HK's Apple Daily raided by 500 officers over national security law

Except enriching them in the long run?

Taiwan importance is its geography. If China is able to control Taiwan it would not have any restriction for its shipping lanes and military. Its a much more important asset in the long run compared to HK.

It was late.

PRC scholars warned new HK generations would culturally drift 10+ years ago. The fact that HK has existed in a national security state of exception for 20+ years, while simultaneously operating as a western spy hub outside of Chinese purview is fundamentally an untenable situation that no sane country should accede to.

Reality is PRC who has always had FULL legal authority over issues of foreign policy under 1C2S post handover and was unprecedentedly patient with HK, while HKers have never demonstrated reasonable accommodation for "one country" interests. Apple Daily's Jimmy Lai met with Pompeo & Pence during height of US/PRC rivalry (read: treason) is just one of the many symptoms of why this crack down was overdue.

Newer HK generations growing up on western textbooks were never going to be loyal. Currently tensions could have been mitigated if PRC rammed through patriotic education and NSL 10+ years ago instead of naively assuming an increasingly irrelevant HK relative to mainland would passively accept loss of privilege and integrate as just another mainland city. Expect newer gen of HKers under PRC cultivation to actually align with PRC interests. For CCP, resetting HK culture is the anecdote that was long recognized but administered too late.

> It doesn't sound like fatalism at all. Recognizing and accepting reality - things as they actually are - isn't the same thing as being fatalistic. As opposed to being wildly delusional about the context for example, which is the guiding philosophy of the do-something-to-stop-China cohort. You can't stop China as they imagine it and thinking that it's possible is quite irrational.

Accepting reality? Years of life in China will make anybody lose touch with one, especially living in the most Potemkin town of them all.

> It's why whenever people talk about ganging up on China, they're always extremely vague about it. That's because it's entirely bunk. Do something! What? Something! Do a thing! Which thing? The thing! It's identical to bumper stickers that (used to) say: Save Tibet, it's largely empty virtue signaling or wishful thinking. It's not realistic.

First, the West has a giant arsenal of means not simply "to do something", but outright destroy China as a state. The West remains the preeminent political, military, economic power of the world by a giant extend, way more than China, Russia, Iran + 10 other rouge states combined. You don't "contain" your enemy, you defeat him, this is how the West needs to start thinking.

— It's a giant power, the West only needs to use it. The West has a way more means than China has to do anything to the West. The direct military attack being only one of many things possible on the list. It's just the Western unwillingness to admit that it can do something, because admitting to it will be be followed by a compulsion of doing so.

West's internal problems are a malaise of heart, while its problem with China is a malaise of mind. The material problems can be fixed, but what's being kept created by your own mind cannot: the Western fixation on impotent "realpolitik China strategy" is one of this kind, and its fixation on China's economic strength is another.

China as a state entity existing in a physical world is much a lesser threat, and danger than the China which exists in the heads of Western elites, and all kinds of wormtongue "strategy advisers", Kissingers, and co.

I'm fully agreeing on the point that the West can't win without a dramatic change happening inside their heads first. For the West to defeat China, first it will need to defeat itself, and own weaknesses, all what holds it back.

Foreign policy making wormridden by "political strategists," pathological addiction to backstabbing of critical allies, refusal to look at politics from classic military dimension;

Elite culture dominated by defeatist people selling wholesale "China model" koolaid like Tim Cook, and Sundarajan Pichai, universal hostility to useful business, and industry by political backstabbers, useful idiots, and wanton saboteurs-profiteers;

The giant Trump electorate, you will have to find a way to live along with these people, but that doesn't mean surrendering to them! Propaganda of inaction, and isolationism exactly of this kind led to US staying out of WW2 until it was tool late;

> It was late.

> PRC scholars warned new HK generations would culturally drift 10+ years ago.

Data suggests that the drift of HK generations [1] in the past two decades are swayed by what happened in China: Hong Kong people identified themselves more as Chinese during 2008 (especially during the Beijing Olympics), less so after being denied universal suffrage despite promises in the Basic Law (the Umbrella Movement in 2013), and when Hong Kong people started to accept TikTok (Douyin) and the like from China, Hong Kong once again diverged from China after 2019 (the extradition Law, its opposing protests, and the Covid-19 outbreak starting in Wuhan).

[1]: https://www.pori.hk/pop-poll/ethnic-identity-en/q001.html?la...

> The fact that HK has existed in a national security state of exception for 20+ years... For CCP, resetting HK culture is the anecdote that was long recognized but administered too late.

What you said explains a lot why Hong Kong people, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and others alike, want to distance themselves from China: CCP does not want diversity and inclusion, that the perceived security (of the party) trumps everything else. CCP wants control, not better governance or de facto long term security, which requires leaving minorities alone. To govern by doing nothing that goes against nature, as in Taoism, is an ancient tradition of China that CCP does not get.

> Apple Daily's Jimmy Lai met with Pompeo & Pence during height of US/PRC rivalry (read: treason) is just one of the many symptoms of why this crack down was overdue.

This explains very well what I mean.

The meeting of Jimmy Lai with Pompeo and Pence did not pose any material threat to national security or the security of CCP—after all, in this information age, the US can learn what they need to learn without such meetings, so the meeting is largely symbolic, and to reduce such information flow CCP can only rely on a Great-Firewall-style censorship in Hong Kong, which is considered unacceptable by many. To consider such immaterial meetings as treason shows sheer insecurity (paranoid) of CCP, and this insecurity is what brings its de factor insecurity, because it is worrying too much and overreacting.