Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

>How else do you explain public opposition to the national security law?

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Hong Kong benefits immensely from its autonomous position in regards to the Chinese government, so they don't want to disrupt the status quo. The protests have revealed HK to be a national security issue for the Chinese government, so they want to create laws to make sure HK isn't used as a center of political dissent. These two ideas are contradictory with each other, so a law like this was inevitable.

>And I'm not sure how Hong Kong's previous autonomy (or any other freedoms) would come at the cost of the PRC's sovereignty?

I'm not sure if you understand the original impetus of the extradition bill. Here's a good Twitter thread that details the provisions: https://twitter.com/DanielDumbrill/status/117502034599824588...

To answer your question, if criminals are able to easily escape China into Hong Kong, that fundamentally weakens the justice system. HKers and mainland Chinese move between HK and the mainland constantly. It would obviously be a failure of justice if you could go to a city within your country and encounter the man who killed your daughter. A similar law exists within Puerto Rico, a US territory. This is the bill that originally sparked the protests.

Recently Beijing passed the bill we are talking about that also gives them much more power in terms of being able to imprison HKers that try to subvert the government. This can be seen as a response to the protests, whose leaders have been revealed to be funded and supported by foreigners. China's sovereignty is absolutely threatened by protests and riots that seek to destabilize Chinese places of power, like Hong Kong.

>As long as it's happening openly, I can't get too upset either way

If you can't get upset about the US meddling in Chinese affairs, then you can't get upset about China trying to stop internal subversion. Not to mention, it absolutely doesn't just happen openly. The US has a long history of covert regime change operations. This happens completely undemocratically. Here's a short list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

I mean, just look at the hysteria surrounding Russian involvement in US elections. Rumors of Trump officials meeting with Russian officials has set public discourse on fire for years. And yet, it's unreasonable for China to oppose Demosisto party leaders who have openly met with US officials. I'm not trying to use whataboutism to deflect, I'm trying to paint an equivalency between the situations of these two countries.

>where did you develop these beliefs?

I'm fairly left leaning. China is a leftist country. I know China isn't perfect, but you can easily rationalize their decisions as being made by a government that cares about its people, not power-mad evil dictators as most people would have you believe. If you're interested in learning more, I would recommend reading Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti. https://mltheory.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/michael-parenti...

Instead of an ad hominem, could you actually cite some facts.

Here are several citations to back up my claim: "The varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be regional variants of ethnic Chinese speech, without consideration of whether they are mutually intelligible. Due to their lack of mutual intelligibility, they are generally described as distinct languages (perhaps hundreds) by linguists who sometimes note that they are more varied than the Romance languages.[b] Investigation of the historical relationships among the Sinitic languages is just getting started. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups, based on often superficial phonetic developments, of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (about 800 million speakers, e.g. Southwestern Mandarin), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese) and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese).[4] These groups are unintelligible to each other and generally many of their subgroups are mutually unintelligible as well (e.g., not only is Min Chinese a family of mutually unintelligible languages, but Southern Min itself is not a single language). There are, however, several transitional areas, where languages and dialects from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility between neighboring areas. Examples are New Xiang and Southwest Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu and Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin and Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka)."[1]

David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages."[2]

Linguists in China often use a formulation introduced by Fu Maoji in the Encyclopedia of China: “汉语在语言系属分类中相当于一个语族的地位。” ("In language classification, Chinese has a status equivalent to a language family.")[3]

Norman (1988), p. 1. "[...] the modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of languages [...]"[4]

DeFrancis (1984), p. 56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China."[5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language [2][3][4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#cite_note-5

> That touched a nerve, didn't it?

Not at all. I'm simply asking you to actually make arguments based upon facts then attacks on a person. Thus, the conversation is meaningful and worth each of our time.

> Let me guess, you don't speak any of these Chinese dialects: Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin.

My wife is Taiwanese and knows Mandarin. Her father was born on the mainland and his family had to flee to Taiwan when he was 2. He speaks Mandarin and Taiwanese. His parents only spoke Mandarin. We've been together for 15 years and discuss linguistics quite often.

> You probably don't speak any Romance language outside of English, do you?

(1) English isn't a Romance language. It is a Germanic language. Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin. They include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and many smaller languages.

(2) I actually do speak Spanish, and I studied Latin for 11 years. My wife's mother is Latina and her parents (both the Chinese father and Latina mother) live in Latin America. They don't speak English. Thus, my primary way of communicating with them is Spanish.

> you would know there's massive overlap between them, phonetically

Languages sounding the same in no way makes them the same language or closer together linguistically. A great example is the vowels in Spanish and Japanese are identical to one another, purely by coincidence. This makes it much much easier for a native Spanish speaker to become aurally proficient in Japanese and vice versa despite the two languages not being related to each other at all.

> Are they mostly "mutually unintelligible"? For sure. But to claim that they are more distant from one another than the Romance languages? Complete and utter bullshit.

(1) Literally the definition dialects vs separate languages is mostly derived from mutual intelligibility. It is simply a fact that many Romance languages are mutually intelligible to one another. Spanish speakers can understand Italians and vice versa. Portuguese can understand Spanish and Italian, but not the other way around. These are simply facts. Thus, by linguistic definitions, it is indisputable that the Romance languages have less variation from one another / are closer to each other than the Chinese languages are from each other.

Please see this enumeration of which languages are mutually intelligible with one another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#List_of...

(2) You didn't respond to any of my citations above including one by Fu Maoji, who was a Chinese linguist.

On the Wikipedia page discussing "Mutually intelligible languages or varieties of one language", it states "In addition, political and social conventions often override considerations of mutual intelligibility. For example, the varieties of Chinese are often considered a single language even though there is usually no mutual intelligibility between geographically separated varieties."[1] Translation -- that the PRC has overridden the linguistic definition of what defines languages vs dialects and replaced it with its arbitrary definition that all Sinitic languages are dialects of a single language for political purposes. The reason - the PRC wants to pretend that there is one China and homogenize the people of China into a single entity. It is why it is forcefully reeducating the Uighurs, why it pretends minorities don't exist in China, and why it has been pushing a Mandarin agenda for decades. However, the government realizes that Shanghainese, Taiwanese, Cantonese, etc aren't going away. Thus, it instead likes to pretend like they are all simply dialects of Chinese in order to make the differences seem less pronounced. This aids in supporting Han ethnic nationalism over regional linguistic pride.

This can be seen clearly by the government's push for all Children to simply learn Mandarin in school. The PRC wants to kill diversity as diversity is seen as a threat to their unified control.

"Indeed, promoting Mandarin Chinese among Hong Kong students has been a political task for the Hong Kong government since 1997, when control of the former British colony was returned to China. The Hong Kong government launched a scheme 10 years ago to incentivize schools to use Mandarin instead of Cantonese in Chinese language classes and has spent 180 million in Hong Kong dollars ($23 million in U.S. currency) in assistance to schools since the effort began.

According to official figures, over 70 percent of Hong Kong’s primary schools now use Mandarin in Chinese-language classes.

...

'A dialect cannot be considered a ‘mother [tongue]’,' wrote the former official at China’s Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission. He asserted that since most Hong Kong people belong to the Han ethnicity, their mother tongue 'should be the hanyu (Chinese).'

But Cantonese and languages spoken in southern China such as Hakka and Min are in fact regarded as languages rather than dialects by linguists, said Stephen Matthews, a linguistics professor at the University of Hong Kong. And since a 'mother tongue' is the first language that a child hears from his or her mother, 'it does not make sense to consider written Chinese as the mother tongue of a Cantonese speaker,' said Mr. Matthews."[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Mutuall...

[2] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/05/...

An "open border" does not mean "force everyone to live in one country". It means potentially emigrants have the choice to move. Given that, the upper limit is determined by the number of willing individuals - that they've evaluated that life is better in the target country.

>(where are the EU nations on this?)

They're silent. It's not their ex-colony and, very sorry to say it like this, but HK isn't worth angering China over.