Chinese military entering Shenzen, just across the border with Hong Kong

I can understand Middle Eastern and muslim majority governments taking that view. I don't understand the ordinary Muslim believer that is prepared to go out and protest against America or Europe thinking that way. Why should they care? After all the reasons you give for treading carefully against China all apply to the US and the west just as much.

Take Pakistan. It gets billions in military and economic aid from the west and does a lot of trade with the US and Europe, but protests against the west are common. I really don't get what it is about China that, in the eyes of the Muslim man in the street, gives it a free pass to mass intern and re-educate muslims into not being muslims.

Why aren't we talking more about the history of HK's creation, namely the Opium wars? I suspect that the majority of people that feel strongly about China's behaviour don't actually have any idea what the British did to China in the middle of the 19th century, namely: in the style of a mafia get 10s of millions of Chinese addicted to Opium and then go to war with them when China tried to put an end to the trade. It is by all today's measures what I'm sure the majority of people would call evil.

I am of course not at all advocating today's Chinese violence. I just don't understand how any of us have a leg to stand on in feeling outraged. This is the world, the so-called modern world, that, by using mobile phones and modern medicine, we've implicitly signed up for. HK is but one example of the price of modernity. What if native Americans or indigenous Australians rose up in the same way, asking for their land back? Or Indians and Africans rose up asking for their natural resources and slave labour back?

The real "crime" here is that we're so morally bankrupt and out of touch with history that all we can do is watch and tweet hashtags. Globalisation is here to stay. The quality of Western life is fundamentally dependent on Chinese labour, manufacturing and technology. We don't get to reap the benefits of that and at the same time arrogantly and unreflectively denounce their political policies. And to repeat, this is not a justification of China's recent stance on HK or any of its other foreign or domestic policies.

Perhaps we should boycott everything Chinese? Of course that is never going to happen. But we can at least help each other remember how exactly the West came to be. Though of course we don't because we're the top dogs and no one is forcing us to. Which I might argue is the true source of the outrage that most of us feel in hearing the news from HK: outrage that something is actually forcing us to reflect on our own circumstances. And what better scapegoat to deflect those difficult emotions than a quintessentially foreign, little understood far far-away culture.

Xi is very much a dictator, but he also needs money to maintain his dictatorship. HK for all its faults and bads is still quite important to the Chinese economy.

That's why we haven't become Xinjiang, IMO.

I find this quite interesting:

"In the Joint Declaration, the PRC Government stated that it had decided to resume the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong (including Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories) with effect from 1 July 1997, and the UK Government declared that it would hand over Hong Kong to the PRC with effect from 1 July 1997. The PRC Government also declared its basic policies regarding Hong Kong in the document.

In accordance with the "one country, two systems" principle agreed between the UK and the PRC, the socialist system of PRC would not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), and Hong Kong's previous capitalist system and its way of life would remain unchanged for a period of 50 years until 2047." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-British_Joint_Declaration