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

It'd be unexpected if they didn't stand down while PLA grunts, I mean "triad gangsters", put a beating on the protestors.

The teachers won and the PRC curriculum was never implemented.

There is one person who has made himself a big single point of failure for China.

I never understood this. Why would HK gain 'independence'? Why would a foreign power 'protect' HK? (protect from what?)

HK has been used to build a narrative that is rather strange... Frankly people in HK calling for independence are a bit like, say, the Texas Nationalist Movement or calling for Seattle independence. It's a fringe movement at best.

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 decades. There's only one way this ends.

Personally I hate all of this. I loved HK being its own little out-of-place enclave in the orient. But that all changed in 1997; the script has been written, and events will grind forward to the inevitable conclusion. Most people I know in HK are thinking about their "Plan B". They would be advised to hurry it up.

The only way would be is if the chinese government changed. Not all that likely, but on the other hand the Berlin wall was only up 30 years.

Tomorrow is always a better day to die.

Ultimately, as mainland economy makes HK increasingly irrelevant, it's in HKers interest to integrate and seek opportunities outside the city. Not every native HKer is qualified to be a financier / banker. The raising cost of living will not abate because HK is where Chinese wealth and FDI is being funneled - and basically the only real strategic importance the city has. That's just the byproduct of extreme wealth concentration in "tier1" cities everywhere. But everywhere else, the poor get priced out, but since HK operates as a city state, people with little prospects are trapped with nowhere to go. And if they're smart, they'll realize this and either move abroad or move on.

Functionally, the sooner HKers accept they'll never be anything but Chinese the sooner they can get on with their lives and out of HK. If they're lucky they'll be extended HKSAR affirmative action privileges so they can still pretend they're better than mainlanders. And really that's what it's about isn't it? It's almost like Cantonese equivalent alt-right thought - a bunch of disenfranchised kids with very little future prospects, reminiscing about a privileged past they've never actually experienced (a few years at the tail end of colonial rule) or existed (independence/democracy). Yeah, they're also fighting for western liberal values, it's all very noble and stuff. That's good western media byline. But at the end of the day, many Cantonese youth also resent being culturally, financially and politically eclipsed by mainlanders - why some of the recent protests targetted mainland tourists just doing their thing (cause you know, China's not bringing their best). It's not limited to HK, a lot of westernized Sinophobia is rooted in the distaste and disbelief that once poor chicken farmers from shithole coal county now live in million dollar homes and drive fancy sports cars. But the mainland won't see them as anything but privileged has-been whiners who refused to integrate and adapt.

If people would just take the beating and lay down, like Gandhi-led resistance against Brits did, it could break down the violent strategy.

Considering the humiliation that the colonisation of HK had been for 100+ years and the resulting nationalistic tendency of the people, if CCTV (Chinese state TV) had shown the pictures of armed protesters storming the HK parliament and some of them flying the Union Jack then the Chinese government would have been forced to fall on the protesters like a ton of bricks.

Don't underestimate the "them and us" mentality in China. It's very pervasive. Your co-worker was assuredly on the "them" side of the equation.

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...

Overall, I am super pessimistic about HK; unless mainland China experiences a similar scale of unrest, HK will become just another mainland city.

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 the wall, the Chinese Communist party won't write off an entire city to restore "Peace"; excepting the continued existence of Taiwan. That though, in no small manner being a diplomatic stalemate with the rest of the world however.

Now they "need" the Triads.

Also it seems this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Years_(2015_film) is actually becoming reality.

No, it was taken from Harvard's University colors, I believe.

> Hanfstaengl composed both Brownshirt and Hitler Youth marches patterned after his Harvard football songs and, he later claimed, devised the chant "Sieg Heil"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Hanfstaengl

I think you have a distorted view of what the role of Police is in a society.

They appear to have commercial ties to Shenzhen across the border. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Yuen_Long_protest

I don't doubt that the situation is complex, but lets get the facts straight.

That is not what happened. They took it as a challenge after they were beaten up. No one did anything to Yuen Long, and they decide to beat any everyone, from Child to Pregnant Woman on the Western MTR Train.

Your monoculture must necessarily be authoritarian to enforce the cultural and ideological policies.

It's also extremely fragile. Cut off the head and everything turns to anarchy. Which is what has happened over and over throughout China's history.

Versus somewhere on the polar opposite end like Switzerland where the national government is basically non-existent and could disappear tomorrow and there wouldn't be much disruption.

[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.