Democracy ~ an anathema to China ~ was at a severe discount in its protectorate of Hong Kong on Sunday despite the fact that the controversial legislation on extradition to the mainland has been kept in abeyance. The renewed spurt in violence has ended the fragile truce. It is a measure of the volatile scenario that plagues the island nation that the situation descended into chaos on Sunday evening as police fired teargas on protesters and unidentified masked men attacked commuters returning from the demonstration.

It is pretty obvious that the people were attacked by the forces in uniform and by watchdogs of the administration who wore masks to conceal their identity. In running battles between riot police and protesters, police fired successive rounds of teargas and advanced on demonstrators who retaliated by throwing back canisters of gas and glass bottles in attempts to hold their ground. After police fired rubber bullets, the crowd eventually dispersed.

We do not know what precisely has ignited the latest upheaval against the legislation. Yet we do know that with China backing the legislation, tension has been simmering in the tiny country where spirited protests and violence rage an inch beneath tension. The latest mayhem is likely to fuel further unrest in the city, where the public outcry over an extradition bill has exacerbated into a bigger protest movement against the city’s increasingly declining autonomy under Chinese control, which seems unlikely given Beijing’s strident support.

The ferment will persist till the controversy over the antiextradition bill is suitably defused. Ms Carrie Lam, the chief executive of the island nation, had merely staved off an escalation of the crisis when she recently put the Bill on hold. The latest protest is focused on the demand for total withdrawal of the legislation. The situation is getting worse because every time there is a demonstration, there is also a fierce confrontation with the police. And the people get still more alienated every time there is a confrontation.

Indeed, Hong Kong, 22 years after it was returned by Britain to China, bears witness to by far the worst social turmoil, of a kind that Ms Lam has scarcely been able to contain. Sunday suffered the latest wave of demonstrations to rock Asia’s financial centre. The implications of the almost relentless unrest are as acutely political as economic. In retrospect, the Umbrella movement, that had shrilled for democratic rights, was not so violent, after all.

The protest, which had proceeded peacefully along the route prescribed by the government, is the latest in the series of rallies that have plunged the city into renewed crisis, so dire as to be almost chronic. More demonstrations have been planned over the coming weekends. The ferment in Hong Kong could pose the most forbidding popular challenge to China’s President-for-life, Xi Jinping, ever since he assumed power in 2012.