idlewords... this won't have any liberal bias at all.
What would be the more conservative take here?
Blocking roads hurts small businesses more. Large businesses are more likely to be opportunistic; why would they care?
A Walk in Hong Kong
121–130 of 398 posts
Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a silly analysis because the conflict is fundamental. China wants to integrate Hong Kong. The protestors want independence. Neither side really wants an indefinite half-hearted autonomy, although the protestors are pushing to preserve it for as long as possible. Your very reaction shows where your sympathies lie, which is very laudable, but are you willing to engage in 'conflict resolution' over your own core…
The protesters are not calling for independence. They have five specific demands, which boil down to "uphold the law as written", including the right (guaranteed in the Basic Law) to elect their government.
It seems that the Basic Law is more subtle than that (Article 45):
" The Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be selected by election or through consultations held locally and be appointed by the Central People's Government.
The method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and in accordance with the principle of gradual and orderly progress. The ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures."
Regarding "independence", when some protesters attack symbols of the Chinese state (inc. flag) and fly foreign flags they are sending a muddled message...
Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching. Yet they couldn’t control a band of wandering, illiterate horsemen. The human spirit can never be controlled.
Except they did. The horsemen got fat on Chinese food and used to Chinese comforts and culture. They stopped riding and became Chinese (just not Han Chinese). China today claims the whole of Mongolia as theirs.
They don't claim the territory of Outer Mongolia, do they? Only Inner Mongolia is part of China, as far as I know.
Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#124This piece is quite accurate - it really makes you feel like you're in Hong Kong during the protests. References aside, as a US citizen in Hong Kong there are some things that I respect immensely and some things that really get on my nerves about HK. I greatly respect the people and the cause. It reminds me of that one poem - > Do not go gentle into that good night. > Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The pe…
What exactly is Asian culture?
It is inscrutable!
Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#125"All that prelude is to say, coming in to the Hong Kong protests from a less developed country like the United States is disorienting." This sentence got me hooked. It must be so alien to the average American that there are more developed countries/cities out there.
I wouldn't put Honk Kong in that list though as much as I like the people and the city. I've been a few times and the infrastructure looks like it's falling apart. Electricity wires are hanging haphazardly, alleyways are dirty, and most facades of buildings are straight out of the third-world. The contrast between high-end boutiques interspaced with tiny mom-and-pop shops selling second hand stuff is a little surreal…
What you described is the exact impression I got when I first travelled to New York :)
"Is it supposed to be this dirty?"
Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#126The Hong Kong government/China have been completely inept at managing the housing situation and it is nearly at a breaking point. It is refreshing to read an article on the current situation that raises the issue.
'One of the deeper causes of the present crisis of legitimacy is the housing crisis in Hong Kong, another way in which the government has failed the people it is meant to represent, and you can see it in the extraordinary density of apartment buildings, each unit pock-marked with an air conditioner, tiny living spaces with some of the highest rents in the world.'
Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes we should be able to have a discussion, but I'd ask you to read the article and then read the comment. Does the comment look like it is responding to the article, or attempting to open a dialogue with the other side ... or does it look like a generic attempt at point scoring for the "pro-mainland" side? If "abcdefghijklmn3" is really keen to engage with the HN community then I take back what I said. But we both k…
I didn't read the whole article because it is excessively wordy, but it romanticizes the protesters and the summary at the end is incomplete. If you have the courage, please look further; this is more nuanced than your mischaracterization of me.
Read it slower.
Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The protesters are not calling for independence. They have five specific demands, which boil down to "uphold the law as written", including the right (guaranteed in the Basic Law) to elect their government.
It seems that the Basic Law is more subtle than that (Article 45): " The Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be selected by election or through consultations held locally and be appointed by the Central People's Government. The method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and in accordan…
By definition, at a mass protest you're going to get all kinds of people. The five demands represent a broad consensus across a very large slice of Hong Kong society.
You can get a lot of attention bringing a foreign flag to a protest, but as Hong Kongers know it is a very small contingent of people who do it. One of them is a well-known, tiny, sweet old lady who got attacked by police last weekend.
Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#129Re: A Walk in Hong Kong
#130This piece is quite accurate - it really makes you feel like you're in Hong Kong during the protests. References aside, as a US citizen in Hong Kong there are some things that I respect immensely and some things that really get on my nerves about HK. I greatly respect the people and the cause. It reminds me of that one poem - > Do not go gentle into that good night. > Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The pe…
This is a silly analysis because the conflict is fundamental. China wants to integrate Hong Kong. The protestors want independence. Neither side really wants an indefinite half-hearted autonomy, although the protestors are pushing to preserve it for as long as possible. Your very reaction shows where your sympathies lie, which is very laudable, but are you willing to engage in 'conflict resolution' over your own core…
This is just plainly inaccurate. There is a spectrum of desired outcome among protesters, from a China that simply better honors the One Country, Two Systems mantra, to outright Independence, and I'd say that most protesters align with the former, but include true free and fair elections, as opposed to the CCP's version in which they have pick the handful of candidates from which Hong Kongers can freely and fairly choose. Many of those that advocate for Independence seem to be called offs from that camp, who have lost all hope that Beijing might actually honor its agreement.
The problem here is that the CCP has created its own interpretation of vocabulary that is otherwise universally accepted and Britain (and the US) failed to account for that and put in place the protections that would have forestalled such aggressive dismantling of Hong Kong's civic framework pre-handover.