‘A Form of Brainwashing’: China Remakes Hong Kong(nytimes.com) |
‘A Form of Brainwashing’: China Remakes Hong Kong(nytimes.com) |
All that is gone.
Head over to the South China Morning Post and see the comments in the articles. All dominated by mainland Chinese, possibly working for the central government. Companies are leaving in droves, taking valuable people with them. Schools are being told to teach National Security Law to kids as young as 5. Even international schools are facing the challenge of allowing discussion in the classroom, under the risk of breaking the NSL.
Last week, HK won a medal in fencing at the Olympics. During the medal ceremony, at a packed shopping mall, many people booed the Chinese anthem. They were deemed to be breaking the NSL and were arrested. FOR BOOING THE ANTHEM.
https://apnews.com/article/2020-tokyo-olympics-sports-arrest...
The National Security Law also prohibits any kind of chants during (now non-existent) protests. People then found a creative way to protest by holding out empty signs in the streets - turns out they're outlawed now too. Yes, empty signs break the National Security Law.
This city has been destroyed in the span of months. It's depressing and heart-breaking. I am moving out with my family next summer.
If you’re leaving to the US, can I ask how you’re going about it? My email is in my profile if you don’t want to post here. I’m trying to leave as well but my fiancée is facing what looks like a year or two long immigration process.
It’s a bit of a shame that the U.S. government passes so many proclamations of support or “it’s dangerous in HK” statements, but makes it hard to actually return.
I hope the UK visa (and other safe havens?) is quick & easy enough?
I read an article the other day that CCP is not surprisingly taking advantage to get party members (e.g. spies) in so I really hope that doesn't um up the process.
The US is making this mistake with Afghanis but seems like there is enough political pressure now that at least we're getting them to a safer intermediary country. Not quick enough though.
It's our moral responsibility, just as it is UK's after their colonization and then abdication of power.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-star...
I don't like many of the things the Hong Kong government is doing, but I can understand why they feel they need to do it.
The Hong Kong government isn't doing anything. It's all the CPG.
So, if you're not even a citizen of China and you're sitting in Europe or the USA and you make some critical post about China to such a degree that the Chinese government deems it "subversive" and you then make the mistake of transiting the Hong Kong airport, you can be arrested and sent to the Chinese mainland for trial.
Interestingly, Qatar has a similar law but it's more limited in scope at least. If however you have a job in Qatar, I'd highly suggest you don't say anything negative about Qatar or the royal family, even on a Facebook post while in a completely different country. People can and have been arrested for this.
Also, Qatar is one of the few countries that require an exit visa to leave the country so think twice about working there regardless of that.
But I digress. I think it's fair to say that any notion of Hong Kong independence or sovereignty is a thinly-veiled illusion at this point.
I have permanent residency and had planned to make HK my long-term home; those plans have evaporated. My friends who've been there even longer than me - many of them from the colonial days - are in the same boat, trying to work out how to sell property they thought they'd always hold and decide where to set up what are effectively completely new lives.
At the same time, I feel like this sense of melancholy is almost fraudulent, because I have an option, unlike a lot of the people I know.
I can just leave; that avenue isn't available to the lady who's sold flowers on the corner outside my flat for longer than I've been there, or to my local friends whose families didn't take part in the pre-1997 passport arbitrage or who were born too late to get a BNO.
Their entire way of life is fundamentally changing in a way they have no control over, and it's heartbreaking.
I highly recommend Greg Girards albums (esp the ones from Kowloon days): https://www.instagram.com/gregforaday/
It’s interesting to live long enough to see a (relatively) free and open society like Hong Kong get consumed by an authoritarian country that is growing more bold every year.
Under the guidelines, students as young as six years old are expected to learn the names of the four offences under the national security law – subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces – as well as the national flag and anthem and the city’s law enforcement agencies. Schools have also been advised to call police under “grave or emergency” situations involving pupils’ staging campus protests, displaying slogans or forming human chains, while teachers were told not to approach the national security law as a debatable matter.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education/article/312320...
The rise in HK liberal values among youth itself was engineered via "insidious" introduction of political education by UK to influence the city's overton window post handover. Curriculum under colonial rule was much more apolitical. Hence why PRC tried so hard to introduce patriotic education to counter such influence. CCP knows better than anyone that education is the greatest propaganda tool of them all. There was early recognition that new generations of HKers would be lost to "foreign" influence ~10 years ago when HK perception of Mainland was highest. Culture war are long wars. The situationw as never tenable. Whether it's insidious brainwashing or mental decolonialzation is matter of perspective, but propaganda works. The HK youths of tomorrow will be sympathetic to PRC / One Country interests. Which for a Chinese city is arguably the way things ought to be.
We need to value individual freedoms and protect them at every turn to retain free societies. As for China, protecting and returning self-governance to Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan is an important human rights battle that the rest of the world needs to more actively engage on. Right now, it seems like everyone is on the sidelines letting all of it happen.
Not that it is positive from a personal liberties standpoint, but in that sense that it is an incredible strategic asset. Imagine if the second world war had been fought today in the era of entertainment journalism, twitter reactionism, and professional punditry. It would be laughable. The war effort would stall before it began.
My grandfather talks to me about how he would enthusiastically walk the streets with his friends after school looking for chewing gum and cigarette wrappers in order to pull the aluminum foil out of the discarded packaging and send the resulting accumulated metal scraps to recycling centers to be made into fighter planes. Things like that would never happen today.
25% the country would insist that Hitler doesn't actually exist, 25% would say the Axis powers are actually doing the right thing and that Pearl Harbor was deserved, 25% would maintain that all calls for intervention are propaganda from the military industrial complex looking to line their pockets at the expense of the public purse, and the remaining 25% would be branded war-mongerers by everyone else.
China does not have that problem. Whatever the government in Beijing wants, ~1.4 billion humans also genuinely want.
I live in Hong Kong for over 3X years.
Feel free to ask me questions about Hong Kong (I am monitoring replies via RSS feed).
If you are a existing target/enemy of CCP, you will probably be grabbed secretly (happens before all these laws introduced but probably not that frequent) or grabbed publicly under "diversion" in NSL (most commonly used excuse).
If you are a citizen of a strong democratic country (e.g US, UK, Australia, Japan...), you should be fine for this few months. (I can only dare to predict the next few months)
If you are a citizen of a weaker democratic country (e.g Taiwan, some smaller Europe countries), you should avoid visiting. Not saying you will be immediate or imminent danger but no point risking it (depends on your purposes).
Since the big local press companies like Apple Daily are forced to be shutdown or scared away, corruption start spreading. Accidents and human errors become more covered up / under-reported. (e.g. deaths after vaccine shots, MTR station could be lethal accidents, murders rate raising)
There is less to no feedback once the powerful people (not just the government, local big companies too) misbehave accidentally or intentionally. I recommend against visiting HK unless your purposes are worth the increases risks.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-security-poll-ex...
2. China realizes this is a serious advantage and want to arrest foreign dissidents when they transfer flights in China. But no one transfers flight in any Chinese territories except in...Hong Kong, with its international airport.
3. China pressured the HK government to pass a security law that allows HK government to arrest anyone on behalf of PRC for extradition purposes, even for transferring flights.
4. The HK civilians revolted against the law for obvious reasons.
5. PRC flipped the table, suppressed HK, declared the Sino-British Joint Declaration to be invalid, and changed all the HK government's security officials to ones from the mainland. Oh, and the brainwashing starts.
Meanwhile, Meng Wanzhou is relaxing in her multimillion dollar mansion in Vancouver arguing Huawei has no ties to the PRC. roll eyes
The whataboutism and misdirection in your response invalidates any point you may have buried in there. Just... stop.
Humans have rights. The sooner China grows the fuck up and comes to terms with that basic tenet of civilization, the better things will be for all of humanity.
The government had a very strong stranglehold on what information the population received. Today that is not the case, and there are very good reasons for it, but in the event that world war three occurred, it would put the West at a severe disadvantage.
World War Three is a dramatic thought, but it isn't even happening and the West is already feeling the pain of this situation. Destabilizing election and covid misinformation being spewed by China and Russia are prime examples.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler foolishly declaring war against the US were the main reasons there was a great deal of support for the war.
>...About 60% of US WW2 soldiers were drafted, not volunteers.
It is misleading to put out that statistic without giving the context. The reason there weren't more volunteers is that the US stopped allowing most volunteers and just told people to wait to be called for the draft:
>...On December 5, 1942, presidential Executive Order 9279 closed voluntary enlistment for all men from the ages of 18 to 37 for the duration of the war, providing protection for the nation's home front manpower pool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Sta...
You don't fight a modern war with patriotism - you may find a million soldiers ready to die for your country, but without weapons, fuels, and food, that's what they will do - die.
The comparison with modern America doesn't really work - nobody in the US is thinking of scrapping aluminum, precisely because the country's so rich that it can fight local warlords across the world, while its citizens barely even noticing it.
US nuclear weapon stockpile will only be enough to neutralise just one military superpower.
A country with resources, and economy to survive the first strike, can realistically rebuild, and come back with vengeance.
I always retold my own variation on the Einstein's quote on WW3 as "WW3 will be started with nuclear weapons, but will be ended with trench warfare"
Well that's not true. And it's especially not true with the new ICBM fuses and bomber launched stand-off missiles. The newly equipped icbms are an approx. 3x multiplier compared to having the same number of weapons a decade ago.
Which frees up weapons to be shifted either to new targets, or from strategic use to potential tactical use, with the new lower adjustable yields.
So even WW3 trench warfare has a good chance of still being nuclear warfare.
Collectivist Asian cultures can definitely manage separation of powers and democracy.
I don't think that's true at all.
Most of the Middle-Eastern dictators are "right wing" and have no goal apart from seizing and holding onto power.
On the communist side, while that would be the case for many leaders, both Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro come to mind as exceptions. Keeping it strictly to "CCP-style" communism, Wen Jiabao jumps out as someone who saw the CCP beauracracy as a positive means to an end.
What do you mean?