Video: Drone footage shows the incredible scale of the Hong Kong protests

Credit where credit is due: drones are pretty good at journalism. The video above was shot by an unmanned drone carrying a video camera, and presents a unique perspective on the scale of the protests taking place in Hong Kong.

Pro-democracy activists have been out in the streets of Hong Kong since Friday, September 26th, when students gathered in a peaceful march to protest the Beijing central government’s plans for the 2017 election. Under the 1997 agreement that transferred Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule, in 2017 Hong Kong was supposed to be permitted to select its top leader via a democratic election. The students took to the streets after the Chinese government indicated that it might renege on that promise.

When police responded harshly to the student protests, thousands of Hong Kong residents flooded into the streets to join them, filling main roads, bridges, and sidewalks in Central, a neighborhood in the middle of the city. As the footage in the video above shows, by September 28th those protests had grown to massive size.