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Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

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Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#151

Post by RankingMember »

stallmanite wrote: post #132
RankingMember wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we really think that armed citizens would have a chance against the current US military? Weaponry has come pretty far since the days the 2nd amendment was created.

I used to think this way. Then I saw what our boys went through doing house-to-house fighting in Iraq. The rural areas of the US are way more heavily armed than the Iraqis were circa 2005. Not to mention the amount of ammo and guns that right-wingers have been stockpiling since the Obama administration. (Perhaps for misguided reasons but nonetheless it happened) It would be a bloodbath.

The ratio of casualties would certainly be the closest in house-to-house combat, but who's to say that's how it would go down? Civilians don't have air power or much of anything that would be effective against armored vehicles. Theoretically a few tanks could cruise through a neighborhood and level it.

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#152

Post by verttii »

salawat wrote: post #70
chvid wrote: post #59

Does these protest still have broad support? It seems obvious that the HK administration is simply drawing out time and hoping the daily troubles the demonstrators are creating in time will kill their cause.

Broad support by whom? If you're including population not under the sphere of influence of the Chinese Communist Party, I'd say most likely yes. If not, of course there isn't broad support in the sense that Hong Kong is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the Mainland. I hate to say it, but I'm expecting that an inevitable Tiananmen 2.0 is in the works; and I have seen nothing to convince me that pushed to t…

Actually Taiwan's de facto independence has probably more to do with them having a relatively large defense force ready to inflict heavy casualties to an invader.

Hong Kong has no such asset.

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#153

Post by hker »

modi15 wrote: post #82

Seems to me this is Tiananmen part 2 unfolding before our eyes. And doesnt look like anyone will come to Hongkongs help. Hoping India will step up and do something. Seems unlikely though.

> Seems to me this is Tiananmen part 2 unfolding before our eyes.

Regarding Tiananmen 2.0, reportedly People's Liberation Army claimed on 13 June not to intervene [1], but some recent comment on 22 July may suggest otherwise [2].

At the end of the day, it boils down to whether the benefit is more than the cost of rolling out PLA.

One concern for CCP is that Taiwan is holding its president election next March, and the top two runners are respectively a pro-Washington candidate and a pro-Beijing candidate, so rolling out the PLA would hurt this proxy election war and more importantly make future “unification” of Taiwan basically impossible.

Another concern is that CCP needs Hong Kong for its free flow of capital and technology (e.g. Hong Kong is not under the same export control as China), and rolling out the PLA would ruin these when China’s economic future is uncertain.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition-pla-...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498017

> Hoping India will step up and do something. Seems unlikely though.

Reading the analysis, some critics speculated that one way out for Hong Kong is for her to be integrated into Taiwan, and then get transitive protection by the United States.

The handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997 in based on the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which China declares is merely historical and no longer holds any “practical significance.” [3]

Note that Hong Kong was given to the Britain by three treaties in the 19th century (1842 Treaty of Nanking, 1860 Convention of Peking, 1898 The Second Convention of Peking), and the true copies of all treaties are in the hand of Taiwan, which were brought to Taiwan by the KMT government during its retreat to Taiwan before 1950.

So if the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the declaration behind the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, is revoked (partly because CCP declares it invalid), Britain might declare that Hong Kong should return to the holder of the three treaties–Taiwan.

Extremely unlikely, but arguably has legal justification.

As a side note, Hong Kong and Taiwan are the two main places sharing the use of traditional Chinese characters (besides Macau), and Taiwan has a good track record of respecting sub-languages of spoken Chinese (not just use Mandarin), so culturally they share a lot. And they also value democracy, freedom, and rule of law as core values, so ignoring geopolitics their integration is plausible.

[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/br...

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#154

Post by bidifferential »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #146
leroy_masochist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would hope that the protesters will continue to use the ingenuity they've shown over the last month (intensely coordinated logistics, hand signs, etc) and refuse to take the bait while finding a clever, asymmetrical response to the intimidation tactics.

No ingenuity is a match for police. And China has shown that they mean business when things risk getting out of (their) hand

> No ingenuity is a match for police.

You’re going to have a real hard time getting the typical American to buy into this perspective.

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#155

Post by tluyben2 »

ginko wrote: post #137
sho wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis is 100% correct. The handover was more than 20 years ago. The horizon for total integration was 50 years. We're more than 40% through. Pre-handover was "britain in asia". The endgame is "full integration". HK is nowhere near 40% full integration. Progress has fallen behind, and now they are catching up. The wishful thinking of HK residents doesn't change anything. The writing has been on the wall for de…

As far as I know that the agreement was for Hong Kong's way of life to "remain unchanged" for 50 years. So it should have been 2047 when they can start thinking about integrating Hong Kong.

Yes, your parent poster is incorrect about the facts; they (China) did sign to leave HK be until 2047, not ‘start integration’ in some kind linear process where 40% of the time means 40% integration. They signed for 99.9999% of the time is 0% integration. But he is right about the reality; no one will defend HK it seems so China might as well push ahead in that case. I like HK a lot; I have not found a place as diverse as that anywhere else (tips are welcome and no, SG is nothing at all like it) but it seems it is closer to being absorbed.

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#156

Post by lolc »

0898 wrote: post #130

Could one make a case in favour of China's one party system by likening it to Apple's tightly integrated ecosystem? I mean, people argue that technology works better when one system controls the hardware, the software and the ecosystem around it. Could the same principle apply to human society? Which is an order of magnitude more complex than a piece of technology. Again, I don't know if this argument has been made b…

Oh sure lots of people argue for this. The scheme has been tried to death literally. Particularily egregious implementations were started by people invested in the Führerprinzip[0]. That idea has a German name because it was developed there. It happens that the worst (in terms of resulting misery) implementation came from Germany too. Luckily such constellations are always unstable due to infighting. The Chinese government will come down due to this if not for any other reason. If you want a stable government, make it so that competition between individuals stabilizes the group.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip

With humans having supersocial traits like ants or bees, the idea of societies where everybody works towards a common goal does appeal to our senses. The reason they don't work so easily is because we have individual interests. Keeping part with the group is part of our desires, but this is a much weaker force than it is in bees, for example. That's because we breed as individuals, and not as a group. So group selection is much weaker. (Check out "Darwin's Cathedral" if you're interested in that topic.)

Now imagine if we did have the ability to form supersocial groups like ants do. We'd try to wipe out each other's group[1] and given today's technology we'd succeed!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war

In the end, just because it works for a company doesn't mean it works for a society. Companies can fail. They can fight. And they can be selective in who they include. Societies will create the boundaries of fair competition.

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#157

Post by SuddsMcDuff »

wavefunction wrote: post #116
Santosh83 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May not work these days. The British were half decent and still they killed thousands of people before they left India. If the protestors continue non-violently, we'll simply see them shot with rubber bullets and carted off, or barricaded and starved out. Countries these days are willing to escalate into violence since every major country has more than enough blood on its hands and prefers tacitly looking the other w…

One wonders if the British were even half decent when you consider their long history of colonial and imperial oppression. One might conclude they were fully indecent, in fact.

Do you think these protests would be happening if the British had kept hold of their former colony HK?

Do you think it's strange that some of the HK protestors have been waving the flag of their former colonial masters?

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#158

Post by tluyben2 »

spiderdev wrote: post #16

A co-worker of mine just returned from visiting mainland China. She said everyone she spoke to, did not know about the protests in Hong Kong. They had no idea that something was happening there.

The Chinese I have met and who became my friends all mostly refuse to talk/mention politics. They ones that answer questions all do so without pushing but they add that really they could not care less about politics; their life has been moving upward steadily and they really do not want or need to know about anything unless that changes. One of my friends says he knows about HK but they do not talk about it because it is meaningless; they cannot do anything, take risk and really believe HK will enjoy the same standard of life upgrades as the mainlanders did. I know only techies and usually those are less politically inclined in ‘free’ countries as well in my experience.

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#159

Post by nyolfen »

cevn wrote: post #133
wavefunction wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wonders if the British were even half decent when you consider their long history of colonial and imperial oppression. One might conclude they were fully indecent, in fact.

Half decent? Has the GP heard of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, or how Churchill starved 3m in Bengal?

[spinning newspaper flies toward screen] STRONG DO WHAT THEY CAN, WEAK SUFFER WHAT THEY MUST

Re: Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists

#160

Post by kortilla »

wavefunction wrote: post #116
Santosh83 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May not work these days. The British were half decent and still they killed thousands of people before they left India. If the protestors continue non-violently, we'll simply see them shot with rubber bullets and carted off, or barricaded and starved out. Countries these days are willing to escalate into violence since every major country has more than enough blood on its hands and prefers tacitly looking the other w…

One wonders if the British were even half decent when you consider their long history of colonial and imperial oppression. One might conclude they were fully indecent, in fact.

Yep, “fully”. There are no shades of grey around these parts. Just the bucket of countries that contain people and then the bucket that doesn’t.
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