81–90 of 155 posts
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I saw the suggestion on twitter that the US and other countries should hand out visas to people from Hong Kong who want to live in a free country (with the hope that the US doesn't continue to decline, from that perspective).
We should go one further and carve out a territory for a New Hong Kong and let them re-build there.
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Read up on Hong Kong history. The people of Hong Kong were under foreign rulers pretty much their entire history. This is one of the reasons why you should always fight for what’s right. Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. They just didn’t bother to begin fighting until they didn’t like their ruler.
Of course it was a colony since... whenever. Speaking as a brit, you're bang on. But given that, what rectitude you suggest I (or they) fight for is unclear. It seems they prefer the UK legacy to the encroaching Chinese one. I'm unsure what you're saying (though I do agree with you about rights and justice, completely).
The protests seem to have become much more than that.
The final form of the protests don't address the frustration of HK residents over living costs.
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We should go one further and carve out a territory for a New Hong Kong and let them re-build there.
That's always been my solution for Israel. Give them a nice hunk of Pacific coast around Oregon/Washington.
(Explaining the joke: that's where the alternate history in _The Yiddish Policemen's Union_ put its post-WW2 Jewish diaspora.)
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They are quite different. Personal take, imagine Scottish English vs American English but 2x that.
If you're talking about spoken, probably the difference is something more like English v German. Individual words can look similar but combine them into a sentence and you probably wouldn't be able to parse it on a first take (if they were transcribed into romanized letters), and there are some grammar differences.
The german grammar is a fair point though. Makes every sentence sound like churchill trying to be annoying on purpose.
It's like English v German, but imagine that German had a bunch of sounds that seem identical to you but are actually different sounds (you just can't hear the difference). Imagine that German Wasser (water) and Wäscher (washer, ish) sounded exactly the same to you, and you couldn't tell the difference. Now imagine that literally every single word had dozens of those identically-sounding-but-actually-different-sounding-to-native-speakers examples.
The issue imo is the increase in tones. Mandarin has 4-5 tones, cantonese has like 6-9. And the tones in Mandarin are much easier to distinguish.
Related: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-officially-declares-that-ho... "U.S. Officially Declares That Hong Kong Is No Longer Autonomous WASHINGTON—The State Department has officially determined that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Wednesday that holds implications for the future of economic ties and could lead to sanctions against China. The State Dep…
Related: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-officially-declares-that-ho... "U.S. Officially Declares That Hong Kong Is No Longer Autonomous WASHINGTON—The State Department has officially determined that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Wednesday that holds implications for the future of economic ties and could lead to sanctions against China. The State Dep…
Not that I disagree with the act, but I love how politicians are trying to frame destroying Hong Kong's economy as supporting "Human Rights and Democracy."
The sad fact of the matter is that Xi has already calculated that and deemed it an acceptable loss in the name of "national security."
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Essentially, yes. Besides China having sovereignty over the city, it has its own currency, government, different law system than China, a border with China, and different passport. In recent years on the rise of Chinese Nationalism, the Chinese government seems to downplay this a lot to eliminate the HKer's local identity and creates an image of HK = China. Culturally, it is also vastly different than China.
What i meant was it was under British rule prior to China. The British ruler was literally appointed by outsiders. From an American perspective it’s more about losing a territory under Allied jurisdiction. From the local perspective it’s about losing independence rights—though they didn’t really have that right under British rule either.
Under the British, while it was true that the governor and many government officials were Brits, a surprising number of them were able to speak fluent Cantonese. They actually took the effort to understand the local culture. You can find many such clips on Youtube.
Nowadays, under Chinese rule, Hong Kongers often get told off by mainland Chinese officials for not speaking Mandarin, and hence Hong Kongers are unpatriotic and seditious. Schools must be forced to switch to teach in Mandarin, and so on.
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What i meant was it was under British rule prior to China. The British ruler was literally appointed by outsiders. From an American perspective it’s more about losing a territory under Allied jurisdiction. From the local perspective it’s about losing independence rights—though they didn’t really have that right under British rule either.
I see, you meant true independence as a nation? Hong Kong has a very complex history and culture about independence. To be brief, majority of Hong Kongers never wanted independence as a country. (It's weird but there was a split of people being pro-China and pro-UK) The thought of Hong Kong independence has been around for long but didn't become major topic and a significant opinion until recent years (after 2014-201…
There’s two way’s to characterize the protests: I don’t like China or I want Democracy.
PRC put strong pressure against Democracy in HK back during British rule, probably because it would set a precedent for after the handover. And despite the last few British governors pushing to increase Democratic processes many efforts for that were stalled by the HK people.
So now that a new governor is in place I fully support movements to increase Democracy, but anything that smells of just an anti-China motivation is just too politically tainted for me to get behind.
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As I genuinely asked in my comment separately in the thread, what practical freedoms are being lost by the everyday person in Hong Kong that would not be considered crimes in the US (or Hong Kong prior to this), for example?
The founding fathers of the US did not write the US constitution with practical freedom in mind. They wrote it with the principles of freedom as sacred. The battles they fought weren't for being able to buy groceries or walk the streets. They fought the battles over things like the right to not being taxed, to not be under the bank of England's monetary regulations, to have their own voice in the political system and…
So is this actually an argument about the influence / authority of China and the extent of their power, or about the specific laws being passed?
Or is it about making sure the 27 years left on the clock are as close to the system that people knew before as possible? Because I don't think the influence of China battle in Hong Kong going to be won, in the long run.
-- edit: btw I equally don't understand (well I do, but for the sake of argument) why China/Xi is so in a rush to accelerate the 27 years left for Hong Kong. If it's going to be reverted to 1 system guaranteed eventually, what's the need to do this right now?
-- further edit: btw I also don't understand why Carrie Lam is so eager to do Beijing's bidding. If she's an independent/educated/Hong Kong native, what's her motivation? Or do they have some dirt on her? If she's worried about being extradited, you would think she'd be most advocating for an independent legal system.