Live updates: China’s Xi Jinping in Hong Kong

Bing Chic property has always been a magnet for Instagrammers eager to capture screenshots From the sky surrounded on all four sides by the high-rise residential towers of the apartment complex.

Last Friday, hundreds of crimson Chinese flags appeared on the white balconies of the complex’s two 28-story buildings. Each Chinese flag was surrounded by two Hong Kong flags, depicting the city’s emblem: a white Bauhinia flower with a star on each petal.

A pro-Beijing association has distributed flags to several housing projects, according to Hong Kong’s state-owned newspaper, Ta Kung Pao. The copious sea of ​​flags at Bing Shek quickly became the talk of the town.

People traveled to Ping Shek, home to about 30,000 residents live in about 4,500 government-subsidized apartmentsTo take pictures of the scene, the residents of the industrial district admired the parade in the courtyards of the square.

“It’s rare to see this kind of culture in Hong Kong,” said Grace Zhang, a 35-year-old resident who moved to the city from neighboring Guangdong Province in mainland China nearly a decade ago.

She said her 8-year-old son was learning about delivery in class and that she wanted to take a picture of him to celebrate the occasion.

Lam Yu, a 62-year-old mechanical engineering equipment salesman, paid a visit to watch the flags. He raised his neck and pointed his smartphone at an angle to the sky to take pictures.

For him, the extradition would mean the end of being a second-class citizen in his city, he said, adding that it has been difficult to watch people from Britain gain vaunted positions in the civil service while more qualified locals are skipped over in Hong Kong.

Lam, initially apprehensive about how Communist Party policies would affect the city’s prospects, eventually collapsed due to China’s economic rise.

“There is no way you can look at China’s development and not be proud,” he said. “Unless you consider yourself Chinese.”

However, not everyone seemed to appreciate showing loyalty to Beijing. Some residents hung sheets that broke the pattern of the flags.

Elsie Leung, a 63-year-old retired security guard, lamented that the building in an adjacent building could not be covered with flags because residents there complained.

Although many of her acquaintances from her church had emigrated, she said, she felt positive about the city’s future.

However, Ms. Leung felt uneasy about the suppression of liberties, especially after the shutdown of independent news outlets and the arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zinn under the National Security Act. The cardinal was a leader in a legal aid organization that provided support to people who were arrested for protesting.

“If you say something wrong,” she said, “you could be arrested.”

Police said early Sunday morning that they were investigating reports of flags being defaced or stolen from Bing Shake and another nearby compound. No arrests were made, but all flags had been removed by Monday morning.