of assaulting police officers and resisting arrest following his trial at Kowloon City Court.
Chan, a 31-year-old waiter, was accused by the prosecution of hurling plastic water bottles at police during the violence, and of kicking officers who came to arrest him.
Magistrate So Wai-tak found that Chan had "endangered the safety" of the police officers, and had treated them as "moving targets."
Chan's application for bail was rejected, and he said he plans to appeal. He had initially been charged with "rioting," a more serious charge.
Former pan-democratic lawmaker Wong Yuk-man, who is a supporter of Civic Passion, told local media that the sentence was "ridiculous."
Dozens of people were injured in the Feb. 9 Mong Kok riots, dubbed the "fishball revolution" on social media, which started after a dispute between police and unlicensed food vendors in the gritty working class district, which was also the scene of clashes during the 2014 Occupy Central pro-democracy movement.
Video footage of the riots showed a large crowd throwing bricks and other objects at riot police, who fought back with pepper spray and batons, injuring an unknown number of people, including journalists.
Others set fire to debris in the street, while business owners reported damage to property. Police arrested 86 people in connection with the clashes.
Complex background to protests
Chung Kim-wah, assistant professor of applied social science at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said the reasons for the initial protest by food vendors were complex.
"There were some immediate factors and some long-running reasons why people came out to protest against the police," Chung said.
"The more immediate factors include the fact that practically every week in the preceding couple of years, there had been police suppression of protests and demonstrations [in Hong Kong]," he said.
"There was video footage that showed the authorities are perhaps being a bit too zealous."
Chinese and Hong Kong officials have described the "fishball revolution" as the work of "radical separatists."
The head of localist group Hong Kong Indigenous Ray Wong, 22, was arrested after the clashes on suspicion of incitement to violence, after chemicals that could be used to make explosives were found inside a flat, police said at the time.
But Hong Kong Indigenous was founded to campaign for "separation" between Hong Kong and mainland China, while activists point to a growing public perception that Beijing has reneged on its promise of "a high degree of autonomy" for the city since the 1997 return to Chinese rule.
Localist activists took part in the 2014 pro-democracy Occupy Central movement, which waged an unsuccessful 79-day civil disobedience campaign for fully democratic elections, although some later rejected its aims.
Maya Wang, China researcher for the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, said there are still many unanswered questions about the "fishball revolution."
"There are still a number of areas that are unclear about this incident, including whether the violence was started by the police or by protesters, and how it came about," Wang said.
"We call on the Hong Kong government to take steps to address the deep social tensions underlying this incident, and to carry out a wide-range and transparent public inquiry and debate," she said.
Heavy-handed Leung
Other commentators blamed the administration of chief executive Leung Chun-ying for heavy-handedness when dealing with dissent, rather than working to gain public trust and recognition for government policies through consensus-building.
And Joseph Cheng, former political science lecturer at Hong Kong's City University, said Leung's reaction to the clashes had won him widespread public disapproval.
"Leung came out [soon after the clashes] and designated them riots, which of course was unacceptable to Hong Kong people," Cheng said.
"For a leader to just come out and make statements about the nature of an incident like that is the way that the government in mainland China would operate," he said.
"It's very dictatorial."
There are signs that the localist movement has gained, rather than lost, public support since the clashes in Mong Kok.
Localist candidates won six directly-elected seats in Hong Kong's Legislative Council (LegCo) in elections in early September, the first since the failure of the pro-democracy movement's bid to win universal suffrage.
Reported by Xin Lin for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.