Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

2. Violence against Pro government folk is bad. However there has also been a lot of documented instances of Pro government forces being dressed as protestors and sparking violence.

From what I've seen it all started remarkably peaceful and had since been escalated to a position where the government has free rein. Not something the protestors wanted.

The rule as written very obviously (at least to me) does NOT prohibit making public political statements in support of particular political groups and processes, actively and instensively advocating for or against certain policies or parties, using props to do so, explicitly condemning policies of certain governments, being a politician or candidate or pundit opinion-maker yourself and expressing strong political agendas to others, etc. It does seem to cover certain forms of expressing these statements (e.g. profanity and insults would fall under the prohibiting language) but not the political opinion as such.

An explicit prohibition against "offending certain groups of the public" is inherently assumed to include demographic groups but exclude political opinions, governments and individual politicians; so shouting "Government of X is horrible and their leader Y is evil" does not violate such a rule in any way whaotsover; that's legitimate political opinion; it's unalienable right of everyone to believe and communicate such things if they want to. Criticizing and insulting policies and political organizations simply can't be offensive in the way that insulting individuals or groups of people can be; if someone says that a statement of "stand with Hong Kong" or "stand with united China" hurts their feelings, then that's probably their (valid) opinion but it doesn't make that statement offensive or insulting no mater if someone claims that, statements of such format simply aren't offensive no matter what political group they support. "Fight for faith, stand with ISIS" or "Fight for man-boy love rights, stand with pedophiles" are justifiably unpopular slogans which would/should raise some eyebrows but they aren't offensive or insulting.

well.... maybe you can make that argument.... but i think that is beyond the scope of the original intent.

If you look at the recent US-led debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the results of all the Arab Spring protests, I think it's fairly obvious that you can't just take a people with no background and hard-fought experience in governing themselves through elections and say poof, you're good. The west tends to forget this - but you have the legacy of Greece and Rome from thousands of years in the past; The Magna Carta started to limit monarchial authority in England beginning in 1215; The French had not one but a whole series of revolutions from the late 1700's through the 1800's. And yet, in between, there were decades and centuries of backslides into fiefdoms and dictatorships and absolute monarchies; even when progress was made, it was incremental - giving political say first to landed aristocracy and clergy, then men, then women. Human progress almost never goes in a straight line, and sometimes, slow and steady and making sure you build a base of support in the general population for the change you're making can work better than monumental sudden changes the populace may not be ready for (look at the different paths, for instance, the acceptance of gay rights and abortion have taken in the US).

Also, keep in mind that China's growth has really only taken off since the mid-to-late 90's. That's less than one generation. Look at the path that comparable economies in Asia took who developed much earlier. Korea's economic miracle took off in 1960, but it was basically ruled by military dictatorships in all but name until 1987. Taiwan saw it's main burst of economic growth in the 60's and 70's, but it was also ruled as a dictatorship by the KMT since they lost the Chinese Civil War. In fact, the first opposition party was not formed until 1986, and martial law, which had been in effect since 1949, was not lifted until 1987, a year before Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai Shek's son and successor, passed away. Singapore's government all during its economic miracle was famously authoritarian.

China's the most populous countries on this planet. I just tend to think that things like this take time, that in fact, sometimes it works out a little better with a certain base level in the population at large. Also, overwhelming consensus in the foreign policy establishment always seems to be wrong - they were wrong in the 90's about the path and speed that liberalization would occur, and now that everyone concurs that it will never happen....well, I tend to think that they might be wrong there too.