Central and Western District Council (2020–2021)
On the council Yip chaired the Traffic and Transport Committee and the district's Environmental Improvement and Greening Working Group and Information Technology Working Group, and was vice-chairman of the newly created Constitutional and Security Affairs Committee.
On 16 January 2020 the Commissioner of Police, Chris Tang, attended the council — the first time the police chief had faced a district council since the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests began. Yip moved an urgent motion condemning the Commissioner over the handling of complaints of police violence; Tang and the District Officer left the chamber, and the motion passed by 14 votes to one. The government issued a statement the same evening saying it did not agree with the motion, which it said made untrue allegations against the police, and that this was why all attending government officers had withdrawn.
In early February 2020 the Chief Secretary, Matthew Cheung, suspended secretariat support and the use of government meeting rooms for all district councils, leaving them without venues. On 10 February Yip responded with a Facebook post headed "A citywide assembly of citizens' representatives: convening a special joint meeting of the eighteen district councils". He argued that the District Councils Ordinance prescribes no meeting venue, so that a meeting is lawful wherever it is held provided the chairman convenes it and a quorum is present, and that the secretariat remained obliged to publish its minutes. On that basis he proposed that elected councillors from all eighteen districts sit together in a single venue, each council convened in the name of its own chairman, and there pass resolutions — on coordinating the pandemic response, on police conduct in each district, on restoring the municipal councils and on constitutional development — to be entered in the official record. He argued that the councils, elected by more than 2.94 million registered voters without screening, carried a mandate that warranted using their powers to the full.
Seventeen pro-democracy-controlled district councils met jointly on 6 June 2020 to oppose the forthcoming national security law, sitting together at a private venue after government premises were refused. Reporting the day before, the Hong Kong outlet DB Channel traced the idea back to Yip's February post, describing it as the earlier articulation of the "Hong Kong lower house" argument later advanced by the activist Finn Lau, and the joint meeting as the concept's first step into practice.
Arrest during the May 2020 protest
On 24 May 2020, during a march against the proposed national security law and the national anthem bill, Yip was monitoring police operations in his capacity as a district councillor under the Goose Neck Bridge in Causeway Bay when an officer pushed him from behind without warning, pinned his neck with a knee and arrested him. He was taken to hospital with injuries to the neck and back of the head, the left elbow and knee, and a torn ligament in the right knee. On 26 May he and another arrested district councillor, Li Chi-hung, were released after declining the police bail conditions.
