Ofc China does not want HK to be free. China found out how to get "rich" without losing control. They want exactly the opposite of what makes HK HK. It's just sad that many strong economies feel like they need / want the growth based on chinese consumption and trade and are feeding this undemocratic behemoth. What is scary is that China is actively promoting expansion by resettling ethnic han chinese.
Huh? People in HK are already ethnic han chinese... If you're talking about Tibet/East Turkestan, sure.
Yes there are Han Chinese in HK, but the Cantonese, Hakka and Chiu Chow are not ethnic Han people. And languages like Cantonese are closer to Thai than they are to Mandarin. Hakka is very different from Mandarin or Cantonese.
I was trying to compare the political situation, not quality of life, which as you mention is vastly different. My comparison is more that: -China controls Hong Kong with only limited local say in the government. Israel also controls the West Bank, with limited Palestinian Authority control of certain matters. -Hong Kong can't have a military or conduct foreign affairs and isn't internationally recognized (same as We…
I'd say that the biggest difference in terms of the political situation is that the people in Hong Kong are Chinese, and Hong Kong is part of China. Palestinians aren't Israeli (and Israel even talks about population transfers to remove Arab citizens), and Palestine isn't considered part of Israel (Israel's stance seems to be "we control this land and maybe some of it is part of Israel but maybe part of it isn't"). W…
There is no chinese language. There are many languages in China and the official language is Mandarin. There are many different ethnic groups in China as well, with different languages (not dialects) and even different writing systems. In my years in China in the 80's and 90's it always struck me that almost the first thing someone asks when you meet someone new is "what are you" Canton, Hakka, Chiu Chow etc. I lived in Beijing for a couiple of years too, and it was the same. The whole "we chinese" line that a lot of people believe is meant to hide the fact that Mandarin is the language of empire. This has changed in the last 20 years, but for most people I knew in Beijing in 2000, who were not from Beijing, Mandarin was a second language. And no one I met there could speak Cantonese. My wife, a native from Hong Kong, still has to speak English when going to Shanghai or Beijing. Hong Kong started as a British Colony and is now a PRC Colony.
But Hong Kong became prosperous during a time when it didn't have either of those. During the booming 70s-90s, just about all high level government officials were appointed by the British. In addition, most of the upper class were British as well. Local Hongkongers were often second class citizens. Likewise, when Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan were booming, they were essentially dictatorships. Heck, compare South Afric…
What do think about Japan? They became the richest country in Asia while being a democracy. Chauvinists don't like to admit it but they are at least partly responsible for the ROC and ROK's success too. > Heck, compare South Africa and Zimbabwe during the apartheid era to now. What happened a shame but the whites in those country are now sleeping in the bed they made.
Japan has not functionally been a democracy since the 1960s, when US intelligence services funded a right-wing takeover of their government that has, with little interruption, remained in place. Its wealth is largely the product of it being the primary client state of the US empire in SE Asia.
The current leader, Abe Shinzo, is actively working on dismantling what little semblance of democracy remains, including silencing the press and passing laws to lock up anyone who "plans to protest" against his government.
>Today, HK's GDP is barely 3% of China's, and the ports of Shanghai and Shenzhen together have 3x the throughput of HK. (Just have a look at these pictures: I am really waiting for a NY Times article that has some angle about what China can teach us, not what they should learn from us. For the last 30 years we have been getting continuous dispatches that Communism with Chinese characteristics will fail into economic…
They can teach us how to use political dissidents as organ donors, suppress protests by disappearing opponents, imprison those who point out corruption, and no doubt many other things alien to our way of life.
>imprison those who point out corruption,
To be fair, the current Chinese administration (Xi Jinping) identified back in 2012 corruption as one of the greatest threats to the Communist party (rightly so for any government imho) and began an unprecedented campaign to crack down on it.
> Chinese student-spies on American University campuses is a well documented phenomenon [0]. Why "Chinese student protesting" is labeled as "spying". Dalai does want to make a part of China become independent. Without going into the debate into the legitimacy of this claim, can a country's citizen express their own emotion through the right channel? What makes them spy?!
The protests themselves are not "spying" per se but rather a tactic used to promote pro-Chinese government propaganda. According to the linked article, members of the student group have been accused of spying. Straight out of that article: Li Fengzhi, a longtime employee of the Chinese Ministry of State Security who came to the United States in 2003 as a graduate student at the University of Denver, said that the Chi…
> Li Fengzhi, a longtime employee of the Chinese Ministry of State Security who came to the United States in 2003 as a graduate student at the University of Denver, said that the Chinese government did not see the group so much as a spying operation, but rather as a propaganda and “information collection organization.”
I could not find any other sources to cross-reference this information. All the information that I could find about Li Fengzhi (wikileaks, washingtonpost) talks about his link to Ministry of State Security (MSS), and make no mentions of comments made on the student groups. So it would appear that he was talking about MSS when talking about "the group".
Of course I could be wrong and NYT had the first hand information on that, but the entire Li Fengzhi story ended in 2010 so it is not likely that NYT had the information without publishing it before 2017.
Why do they just -need- to have Taiwan back that they would kill for it? Just let it be.
If China doesn't have Taiwan, then some other country (e.g. the US or Japan) can put a naval base there and deny access to a large area. That would be a strategic disaster.
not after China can build 6 aircraft carrier combat groups.
I am not sure you are really replying to my comment. I said nothing about CCP being what, I am defending Chinese people's behavior, and rebuttal the ideas that Chinese people are a group of "extreme communism supporter who happily enjoy the value of freedom and hide their true color". CCP does much worse things than you western people even remotely understood. That does not mean that Chinese people are spies/extremis…
I'm not sure I was replying directly to your comment either. I apologize. I only recently learned about the whole "washing" of the "Incident" and it has really made me think. I certainly agree with your rebuttal. I do not conflate the CCP with the Chinese people. And I'm aware that there are hundreds of millions of Chinese people who don't even live in China. I also recognize that most of the members of the CCP are g…
Falun gong... Your wiki link has 4 external links and they are all YouTube videos... I am not sure there is any credibility in this form of data source...
But Hong Kong became prosperous during a time when it didn't have either of those. During the booming 70s-90s, just about all high level government officials were appointed by the British. In addition, most of the upper class were British as well. Local Hongkongers were often second class citizens. Likewise, when Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan were booming, they were essentially dictatorships. Heck, compare South Afric…
What do think about Japan? They became the richest country in Asia while being a democracy. Chauvinists don't like to admit it but they are at least partly responsible for the ROC and ROK's success too. > Heck, compare South Africa and Zimbabwe during the apartheid era to now. What happened a shame but the whites in those country are now sleeping in the bed they made.
The ROK was a wild economic success when it was a dictatorship that tortured and dissapeared political dissidents.
I think economic success has more to do with access to American markets, and being a 'strategic partner' in cold war geo-political games, then it did with your form of government.
Good point. The enormous strides China has made in recent decades, the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty - extremely impressive, and unambiguously good. Other things, not so much.
The thought of a truly democratic China today should be a terrifying thought to the rest of the world. It's a risky prospect compared to the current stability and growth. I'm sure they'll grow into their own version of democracy when necessary. And speaking of "democracy" is a two party system really all that much better or different than a one party system?
Why would it be terrifying if it was truly democratic?
Yep, and while there was never universal suffrage, most other civil liberties and the rule of law were upheld, by and large, under British administration. And that is giving way, slice by slice, to Chinese "guanxi" (i.e., "connections", "who do you know") and authoritarian politics. :-/
This is funny given the fact that in HK what school you go to largely depends on how much money your parents have (buy bonds issued by schools) and what is their occupation. This is strictly prohibited in mainland China - a private school recently asked education level of parents on one of its admin forms, that became national news and that school got punished in days. Selling school bonds to effectively bar average…
Well, that is an issue of freedom.
A rich person can buy a BMW with their money, so why shouldn't they also be able to buy expensive education?