Rioters, irritated, trashed his restaurants for revenge. They smashed windows, damaged CCTVs and spray-painted doors with graffiti. Yeung said he personally received threatening phone calls and malicious comments on the internet and was informed of an upsurge of complaints about food security and fire fighting devices by authorities.

Over the past months, the total turnover of Yeung's restaurants dropped by about 30 percent.

But Yeung remained firm with his stance. "Whether the business is good or not doesn't bother me, but I am very sad that rioters became more and more violent in streets and more common people got hurt."

"At this time, business is not that important anymore. Now it's the struggle for humanity that matters, we must return to humanity. I feel that in the past months, humanity is lost in Hong Kong."

Yeung said he could not sleep at night after watching the live broadcast that a man trying to remove a barricade on the road was knocked unconscious by a masked rioter with a sewage cover-like object. "The Hong Kong where I was born and grew up was a place full of love. But that Hong Kong has gone."

With shops trashed and residents beaten up, the violence has been escalating in Hong Kong since June. A 70-year-old street cleaner died in November after being hit by a brick thrown by a rioter, and a construction worker was set ablaze for criticizing rioters' vandalism in a metro station.

It was the police who actually protected Hong Kong residents over the past months, Yeung said.

"I can see our selfless police officers work so hard to protect us," Yeung said. "However, some people kept smearing them and cooking up fake news to mislead the public."