Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life

Because none of those annexations haven't affected "core" territories of the west or their "core" population. The west definitely did not ignore 9/11.

Some people are more "western" than others. More specifically, the ones that can vote to mobilize the "western" military. Spill their blood and get demolished. Spill the blood of their worshipers and suddenly their own blood is too valuable to waste.

Agreed. Always funny to see how the same people who support HK protesters vilify BLM/Antifa who are protesting our gradual slide into an authoritarian police state.

Lots of HK protesters demand nothing less than defunding the police, radical democracy and autonomy from the higher ups in Beijing. If anyone of the protesters in Portland demanded the same, this whole conversation would be different on HN.

Isnt it even in the contracts, That there a 50year transition period until the full merger?

>Have you ever seen congressional approval ratings?

I have, have you? General approval ratings for Senators and Representatives tend to be extremely high, and in turn the reelection rate of incumbents is quite high as well. Or did you mean "approval of Congress as a whole"? If you did that's silly because people do not vote for Congress as a whole, people vote for their own representatives within that body. Since the population is not perfectly uniform in its beliefs or priorities, that means inevitably even the most perfect hard working representatives will certainly not get their way all the time, and will probably flat out lose fights sometimes, which means that the body as a whole will be making one group or another mad almost all of the time. That's the reality of organizing a diverse group of people though towards goals too big for them to handle individually. It would make no difference for any system of governance whatsoever short of some sort of compulsive mind control, the population will be angry about decisions some of the time.

If you were going to object to GP, a better (scarier) counter point would be that as technological advancement has ever more eclipsed individual human power, it's not at all guaranteed that at some point a totalitarian regime couldn't emerge backed (and/or run) by sufficient tech to be internally long term stable even against the wishes of the majority population. Or for another side, that could simply do away with said majority of the population.

playing the devil's advocate

The article prefaces by saying this

"One way to cement a claim to a disputed territory — and to anger others who think it belongs to them — is to build on it."

Then goes onto describe the disputes almost being exclusive between China and the US Navy, and further reinforces that point by saying,

"The U.S., the longtime guarantor of freedom of navigation in Asia’s waters..."

I'm sorry, but isn't it sort of ironic that Bloomberg accuses of territorial disputes mainly with China as being the aggressor, when most of their maritime incidents are almost exclusively against the US Navy?