Why so many Chinese students can’t understand the Hong Kong protests

>The finance industry is already planning to exit HK (too volatile)

They have been saying this since 1997 and I have yet to see it happen. In order to have a functioning finance industry, you need people with education and a willingness to move.

Bankers won't move to China because a) personal risk b) no banker I know actually likes staying in China (they always fly back over the weekends) and c) 60% tax rate. And people just don't trust the legal system there. And Hong Kong is the next closest things.

The only bankers that I have seen move from HK to China is when they pay them 10x the salary. Those are usually family offices with private equity money. It just isn't sustainable to do.

Also, Hong Kong provides a lot of financial benefits for mainland Chinese companies. That's why there are so many shell companies in Hong Kong. All those benefits will evaporate if moved elsewhere. Even Singapore is 3-5x more difficult for a Mainlander to open a company. Added to the fact Mainlanders have no sway on the Singaporean government and have a history of cracking down hard on criminals, they are much more reluctant to swap HK for Singapore.

All this talk about the financial industry in HK going down is just wishful thinking. Even Mainlanders are logical when it comes down to business. They won't shot themselves in the foot. That's why they have been showing restrain. It's not because they are afraid of another Tiananmen Sqaure. It's because they are looking at their wallets. How much damage it would do to their own companies.

Both Fang "a communications professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong" and Xiao who "teaches at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information and runs a bilingual Web site called China Digital Times" (a great resource) are commenting on general issues regarding Chinese journalism / media propaganda apparatus doesn't meaningfully elucidate divergent perspectives of netizens on College Daily. The article doesn't deviate from generic all Chinese media is state controlled narrative which while true omits the fact that Chinese student diaspora doesn't exclusive derive information from Chinese sources or even trust Chinese sources, specifically in reference to College Daily which I've seen even die-hard /r/sino tankies dismiss. Instead condescendingly portraying Chinese media readers as "conditioned" to propaganda, "dissociated from truth", "one of the melon-eating masses", "passive onlooker with neither the means nor the interest to know what’s truly going on", deserving of "sympathy" because they're not even deplorable enough like western fringe opinion holders who had the freedom to form their own worldview. A brainwashed monolith.

The headline is accurate in the sense that's it's not factually wrong, but that's the nature of propaganda via omission. Repeat such pattern over many articles and it gives credence to the "rebuttal" that identifies the piece as one of many designed to "orchestrate a defamatory campaign" against China and in particular increasing politically active Chinese students in context of current political climate. I'm going to end my contributions here, but thank you for the discussion.

I have lived in the UK for over 20 years since I was 8, and I have to say I don't understand the Hong Kong riots.

For starters, does any of you even know how it all started? The extradition bill? To do what? To extradite a Hong Kong teen that killed his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan so he can be prosecuted there, at the request of Taiwan! I don't ever see that mentioned anywhere.

Let me say, this video absolutely riled me (even more so than the ones I’ve seen of the rioters getting violent):

https://videos-a.jwpsrv.com/content/conversions/KWwwg9Oc/vid...

Sure, these guys are “peaceful” as in they didn’t hurt anyone, but watch and observe their actions:

1. The guys postures are incredibly aggressive for starters, for me, I would not call that peaceful at all.

2. Once someone took action to stop them, they held their hands up to make it look like they didn’t do anything wrong

3. They have friends specifically to capture the moment when they look like they were provoked

Now taking all of these points into consideration, this is an intentional provocation to have someone take action against them and make themselves look like the good guys. Here is my question to you all, what would you have done in those situations? Forcefully make them stop? Then that makes you the bad guy, and could potentially have you beaten up (let’s look at the number of thugs they have behind them). Call the police? Then the police will look like the bad guys, which is probably their intention anyways. So personally, I do not buy the “protests” being peaceful at all, maybe it was at the start, but there are a lot more violence from these “protesters” that are not being reported.

Not saying you're wrong but you're way too confident on your stance when most people don't even have all the facts aside from cherry-picked bits from biased media (regardless of side). I have been following the protests since the beginning and I seem to remember things were peaceful until bad actors (violent police and hired thugs) came into the picture. There has also been evidence of false flag operations so how would you even know how to pick apart the real protestors from the provocateurs?

I think this narrative is very misleading.

They did complain a lot about how the CCP plunged the country into the largest famine in history because of their incompetence. It was this incompetence that led to the rise of Deng Xiaoping. Mao then launched the Cultural Revolution during which different factions in the CCP fought with each other rather than "keep their head down". At Tiananmen Square in 1976 millions of people, peasants and rich, shouted slogans attacking Mao and the Gang of Four. Deng Xiaoping then launched the economic miracle by reducing CCP involvement in the economy .

To say that the history of modern China is a long, stable period where the people never spoke up and built a powerhouse economy by listening to the directives of the all knowing CCP is historical revisionism at best.