https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/cg1sh2/chaos_and...
What I personally find astounding that the police were pulled out right before the fight, the 999 operators hanged up for the callers and nearby police stations were closed during the event.
It'd be unexpected if they didn't stand down while PLA grunts, I mean "triad gangsters", put a beating on the protestors.
Of course the leadership could've arranged for the police force to retreat without informing them about the purpose. In that case, the rank-and-file officers are probably quite unhappy about that decision.
Concretely, it seems HKers can protest as much as they want, but when push comes to shove, the PRC will just end up crushing them and the parts of democracy they still have.
I can't imagine how they may get any other outcome. Even if I wish they could just gain independence, it seems unlikely, and it's not like any foreign power would go to war to protect HK.
The handover was more than 20 years ago. The horizon for total integration was 50 years. We're more than 40% through. Pre-handover was "britain in asia". The endgame is "full integration".
HK is nowhere near 40% full integration. Progress has fallen behind, and now they are catching up. The wishful thinking of HK residents doesn't change anything. The writing has been on the wall for decades. There's only one way this ends.
Personally I hate all of this. I loved HK being its own little out-of-place enclave in the orient. But that all changed in 1997; the script has been written, and events will grind forward to the inevitable conclusion. Most people I know in HK are thinking about their "Plan B". They would be advised to hurry it up.
The only way would be is if the chinese government changed. Not all that likely, but on the other hand the Berlin wall was only up 30 years.
Tomorrow is always a better day to die.
The teachers won and the PRC curriculum was never implemented.
There is one person who has made himself a big single point of failure for China.
I never understood this. Why would HK gain 'independence'? Why would a foreign power 'protect' HK? (protect from what?)
HK has been used to build a narrative that is rather strange... Frankly people in HK calling for independence are a bit like, say, the Texas Nationalist Movement or calling for Seattle independence. It's a fringe movement at best.
I think a lot of HKers are coming to realise that under the current political system their rights are always going to be under threat, and eventually will be eroded completely. The only way to prevent that is true democracy. So it's not that true democracy is the motivation for this.
because if they don't they will be slowly assimilated into a non-democratic PRC. I am not calling for independence, I'm saying it would be nice if they had it rather than add 7m people to a regime.
> Why would a foreign power 'protect' HK?
they wouldn't, that's the point.
If HK were to declare independence, in other ages there might have been foreign powers propping them up _for their own interests_. I am not advocating this, I'm just pointing out this seems unlikely in the current world.
As for the Seattle independence: well, HK was independent for a while, and they hare already a SAR, the simile seems incorrect, but sure, it's not trivial to secede.
Ultimately, as mainland economy makes HK increasingly irrelevant, it's in HKers interest to integrate and seek opportunities outside the city. Not every native HKer is qualified to be a financier / banker. The raising cost of living will not abate because HK is where Chinese wealth and FDI is being funneled - and basically the only real strategic importance the city has. That's just the byproduct of extreme wealth concentration in "tier1" cities everywhere. But everywhere else, the poor get priced out, but since HK operates as a city state, people with little prospects are trapped with nowhere to go. And if they're smart, they'll realize this and either move abroad or move on.
Functionally, the sooner HKers accept they'll never be anything but Chinese the sooner they can get on with their lives and out of HK. If they're lucky they'll be extended HKSAR affirmative action privileges so they can still pretend they're better than mainlanders. And really that's what it's about isn't it? It's almost like Cantonese equivalent alt-right thought - a bunch of disenfranchised kids with very little future prospects, reminiscing about a privileged past they've never actually experienced (a few years at the tail end of colonial rule) or existed (independence/democracy). Yeah, they're also fighting for western liberal values, it's all very noble and stuff. That's good western media byline. But at the end of the day, many Cantonese youth also resent being culturally, financially and politically eclipsed by mainlanders - why some of the recent protests targetted mainland tourists just doing their thing (cause you know, China's not bringing their best). It's not limited to HK, a lot of westernized Sinophobia is rooted in the distaste and disbelief that once poor chicken farmers from shithole coal county now live in million dollar homes and drive fancy sports cars. But the mainland won't see them as anything but privileged has-been whiners who refused to integrate and adapt.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended? We'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20492145
The Chinese and HK governments have realized they've lost the culture wars and public opinion so they've resorted to the tried and tested handbook of authoritarian governments, to create a cycle of violence to create justification for cracking down.
This is a provocation. Protesters will now counter arm themselves with similar bats and sticks, which in turn will give the police extra justification when they uncover "weapons". It will be used by the Chinese domestic media as justification to crack down hard.
Don't underestimate the "them and us" mentality in China. It's very pervasive. Your co-worker was assuredly on the "them" side of the equation.
Considering the humiliation that the colonisation of HK had been for 100+ years and the resulting nationalistic tendency of the people, if CCTV (Chinese state TV) had shown the pictures of armed protesters storming the HK parliament and some of them flying the Union Jack then the Chinese government would have been forced to fall on the protesters like a ton of bricks.
People in HK use Chinese apps and Chinese intelligence probably has comprehensive mass surveillance system in place, but it could not predict recent events. Chinese and HK leaders were caught by surprise.
Hoping India will step up and do something. Seems unlikely though.
Does anyone know of any co-ordinated efforts to do so?
My gut reaction is these attackers are from mainland China and who have been organised by an official in order to try and reduce HK's tendency to protest (a sentiment echoed in that article as well).
Also government mass surveillance and identifying people who were recorded in public by a citizen commiting violence aren't the same thing. I wish I didn't have to explain this.
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/07/22/hong-kong-police-made-...
It seems obvious that the HK administration is simply drawing out time and hoping the daily troubles the demonstrators are creating in time will kill their cause.
If you're including population not under the sphere of influence of the Chinese Communist Party, I'd say most likely yes.
If not, of course there isn't broad support in the sense that Hong Kong is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the Mainland.
I hate to say it, but I'm expecting that an inevitable Tiananmen 2.0 is in the works; and I have seen nothing to convince me that pushed to the wall, the Chinese Communist party won't write off an entire city to restore "Peace"; excepting the continued existence of Taiwan. That though, in no small manner being a diplomatic stalemate with the rest of the world however.
Hong Kong has no such asset.
I think the parallel are the occupy protests in HK around 2014. In the beginning they had broad support but after about half a year that public support was gone and the police could clear remaining "occupiers".
As an outsider the issues of extradition seems like a symptom of something deeper: Hong Kong's role as a part of China. Perhaps frustration over economic conditions: Obscene rent to wage ratios. Not the same growth as in nearby mainland.
Now they "need" the Triads.
Also it seems this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Years_(2015_film) is actually becoming reality.
I believe Brown was chosen for the Nazi SA uniforms because they were cheap.
No, it was taken from Harvard's University colors, I believe.
> Hanfstaengl composed both Brownshirt and Hitler Youth marches patterned after his Harvard football songs and, he later claimed, devised the chant "Sieg Heil"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
Harvard university is Crimson?
I mean, people argue that technology works better when one system controls the hardware, the software and the ecosystem around it.
Could the same principle apply to human society? Which is an order of magnitude more complex than a piece of technology.
Again, I don't know if this argument has been made before – or if it's even one I'd want to make. But I'm just curious if this is something people say?
PS: I'm just stating a fact not endorsing anyone here. The "siege" of CCP office is a very bad move. They are hurting the face of the mainland, provided excuses and received the ruthless response this political machine was designed to do.
If people would just take the beating and lay down, like Gandhi-led resistance against Brits did, it could break down the violent strategy.
China (PRC), on the other hand, loves nothing more than to do China everywhere China is, or was, or will be. They can't stand it when somewhere that should be China isn't doing China hard enough. So when Hong Kong goes around saying "a little less China, please; we'd like to still be a little Hong Kong" then China retorts "how dare you not be all-the-way China!" They will gleefully beat more China into Hong Kong if given a flimsy, contrived excuse to do so. It's the same as it was in Tibet, except Tibet did not have the leverage of being so important to international trade. China very much wants to erase the historic embarrassment it suffered from the UK in the Opium Wars, and as long as Hong Kong doesn't want to be more Chinese, the wound stays open. Macau isn't facing the same mainland attitudes, probably because it wasn't taken by force.
But on the other hand, violent resistance definitely won't work, either. China won't kill everyone, but they will kill, imprison, or hospitalize enough people that the others learn what kinds of things can get you vanished, erased, or exampled.
The only winning strategy against China in Hong Kong/Macau is to get out, and with one's money, if possible. Expand businesses into Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and/or Australia, de-emphasize the Hong Kong facilities, and move people and households elsewhere. And that works fine for China, too. It makes Hong Kong more PRC-Chinese at the same time it is making other places more ethnically-Chinese, and they get to keep all the capital that was left behind.
Anecdotally, everyone I know from Hong Kong already moved to Vancouver.
For a case related to earlier protest in 2016, see [1] in Chinese.
[1]: https://thestandnews.com/politics/高調拉人-低調撤案-警方旺角騷亂後-環保倉當-武器庫...
For this particular case of arrest you mentioned, one thing stood out: the supposed “petrol bombs“ were in fact sealed, unopened beer bottles (see the zoom-in here [2]). The correct way to make a petrol bomb needs to replace the content [3]. For all we know, the police have found 10 bottles of unopened beer and claimed to have found 10 petrol bombs.
[2]: https://lihkg.com/thread/1335217/page/1
[3]: https://img.appledaily.com.tw/images/ReNews/20130804/640_13b...
In a place where weapons are banned, it can make sense to construct them. In a time of effective peaceful protest, it can make sense to an authoritarian government to attempt to justify a crackdown.
My heart is with those protesting in Hong Kong: 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ...'
Anyone who knows anything about explosives - knows you don't "stockpile" TATP.
It's a highly energetic explosive that will go off if you look at it sideways.
Storing it? You'd have to be a fool.
Overall, I am super pessimistic about HK; unless mainland China experiences a similar scale of unrest, HK will become just another mainland city.
Regarding Tiananmen 2.0, reportedly People's Liberation Army claimed on 13 June not to intervene [1], but some recent comment on 22 July may suggest otherwise [2].
At the end of the day, it boils down to whether the benefit is more than the cost of rolling out PLA.
One concern for CCP is that Taiwan is holding its president election next March, and the top two runners are respectively a pro-Washington candidate and a pro-Beijing candidate, so rolling out the PLA would hurt this proxy election war and more importantly make future “unification” of Taiwan basically impossible.
Another concern is that CCP needs Hong Kong for its free flow of capital and technology (e.g. Hong Kong is not under the same export control as China), and rolling out the PLA would ruin these when China’s economic future is uncertain.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition-pla-...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498017
> Hoping India will step up and do something. Seems unlikely though.
Reading the analysis, some critics speculated that one way out for Hong Kong is for her to be integrated into Taiwan, and then get transitive protection by the United States.
The handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997 in based on the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which China declares is merely historical and no longer holds any “practical significance.” [3]
Note that Hong Kong was given to the Britain by three treaties in the 19th century (1842 Treaty of Nanking, 1860 Convention of Peking, 1898 The Second Convention of Peking), and the true copies of all treaties are in the hand of Taiwan, which were brought to Taiwan by the KMT government during its retreat to Taiwan before 1950.
So if the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the declaration behind the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, is revoked (partly because CCP declares it invalid), Britain might declare that Hong Kong should return to the holder of the three treaties–Taiwan.
Extremely unlikely, but arguably has legal justification.
As a side note, Hong Kong and Taiwan are the two main places sharing the use of traditional Chinese characters (besides Macau), and Taiwan has a good track record of respecting sub-languages of spoken Chinese (not just use Mandarin), so culturally they share a lot. And they also value democracy, freedom, and rule of law as core values, so ignoring geopolitics their integration is plausible.
[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/br...
Quite a caveat there, unfortunately :-)
I think you have a distorted view of what the role of Police is in a society.
I don't doubt that the situation is complex, but lets get the facts straight.
They appear to have commercial ties to Shenzhen across the border. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Yuen_Long_protest
That is not what happened. They took it as a challenge after they were beaten up. No one did anything to Yuen Long, and they decide to beat any everyone, from Child to Pregnant Woman on the Western MTR Train.
Your monoculture must necessarily be authoritarian to enforce the cultural and ideological policies.
It's also extremely fragile. Cut off the head and everything turns to anarchy. Which is what has happened over and over throughout China's history.
Versus somewhere on the polar opposite end like Switzerland where the national government is basically non-existent and could disappear tomorrow and there wouldn't be much disruption.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
With humans having supersocial traits like ants or bees, the idea of societies where everybody works towards a common goal does appeal to our senses. The reason they don't work so easily is because we have individual interests. Keeping part with the group is part of our desires, but this is a much weaker force than it is in bees, for example. That's because we breed as individuals, and not as a group. So group selection is much weaker. (Check out "Darwin's Cathedral" if you're interested in that topic.)
Now imagine if we did have the ability to form supersocial groups like ants do. We'd try to wipe out each other's group[1] and given today's technology we'd succeed!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
In the end, just because it works for a company doesn't mean it works for a society. Companies can fail. They can fight. And they can be selective in who they include. Societies will create the boundaries of fair competition.
I'm just curious whether people who are in favour of the One Party system use arguments or metaphors like these.
That is not true that there would not have been any process.
There would have been a full legal process like any extradition: I.e. extradition would have been requested based on a legal case, this would have been examined by a HK court with the 'accused' able to defend, then that HK court would have made a decision. [That's the actual bill]
What you are suggesting is exactly the same as discussing Seattle independence mentioned by GP, and should be regarded as equally extravagant.
> HK was independent for a while
HK was never, ever been independent.
Gandhi quote:
>My non-violence does not admit of running away from danger and leaving dear ones unprotected. Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence to cowardice. I can no more preach non-violence to a coward than I can tempt a blind man to enjoy healthy scenes. Non-violence is the summit of bravery. And in my own experience, I have had no difficulty in demonstrating to men trained in the school of violence the superiority of non-violence. As a coward, which I was for years, I harboured violence. I began to prize non-violence only when I began to shed cowardice.
It's authoritarian, deplorable, contrary to the common good of the people and in every way wretched.
With that said considering the current movement and public enablement of the PRC and Winnie the Pooh's iron fist, nothing you've said or what we have seen in Hong Kong is a surprise. Never the less, the entire situation is an incredible backwards step for common kind.
Historic genocidal wars are probably still remembered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punti-Hakka_Clan_Wars
Or simply because protesters have made their lives very difficult for the past couple months and they're running out of patience and sympathy. Simple ingroup / outgroup dynamics.
But... As a counter argument, that could be exactly why law enforcement were pulled away this time. If they started cracking down on violent anti-protestors the peaceful protestors could have gotten caught in the mix and it could have escalated rapidly. I'm not defending Honk Kong leadership, but hopefully they're aware of the risk of concentrating armed forces amidst this tension.
If shots are fired it turns into a chain reaction.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/06/02/317996805/...
China apologists frequently cite the higher efficiency of the one party system compared to democracies hampered by due process.
During the Roman Republic, in time of crisis a dictator could be installed (for a 6 month period) to "sort things out".
So, the tradeoff between accountability and efficacy has been around for a while.
In fact, China cannot even claim superiority in terms of economic growth, because their per capita GDP grows much slower than Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan for the same period during high growth (see the graph in [1]).
Hence the argument for higher efficiency is in fact misplaced, mostly based on her accumulated power largely due to huge population. But her population is aging quickly, and so will her productivity and growth.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-state-driven-growth-mode...
Also the news we are discussing demonstrates why the people of Hong Kong need protecting. So questioning that isnt honest either.
It's "fringe" because it's part of China, and even all 7+ million people in HK comprise less than 1% of China. I know many Chinese people, and they do not give a shit about HK's ideas about its own independence. They consider it China, full stop. The example about Seattle "declaring independence" the GP gave is actually quite apt. There is only one way this will play out.
I happen to vehemently disagree with what the PRC is doing, for what it's worth. But reality is reality and this script is going to unfold exactly as everyone thinks it will. In 10 years time I doubt there'll even be a border. Who's going to stop them? Boris Johnson?
Nothing beyond being not 100% sure whether that referred to the entirety of the territory or just the city.
I don't think its fair to count the entirety of China when deciding whether its fringe. Irish unification is 'fringe' in the UK, doesn't stop it being important to a sizable proportion of Northern Ireland. South Sudan independence was probably 'fringe' within greater Sudan, that doesn't mean it wasn't important the South Sudanese.
And I never said any independence bid would be successful, that doesn't stop people wanting it. So yes I agree with your last paragraph.
If the Hong Kong protesters want to avoid a repeat of 1989, they'd do well to study the tactics that were tried back then, among which establishing friendly relations with the soldiers appears to have been particularly effective: "Contact with protesters and residents of Beijing sapped the will of the troops to follow their orders, and the food and water offered to them, in lieu of their absent army rations, further diminished their will to act against the protesters." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insubordination_in_the_PLA_dur...
Seeing this is crazy.
As for diversity, it's a unique mix. Notable quantities of French, British, Americans, Indonesians, Filipinos, Thais, Indians, and locals. Indonesians and Filipinos are obviously insanely marginalized, as domestic helpers, but they were cool to hang with on their 1 day off per week.
You’re going to have a real hard time getting the typical American to buy into this perspective.
The typical American probably sides with the police over protesters in most situations.
The only protesters that can match the police are those with inside support. It's how certain people can demonstrate while carrying rifles without issues, while other unarmed peaceful protesters can be corralled, brutalized, and arrested.
Hong Kong is more or less an island, a small one. China can fill the "1,104-square-kilometre (426 sq mi) territory" with soldiers and police in a heartbeat. Nothing you can do, cops already know the 1000+ leaders of the movement and they will be arrested or killed in the first hours. Etc etc
Not yet.
Do you think it's strange that some of the HK protestors have been waving the flag of their former colonial masters?
Amritsar caused outrage in Britain and changed the whole narrative. It took time, but within a decade British government had lost all moral ground and British attitudes had shifted.
As evil/bad as the situation was; non-violence only helps if someone loses more than they gain by just killing you. In this case it was by losing the moral high-ground that was valued by some British people at least. Sure it probably wasn't decent people among the perpetrators, but the pearl clutchers back home.
Look at how everyone is treating Taiwan. That should tell you enough about how nobody will be willing to compromise anything for the sake of Hong Kong.
What incident are you referring about here?
