The president of Taiwan’s legislature visited Aegis, the restaurant in Taipei that employed Hong Kong protesters, for dinner on Thursday night to offer support for their home city.

Aegis reopened just over two weeks ago on Nov. 11, after it came under attack in mid-October by a man who flung chicken feces inside the premises.

Yu Shyi-kun, head of the Legislative Yuan, told Apple Daily Taiwan that he had asked to meet up with election aides at Aegis because he wanted to show his support to the restaurant.

“We have limited ability to turn around the fate of Hong Kong, but having seen how hard its people are working, we are showing them our concern,” Yu said.

The Taiwanese politician was having a get-together with young campaign workers who helped him in his 2014 mayoral election bid in New Taipei City.

He felt sad for the young generations of Hong Kong, he said, especially in light of developments in the last two weeks when four pro-democracy lawmakers were ousted from their elected seats, followed by the mass resignation of 15 other lawmakers in protest at the government’s disqualification decision.

Yu also recalled the histories of Hong Kong and Taiwan, saying how the elite in the older generations had placed Chinese ethnicity and nationalism above democracy as the highest core value in “democratic politics.”

Elite Hongkongers chose to let the city be handed back to mainland China despite 31 resolutions by the United Nations from 1949 to grant Hong Kong independence, Yu said, citing academic information. He understood that the British government at the time had also intended to allow its then colony to pick its own chief executive by direct election, but older Hongkongers did not want that either, he said.

The Taiwanese elite, meanwhile, saw their decision to choose a return to mainland China trigger an anti-government uprising that was violently suppressed by the Kuomintang on the island in 1947.

In both cases, wrong decisions led to the suffering of the younger generations, underscoring the importance of making the right decision at critical moments, Yu said.

He said that politicians around the world all knew it was immensely difficult to change the nature of China’s Communist Party, and called on all democratic and advanced governments to wake up to reality.

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