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

latimes.com

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

#311

Post by pimmen »

roboys wrote: post #302
pimmen wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood then why the Chinese are against democracy. If everyone is happy and can't imagine a better government wouldn't they just elect the CCP every time?

If a country is not ready for Democracy with the necessary amount of development/safeguards, this can be a disaster. Like installing an internet connected Windows XP on your network with no updates, it introduces tremendous attack vectors that established actors/economies (UK, France, US, Germany) will be all to happy to exploit.

And when is a country ready for democracy? Why was Taiwan ready for democracy decades ago but Shanghai is not?

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

#312

Post by jialutu »

entrynode wrote: post #293
jialutu wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither I nor any of my family have been tried in China (I am guessing you haven't either), so I cannot comment on the legal system, but in reality, the legal system in the UK is not perfect either. There was a really good book released 2018 about how the legal system is broken here, if you are interested, it's a really good read: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Barrister-Stories-Law-Broken... Onto the topic of the e…

what is the relevance of the UK legal system here? The discussion is about China Secondly, it could easily be argued that a legal extradition route would be a lot easier than secretly kidnapping and disappearing people over the border. Why do you think it would be easier to kidnap?

Why is the UK legal system relevant here? Well, it's really not, but I am just comparing it to a legal system that I am familiar with, which is a bit of a joke as well; I am happy to hear how the legal system works where you are from if you are willing to tell. Additionally, the Chinese legal system uses civil law, which is based on the Roman system that is used throughout Europe, I mean if I had a spin of it in the UK, can make it look like a horrible system, even though it works.

As for what's easier, let's look at it this way. For me to kidnap someone, I can just find where they are staying, break into said place and then take them away; if I am super careful, I will do it when there is no one around. For me to create a legal extradition route, then I would need to look into your history, financial dealings etc, find out somewhere that looks dodgy, and try to use that as evidence; sometimes I cannot even use that as evidence given it may not even be committed in China. Remember, Al Capone was sentenced not due to the other crimes he committed (due to lack of evidence) but rather due to his tax evasions, so proving something legally when you haven't done it is very hard. If given that you can just go around "kidnapping and disappearing people" as you have stated, why would you want to bother create the legal route right?

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

#313

Post by Paradigma11 »

dragonsh wrote: post #224
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> British kept it the same without granting freedom or democracy Well they tried. Shortly after the Chinese revolution, HK was receiving an influx of refugees from China. Mostly well educated and skilled people. Britain was moving to bring in democratic reforms in the 1950s. China threatened to invade to "liberate" the territory if such reforms continued. https://qz.com/279013/the-secret-history-of-hong-kongs-still..…

> Well they tried. Shortly after the Chinese revolution, HK was receiving an influx of refugees from China. Mostly well educated and skilled people. Britain was moving to bring in democratic reforms in the 1950s. China threatened to invade to "liberate" the territory if such reforms continued. They didn't try but abandoned any efforts due to self interest of profits and economic extraction from a colony. The article…

"Liao Chengzhi, a senior Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong affairs, said in 1960 that China "shall not hesitate to take positive action to have Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Territories liberated" should the status quo (i.e. colonial administration) be changed." seems rather clear on that matter. Naturally the UK also had additional other interests but democratic reform was off the table.

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

#314

Post by PunchTornado »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #30

I think a lot of people who were born in the west don't understand that, when you're very poor, economic circumstances matter more than political freedom. After all, having money (or not) affects what you can or cannot do far more than whoever's in charge. Chinese people today have lived through an economic miracle. If I lived there I doubt I'd criticize their system, especially considering people still can remember…

a lot of lies in these paragraphs, like Ukraine being the poorest country in Europe.

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

#315

Post by shkkmo »

dirtyid wrote: post #254
shkkmo wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Decontextualizing the nature of the interview and soundbite into a headline is not responsible journalism IMO No, not particularly. However, having read both the contents and the piece the and summary of the "rebuttal", I find the headline sufficiently accurate. If find the headline more accurate that your attempt to characterize it as "the kind of headline one would engineer to dismiss Chinese perspectives" >as fo…

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 f…

Calling something propaganda by omission is still not a rebuttal, especially when that rebuttal also fails to provide any of the supposedly "omitted" facts.

You can't just ignore things you disagree with because they are biased.

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

#316

Post by _tik_ »

I think the Chinese have different point of view about the protest. The lack of support is not because of the CCP propaganda. The Mainland Chinese view about Hong Kong in the current protest environment is not any different from what the Mainland Hong Kong for the past few years

The view in The Mainland Chinese is HK ppls are racist and snobbish towards Mainland Chinese . Which is If you spoken to HK peoples. That is not far from reality. Here a couple of links to illustrate https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-16828134 https://qz.com/442887/how-hong-kong-is-different-from-china-...

At the same time Mainland Chinese look at hk problems is an economic problem. Due to insecurity of the rising china and inequality created since the British policy.

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

#317

Post by nailer »

liuliu wrote: post #175
nailer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Chinese economic gain was due to the US government opening up relations with the Chinese government as a way of countering the Soviet Union. I'm not sure how much credit the Chinese Communist Party deserves for that.

There are certain ironies. I don't think you can attribute the initial growth in 1980s to the U.S. investments. The initial growth in 1980s was largely driven by Hong Kong and Taiwan investments.

How did HK investment affect PRC? Through Shenzen becoming a commercial hub?

What about TW? I'm not seeing the connection to the PRC there.

Money wouldn't have flown into PRC (and it would have collapsed with the rest of the communism) if the US hadn't opened up investment.

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

#318

Post by mcv »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #30

I think a lot of people who were born in the west don't understand that, when you're very poor, economic circumstances matter more than political freedom. After all, having money (or not) affects what you can or cannot do far more than whoever's in charge. Chinese people today have lived through an economic miracle. If I lived there I doubt I'd criticize their system, especially considering people still can remember…

> "I think a lot of people who were born in the west don't understand that, when you're very poor, economic circumstances matter more than political freedom."

While this is true, I think those improved economic circumstances will eventually create a need for more political freedom. Chinese people already make occasional demands of their government, and that will only become more common. I think that as China grows more prosperous, it will eventually also have to become more free.

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

#319

Post by csomar »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #30

I think a lot of people who were born in the west don't understand that, when you're very poor, economic circumstances matter more than political freedom. After all, having money (or not) affects what you can or cannot do far more than whoever's in charge. Chinese people today have lived through an economic miracle. If I lived there I doubt I'd criticize their system, especially considering people still can remember…

> The finance industry is already planning to exit HK (too volatile), and China can kill the rest of their economy. Rich HKers will leave.

What makes you certain of that? HK did attract more billionaires/rich people in the last few years despite the volatility.

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

#320

Post by blade123 »

pimmen wrote: post #255
markus_zhang wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I pretty much agree with you. It's very difficult to rule a large country as China and Chinese people generally respect that. Also like you said, the failure of those color revolutions just showed other people how important stable is.

I've never understood then why the Chinese are against democracy. If everyone is happy and can't imagine a better government wouldn't they just elect the CCP every time?

> can't imagine a better government

As an American, I sometimes wonder if it is too dogmatic to treat democracy as the end all be all of governments.

As I understand it, democracy refers to a heuristic for solving the problem of reaching consensus in a decision making scenario in a system of multiple agents each having a differing opinion. In this heuristic, every agent has the right to vote on an issue in order to influence the consensus. (America is a republic so we vote on other agents to do the voting on our behalf rather than the issues themselves.)

Computer scientists can come up with all sorts of different ways of tackling the consensus problem. For example, one strategy is to choose the agents with the most information about the system (most educated) and treat their opinions as more important when reaching consensus. (As society advances and modeling societal problems become more sophisticated, solutions may require people with increasingly more domain knowledge.)

Although variations of such strategies are probably not democracies, I don't think they are necessarily inferior, if as a heuristic when tried out, are actually effective.

If there's a formal proof that democracy is, in fact, the best government, I'm open to hearing it though.

When people say they want democracy, don't they often mean more specifically that they want rule of law / due process? Is it not possible to have both a government that have characteristics that make it authoritarian / not democratic but also have rule of law?

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