If we burn, you burn with us | Hacker News Reader

If we burn, you burn with us

bloomberg.com

96 pointsjmsflknr36 comments

I am riveted by the protests - does anyone know if there is a way we can help them from afar?

Some concrete actions that could help Hong Kong:

1. For governments worldwide:

1a. Freeze the assets of senior officials of the Chinese and Hong Kong governments who violated human rights, in the style of Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019.

1b. Stop exporting crowd-control equipment to Hong Kong which could be used by the Police Force.

2. For citizens worldwide:

2a. Urge your governments to do the above.

2b. Stop collaborating with China in the research and development of surveillance technology, which is being used also in Xinjiang.

2c. Purchase goods and services not from Chinese sources.

(Quoting a comment I made elsewhere)

There's a list of options maintained here: https://github.com/hongkonggong/beyond-lennon-walls/blob/mas...

(I came across this following @pinboard's tweets - not sure if it was linked directly though.)

Can’t mainland China just let Hong Kong burn itself? There seems to be little incentive for China to either provide reforms (which would embolden the protestors) or do an authoritarian crackdown (the everyone burns scenario). It would seem they can just wait it out and let the protests paralyze Hong Kong until even local sentiments turn against them.

There is no sense into trying to find a rational action/reaction from China. It is one of those states that meet resistance with blood. Always have. Most likely always will. They play the looooooong game (like Russia and Turkey). It is like a chess game to them. Popularity is just a chess piece and they can win it back in 20 years, with some other Olympic Games or similar. They gain some land forever (Cyprus, HK, you-name-it), while the democracy wolves howl in the dark/background, in vain. And if/when they ever need to win back popularity points they will take a few steps to sneak their way out of this.

Edit: a couple of typos/grammatic errors.

> It is one of those states that meet resistance with blood. Always have.

Isn't that pretty much "any country on earth that is strong enough to do that"? Civil society may protest all it wants, Iraq was still invaded. Another round of protests, but Libya was still bombed back into the dark ages.

America has made a lot of mistakes with its foreign policy, but it's disingenuous to act like the US has ever done anything like tiananmen square to it's own people in the modern era. There is absolutely a difference between how the United States responds to dissent, and how repressive regimes do

give orange man few more years

Sure, not on that scale, but then again, "the system" hasn't been challenged at that scale. Kent State in 1970 comes to mind - and that was a protest against a war on the other side of the globe.

That depends on how you define 'modern era' I guess...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing

> Washington police met with resistance, shots were fired, and two veterans were wounded and later died.

> A second, smaller Bonus March in 1933 at the start of the Roosevelt administration was defused [...] with an offer of jobs [...] Those who chose not to work for the CCC by the May 22 deadline were given transportation home. In 1936, Congress [...] paid the veterans their bonus nine years early.

I'm going to go ahead and say this is reaching comparing it to Tiananmen square where thousands of peaceful protesters were killed by the army. Additionally, the government ordered the protesters killed, vs. some police in a heated situation firing.

> The MOVE members fired at them and a gunfight with semi-automatic and automatic firearms

Again, not saying the police did the right thing here, but MOVE was armed with illegal fully automatic weapons and was firing them at the police. This is very different from a peaceful protest being squashed by the army and then covered up by the government.

I feel like this is so obvious, it's strange it needs to be said? America makes mistakes all the time. But the core values are to admit those mistakes, and work to fix them, not cover it up.

> it's disingenuous to act like the US has ever done anything like tiananmen square to it's own people in the modern era

How are you defining modern? Because the late modern period starts in the mid-18th century, which means Manifest Destiny has still yet to happen. The USA might not have a Tiananmen Square incident where they crush thousands all at once, but they definitely have crushed populations over time, in greater numbers.

I agree this is the better solution. A lot of the western commentators on this issue tend to take a ivory tower perspective. I think China could very well just ignore them and let them burn. It doesn't necessarily make xi look weak. A lot of the Chinese people attitudes are it is what it is. If china's strategy is to just ignore everything and let Hong Kong people burn themselves out, which I personally think is the right strategy, the Chinese majority will understand and probably wouldn't care. And I think people are over estimating the importance of Hong Kong. There have already been experiments to turn Shanghai into a free economic zone. All they have to do is flip the switch and Shanghai or shenzhen will gradually replace Hong kongs role

If Hong Kong is truly unimportant as you say, why not then let them go? I think HK is incredibly important to the ego of the PRC. They’re fearful of what this would mean, that it would cause China to lose the battle over Taiwan, over Xinjiang and over Tibet. It may not be a dealbreaker economically but it could be a tipping point for national unity. Many parts of China are looking to break away, for obvious reasons.

The success of the ruling party may well depend on their ability to exert their will and control over the non-Core territories (and to an extent at least perceptually Taiwan) and keep the whole of what they’ve been selling as China as one.

It’s not what it is that makes them important in this context it’s what it represents to the PRC.

Can anyone downvoting the parent shed light into why this comment deserved it?

It's a valid tactical play (one that was used in 2014 during the umbrella revolution) and bringing it up definitely adds to the discussion.

I'm not sure why it deserves downvotes. It's not in support of an authoritarian government and it's not like they're going to come here and find "brand new ideas" on what to do.

As the article states, the Chinese government has huge incentives to not crack down with military action potentially incurring financial suicide.

Why is China poising with its finger on the military tigger and why the downvotes?

edit: umbrella revolution was 2014, not 15.

When the topic is conflict relating to "rivals" of USA, don't expect HN downvotes to make sense.

Indeed, maybe the military is there just for the occassion that the protesters do actually start destroying the city but otherwise they intend to wait it out until they get fatigued.

> they can just wait it out and let the protests paralyze Hong Kong until even local sentiments turn against them

1.7 million protestors means the protest is the local sentiment. The vast majority of native HKers are fully behind the protests. As would you be if your lifetime home was being forcefully taken over by China.

It’s pretty telling to me that this author (“the editorial director of the Bloomberg New Economy”) is so quick to dismiss full democracy. The people of Hong Kong are asking for full democracy are they not? If the people are asking for it why on earth is the author so willing to accept that this is out of the question? They do not want more puppets, even if appeasement might succeed...

I would argue it needs to be measured steps to get to that point. Hong Kong has seen that it is going to have a lot of its autonomy stripped away and that peaceful, sustained protests are more or less ignored, which is why it deteriorated into this. It's a tremendously patronizing attitude that Beijing has towards everyone; my suspicion is that Beijing views Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as wayward children that need to be brought back into the fold.

You can't change who has final say in measured steps though; it is not a half-and-half proposition. It might be theoretically possible, but the complexity of such a system isn't at all stable and pressure can build quite quickly. It looks like China has been taking very mild measured steps towards change and it has resulted in the streets being clogged with protestors in ~20 years.

Ultimately the people who control the army get to say what the rules are.

Why do you think the author is wrong?

In 1997, China regained sovereignty over Hong Kong. It remains a SAR until 2047. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong

So yes, people of Hong Kong are asking true universal suffrage just as you say, but I understand the sentiment to dismiss the claim because... how do you get there?

It is literally a path that is blocked/unseeable with out some form of miracle.

I'm legitimately asking - protest all you want, bring the city to a halt. What incentive does China have to allow it to remain a full democracy?

It works well. Arrogance assumes that you must impose your will upon others.

> In 1997, China regained sovereignty over Hong Kong. It remains a SAR until 2047.

Why do you think China has any intention of keeping their end of that contract? (And I'm not being snarky either.)

Contracts in general are done between parties of approximately equal power, or in lieue of that, in an environment where a third party has sufficient power over all signatories. The only sane position is to take the most cynical one: assume that anyone and everyone will attempt to break the rules of the contract at every opportunity, if it benefits them.

Everyone is immoral. And the only ones who play fair are those who don't know how to cheat well enough.

Telling for what? Being realistic? It’s easy to get high on your moral highground and start pointing fingers. Xi will not accept democracy in HK is a realistic evaluation as opposed to what from you?

Please don't cross into getting personal or taking HN threads further into flamewar. Both of those are the opposite direction to where we want threads to go here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You've misunderstood this part. TFA posits that democracy is impossible while HK is under Chinese Communist Party control. That is a statement about the Chinese Communist Party, not about the people of Hong Kong.

In context of that paragraph, that should be read as “Full democracy, of course, has always been out of the question [for Xi]”.

What the author is willing to accept is irrelevant - the question is what is China willing to accept.

Based on the headline I thought this would be an article about billionaires in their bunkers after we've hit 5c warming.

Good read nonetheless. Let's hope for some sort of reasonable resolution...

I wonder if there are tactics being learned by other governments (or future potential rioters!) here about how to deal with ongoing instability caused by rioting. At this scale, these don't happen often, so is there a "meta" being played out by the two sides?

It's not rioting.

Fair enough, what should I be calling it? Genuine question, not sure.

Protest

An Uprising

It's a demonstration or a protest.

FWIW, there's an extra layer to language here where China gov't calls them rioters, so by your choice of words you choose sides.

Yeah, I realized that after I wrote it, sorry.

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