Fighting a land war against China for Hong Kong is ludicrous. Making a second Tiananmen Square painful for Beijing is not.
From sanctions, to weapons sales to Taiwan et al, to providing protesters and resistance pockets with intelligence, there are options. Whether they’re worth it is the question.
Maybe the USSR becomes the global superpolice...
It doesn't matter how bad its economy is if it controls all the militaries and secret polices!
/s
7 millions people in Honk Kong cannot win against 1.3 billions of people from main land, no matter how many weapons you provide.
"Making a second Tiananmen Square painful for Beijing is not" could be a good strat, but something tells me they learned from that one and have a plan for it this time.
That would be in no-one's interests.
Immediately after the Tiananmen Square events in 1989 the US sent a high ranking general to Beijing to reassure the Chinese that this changed nothing.
The situation has changed because now China is seen as a real rival but the US and the West still have zero interests in going down that route. Not least because China is not a small country, it's the second economy on Earth.
I think the events in HK are being spinned and that some people are really losing their sense of proportion.
Bluntly speaking: The events in HK are irrelevant globally and are regional news at best. They are not a global issue that deserve international involvement.
At the same time, it is very difficult to understand the message and aim of the protesters, and their violence made them lose a lot of credibility.
And, it also gives the West less credibility internationally. The US has been very clear that it was behind "one China, two systems" since the 80s a dramatic policy change would make every other country think "ok, so why should we expect that any treaty we or alliance we form with the US will hold?". If countries don't trust the West they stop working with the West and that reduces its power by orders of magnitude.
People seem to be outraged by vague allegations of Russian meddling in other countries' affairs but China should be treated like a colony by the West... That's highly hypocritical (if not racist).
If your core values are freedom, democracy, and the right of the people to choose who governs them, then it does not seem hypocritical at all.
That agreement was predicated on a belief that over time, China would open up and become more democratic and Hong Kong would smoothly merge cultures.
Unfortunately, that assumption was entirely false. It's been 20 years since the handover, and China has not at all moved towards freedoms generally considered a pre-requisite to social society in the west.
Hong Kong has completely different values than mainland China. Even if the current events fade away, they are on an unavoidable collision course.
I’m Swedish, a person with the same passport as me was kidnapped from Thailand and imprisoned in China probably after hours of torture because of something he published and his democracy activism in Hong Kong. The sentiment in Sweden is that it would’ve been nice for China to not say that Hong Kong would be under ”one China, two systems” if that’s not how things would turn out. Kidnapping Swedish citizens in Thailand for something they are legally allowed to do in Hong Kong doesn’t look like a domestic issue to me.
That's what happening and I don't remember that the Chinese government tried to renege on this.
But again, ultimately this is a domestic issue. Britain is out of the picture.
The respect of ”one country, two systems” was something China promised the UK. The international community is absolutely remaining in the picture.
China has also extradition treaties with some western countries. Does that mean that e.g. France is no longer 'autonomous'?
This extradition bill does not impact HK's autonomy at all. This is very transparently a pretext.
One has to wonder who's behind all of this because this is really getting more farcical by the day.
It is also very interesting that western media tend to use the terms 'China' for the mainland in their reports on these events. Clearly this is not neutral and makes Western opinion believe that HK is not China.