131–140 of 398 posts
"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.
These places will also have to figure out what it means to keep infrastructure refreshed in 50 years. It is always a struggle..
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Face is important because it came from a family oriented culture. If you were made to look bad, you'd feel even worse when the rest of your family finds out (Grandparents, relatives would talk negatively about this aka gossip). This morphed into businesses that build on relationships, the Chinese term for that is 'guanxi'. For China, they would 'lose face' if Hong Kong became independent (or Xinjiang or Tibet for tha…
Actually I don't think so. It is much more than losing face. Losing sovereignity in East Asian countries, where nationalism is hyper active, is an attack directly on national identity. The Chinese government now will cease to exist if it yields to independence demands from any of the separationist region. The nationalistic education has been ingrained into society at large, something nobody dares to question.
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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.
Violence, disruption, and foreign flags might be from a minority but they have destroyed any sympathy the mainland opinion may have had towards the movement (and there was sympathy) and I think that they actually help the hardliners in Beijing.
Interesting to contrast this with popular demonstrations in US or France. No windows broken? Burnt city infrastructure? No beaten up police? All so quiet.
But why? If it is the government people protest, but why do people break shop windows and burn someone's car all the time...
It seems to be a lesser kind of terrorism for me: they don't like a country, they hurt properties instead of people.
I am in Verona (Italy) at this time, and I'm in a hotel where some tourists from Shanghai happen to be as well. I'm alone, so I hang out in the lobby a lot. I just engaged in some small talk with some of those tourists, and the discussion somehow shifted to the Hong Kong protests. Basically what they sad is that western culture in Hong Kong clashes with the chinese culture. They don't seem to say that the chinese way…
If anyone else is open to the other point of view, I could use some help. I'm struggling a lot at the moment with how little relevance seems to be given to how significant HK was in defining China's modern identity. How many people actually know how HK came into being? That the supposedly democratic state of Britain who had already violently colonised India, used Indian land and serfs to grow 1000s of tons of Opium t…
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Here on HN, how developed a country is is directly proportional to the quality of train service in that country. Other considerations are too marginal to matter.
Public transport / trains is just one of the most obvious aspects. Of course there are others (public schools, public universities, quality of streets, public healthcare, general safety, food quality, nature, many many more ...). Often they are very much correlated, though. Do I understand you right that you claim that while train service is bad in USA, there are other things / aspects which are better developed in U…
EDIT: To provide a random anecdote, if you've ever known someone who needed an ambulance in the south of Spain you'll know what I mean. ;) The public healthcare services don't exactly have a very positive reputation, though the private ones are relatively cheap.
Random article of an incident in Sweden so apparently it isn't just the experience of my family members: https://www.thelocal.se/20120503/40608
I'd like to find actual data on this but seem to be having difficulty doing so.
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When nearly half the population participates, I dont think you need much ID'ing.
There's over 7 million people in HK, at the largest protest, they estimated around 2 million took part, so not even half. During most protests, that number is significantly lower.
> The MTR is the one technology the Hong Kong protests could not do without, an autonomous fiefdom that the police mostly stay out of. It is neutral territory This is a godsend. During Paris protest earlier this year the gov would just shut down public transports for about 5~10 km around and block main accesses so people couldn’t massively join the protests. At least the mainland gov. didn’t get to touch that I guess…
If you close public transport 5~10km around the protests, there wouldn't be much public transport operating in Paris. Rather there were a handful of closed subway stations, around where the protests were (like Etoile was closed, but not the closest stations). I understand the idea, a stampede in subway corridors would have caused casualties.
Even without using public transportation, you could try to walk from the Louvre to Etoile for instance and get blocked as soon as at Concorde by police barricades. We went to Chatelet/Les Halles during the whole thing, and you would see protesters preparing their masks, helmets etc. and planning their path to the main place to avoid hitting the main police blocks.