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Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#131

Post by magicsmoke »

blhack wrote: post #128
canada_dry wrote: post #6

What has happened to Hong Kong is a strong canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator for other Chinese territorial disputes [i]. With Hong Kong it was somewhat inevitable but I can't help but imagine how different it would be if the US and EU/Britain (as leads) would have strongly denounced their approach. I suspect in a decade from now the West will be lamenting how Hong Kong was the right opportunity to stifle China's ambi…

> I can't help but imagine how different it would be if the US and EU/Britain (as leads) would have strongly denounced their approach. What? What could the US have done beyond what we did other than all out war? The US response to this was very harsh. We undid 50 years of diplomacy with China, and have started building a sortof SEA equivalent to NATO. Chinese/American relations have probably never been as unfriendly…

I think the dissonance over the US not doing enough is that if the US pulled these moves a decade or two ago, China would have blinked. China not blinking doesn't mean the US isn't doing enough. It means we're living in a world where China doesn't blink anymore. America's absolute influence might still be the same, but its relative influence has fallen.

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#132

Post by dqpb »

> It's like watching a patient with cancer finally die

Or perhaps it’s like police officers bearing down their weight on a man’s chest and neck, forcing all the oxygen out of his lungs and holding them empty for six minutes so the whole world can witness the life slowly drain from his eyes.

Authorities around the world are highly effective at snuffing out human life and freedom.

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#133

Post by AlotOfReading »

8note wrote: post #118
hnarn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ironic, because the United States is not claiming the area as territorial waters belonging to the U.S. China is clearly the "aggressor" in this situation because they are building military installations in an area that was previously not a militarized zone.

The American navy has been going around there for a long time; that's hardly non-militarized. I'm not sure there's a big difference between claiming they're territorial US waters vs claiming that the US gets to decide who's waters they are. In both cases the US has sovereignty over those waters

I'm not aware of the US ever claiming it gets to decide whose waters they are. Can you provide some links for that? I've only seen the US appeal to the convention and various arbitrations on the issue.

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#134

Post by thaumasiotes »

dbcurtis wrote: post #38
canada_dry wrote: post #6

What has happened to Hong Kong is a strong canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator for other Chinese territorial disputes [i]. With Hong Kong it was somewhat inevitable but I can't help but imagine how different it would be if the US and EU/Britain (as leads) would have strongly denounced their approach. I suspect in a decade from now the West will be lamenting how Hong Kong was the right opportunity to stifle China's ambi…

That argument is a lot harder to sell since the Korea and Viet Nam wars. Not that I disagree with you. China does need to be reigned in, and we should have started years ago. But the leadership of the USA was mostly of draftable age during the Viet Nam war, or, like me, did their grade school homework in front of the TV news with Walter Cronkite reading the daily body count.

> China does need to be rei[]ned in, and we should have started years ago.

Why? What would the benefit be? What would the benefit have been?

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#135

Post by srtjstjsj »

chrisco255 wrote: post #130
roughly wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an important point. From a political standpoint, one of the purposes of the defense treaties has been to discourage allies from building up their own militaries. This was an explicit policy in the wake of WW2 to promote both US hegemony, but also to promote stability - the theory being a world with one dominant military power is less likely to see large wars like WW1 and WW2.

Pax Americana, like Pax Britannica before it. Wonder how much longer that can hold?

Until Pax China.

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#136

Post by dmurray »

spectramax wrote: post #73
dmurray wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about geopolitics, it's about economics. China has been extremely pragmatic and results-oriented. When Hong Kong was the most economically successful part of China, they were happy to leave it be and learn some lessons from it. Now the rest of China has largely caught up and it's time for them to make HK more like Shenzhen, rather than the other way around.

Giving that Shanghai stock market trades more than HK, that argument doesn't hold up. China didn't need HK. They did not want a western-aligned population of 7M people within 40km of its borders and instead decided to deal with them with a heavy hand. I think China played their hand too soon and the west is waking up to it.

"Shanghai stock market trades more than HK" is a strange rebuttal to my argument. You presumably mean that's true now, rather than 20 years ago when China decided to go with "one country, two systems" - which is exactly my argument, that Hong Kong is no longer the needed as a moneymaker. Either way, overall stock exchange volume is not a very standard measure of economic activity - at the very least you'd want to weight it per capita.

Of course China is motivated to have Hong Kong aligned with it rather than flirting with the West. Whether the West is "waking up to it" is not so clear to me. The HK riots were a big deal in the Western media for a while but now we've moved on.

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#137

Post by srtjstjsj »

baybal2 wrote: post #83
hnarn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best predictor for future behavior is past behavior: China is testing the waters, in some cases in a quite literal sense (South China Sea), and you're correct that how the world reacts to Hong Kong and the Xinjiang "re-education camps" will be seen as a vital piece of information in the future when deciding on how to proceed with other "problematic" regions: for example Taiwan, which in the case where strong-armi…

I want to say that defence treaties, are a bit special in the context of USA. Why USA has historically entered into so many treaties? They reason is is because USA's constitutional arrangement makes it really hard for the US government to declare a war... on the paper. So, by giving a treaty, USA was giving the strongest assurance that by turning a treaty into its own law, it prevents the chance of anybody in the con…

Has the US entered "so many" treaties?

WWI was caused by an overuse of treaties.

"Declaring" war had meant almost nothing since 1789.

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#138

Post by srtjstjsj »

dbcurtis wrote: post #91
bsanr2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the same generation was in power when we launched our twenty-year War on Terror, and the comparisons to Vietnam that started popping up a decade and a half ago didn't manifest in any sort of wariness to move forward and keep moving forward with our attempted "regime change." If anything, it's that which has changed our willingness to step forward militarily. The conclusion is that we spent our war capital on friv…

The war on terror was not about containing communism. It could not be labeled and dismissed as “anti-communist hysteria”

It was anti-Islamist hysteria. What's the difference?

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#139

Post by souterrain »

blhack wrote: post #128
canada_dry wrote: post #6

What has happened to Hong Kong is a strong canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator for other Chinese territorial disputes [i]. With Hong Kong it was somewhat inevitable but I can't help but imagine how different it would be if the US and EU/Britain (as leads) would have strongly denounced their approach. I suspect in a decade from now the West will be lamenting how Hong Kong was the right opportunity to stifle China's ambi…

> I can't help but imagine how different it would be if the US and EU/Britain (as leads) would have strongly denounced their approach. What? What could the US have done beyond what we did other than all out war? The US response to this was very harsh. We undid 50 years of diplomacy with China, and have started building a sortof SEA equivalent to NATO. Chinese/American relations have probably never been as unfriendly…

This is remarkably confusing to read on my Chinese-manufactured mobile device I bought from an American company.

Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

#140

Post by srtjstjsj »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #69
canada_dry wrote: post #6

What has happened to Hong Kong is a strong canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator for other Chinese territorial disputes [i]. With Hong Kong it was somewhat inevitable but I can't help but imagine how different it would be if the US and EU/Britain (as leads) would have strongly denounced their approach. I suspect in a decade from now the West will be lamenting how Hong Kong was the right opportunity to stifle China's ambi…

We can no longer say "the west" and expect a unified response - brexit, the constant attacks on member nations of NATO by Trump, The Iran deal that Europe still backs but the US doesn't. There's a reason Russia and China are bold right now. EDIT: I get it, it's politically charged, but I remind everyone to discuss, rather than downvote, based on your own political opinion.

That doesn't make sense. Trump is pro Russia and anti China. Chinese facing more heat now than in the past 50 years.
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