http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/world/asia/hong-kong-legislative-council.html 2016-10-12 14:00:20 At Hong Kong Swearing-In, Some Lawmakers Pepper Their Oath With Jabs The acts of defiance, directed at Beijing as some called for outright independence for the semiautonomous territory, seemed to augur a stormy legislative term. === HONG KONG — The streets of One new legislator, His ally from Youngspiration, Yau Wai-ching, 25, slipped what sounded like a profanity into the phrase “People’s Republic of China” when she recited her oath. The two were among several young political activists The defiance by the pair at the ceremony was a direct jab to the Chinese government, whose top representative in Hong Kong had warned of “calamity” if advocates of independence were permitted to take seats in the legislature. Theatrical protests that others staged on Wednesday spoke to the grievances that have remained unresolved since the protests in 2014 and presaged more clashes to come in and outside the legislative chamber. “I would never serve a regime that murders its own people,” said Nathan Law, a student leader of the 2014 protests. He then read the official oath in full, while giving the second character of each “China,” in Cantonese, a sharply rising intonation. Mr. Law, 23, who founded the Demosisto party with his fellow Umbrella Movement leader Joshua Wong and ran on a platform that called for self-determination for Hong Kong, is the youngest person ever to serve in the legislature. Shiu Ka-chun, a university lecturer and participant in the 2014 protests, after taking his oath as a legislator representing the social welfare sector, declared, “We’re back.” Lau Siu-lai, an instructor who taught at mobile democracy classrooms during the Umbrella Movement, read the oath in extreme slow motion. The statement of no more than 80 words in English took her about 10 minutes to read. Leung Kwok-hung, a longtime democracy advocate widely known as The Council’s clerk refused to swear in three of the body’s 70 legislators — Mr. Leung and Ms. Yau of Youngspiration and a third pro-democracy legislator, Edward Yiu, because of their deviations from the text and the banner display. They are expected to be able to take the oath again next week, as in the case of a legislator who Not all innovations on oath-taking were directed at the Chinese government. One legislator, Ann Chiang of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, a pro-Beijing party, took the unusual step of reciting the oath in Mandarin, the official language of the Chinese mainland rather than the Cantonese that is standard in Hong Kong. The oath, in English, reads: