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Comment by LordFast | Hacker News Reader

"Realistically these protests cannot lead anywhere and the only ones they hurt are Hong Kong people themselves and their future at a time when Hong Kong is no longer strategically important (although still important)."

Ding ding ding. Tough pill to swallow for anyone walking in the same shoes but it's the pragmatic truth.

Analogously, high-flying startup gets bought by mega corp. News at 11, and the human story repeats itself.

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"Analogously, high-flying startup gets bought by mega corp"

What do startups getting acquired have to do with Hong Kong's relationship with China?

I'm guessing you may be unaware of the fact that Hong Kong was re-acquired by China in 1997. It had been allowed freedoms that were nigh-unbelievable in mainland China, which allowed it to surge in growth and expertise at an extremely rapid rate during the 80s and 90s. The transition was a tense one with the world watching to see what would happen. China let the 'startup' city run independently for a while, and now it's finally reigning it in to be more aligned to toe the'corporate line.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hong_Kong#1990s

They also got freedoms that they never had under the British either. The next 10 to 15 years seem to be their golden years.

It should be noted that Britain tried to give Hong Kong more democracy and freedom since the 60’s but got rejected by China [1], when saying that Hong Kong had more freedom after the handover in 1997.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/asia/china-began-pu...

That’s like me taking your wallet, but still offering to let you use your debit card once in a while. At the end of the day, it's a colonizer dictating the terms of governance over territory obtained through coercive means.

I'm not sure that "colonial governor suggested it" is the same as "Britain tried"...

Presumably he's referring to the phenomena where whenever any new movement or organization poses a threat to the established order, the established powers will co-opt, buy off, undermine, or otherwise eliminate the leaders of the new movement, cutting off the threat at its source.

Multiple systems within the modern world work like this. Tech startup acquisitions are a way for established mega-corps to eliminate rising competition by paying a billion or so to the founders, key employees, and investors of them. Democracy is a way to encourage would-be revolutionaries to instead run for office and become part of the governing political establishment rather than overthrowing it. College scholarships are a way to take intelligent, driven kids from the lower classes and provide them with an entry point into the upper classes, so that they don't serve as a nucleus for class struggle in the future.

We used to have institutions that were significantly less robust to these threats, eg. a hereditary monarchy has no defense for an incompetent king faced by able revolutionaries. However, over time all of these non-resilient institutions have been replaced by more resilient ones with escape valves to embrace those who would overthrow them.

The only way to achieve meaningful social change is to do something so insane that all the powers that be laugh at you, eg. create a website for college kids to throw virtual sheep at each other or make millions of CPUs compete to solve useless math problems and call it a currency.

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