Unwanted and unhappy, but can't leave. I wonder if this might make some otherwise "approved candidates" think twice.
Go completely CCP authoritarian will kill any trust of her by HK citizens, and could she advance anywhere in the mainland party?
Go to the HK side may regain trust but kill all CCP future.
Neither, the current state, will ensure that nobody is happy.
Seems like no possible exit plan? Could CCP push her hard enough that she must exit by taking her own life? If so, would that be a sufficient potential embarrassment for CCP to prevent them from doing so?
Your assumption that HK doesn't have any autonomy might have something to do with that ;)
As to what she could do: she can do a lot; the protestors have a list of 5 demands, one of them is the withdrawal of the extradition-bill. She could comply with that, for example.
Their demands also include permanent legislative independence from China. Something they obviously don’t have today, and will have less and less as China continues it’s stated policy of continuing the complete integration of Hong Kong into China.
Any level of autonomy Hong Kong has is granted entirely at the discretion of China, and is only temporary in any case, as it has an expiry date. It’s exceedingly obvious to any observer that Hong Kong does not currently have sufficient autonomy to satisfy the protestors demands.
With open warfare, the historical playbook for putting down this sort of thing is clear. Roll in the tanks, and infantry from Mongolia or whatever. Sometimes the revolt get put down immediately, sometimes you end up with guerrilla warfare.
What a contorted argument. I assume that the British empire wasn’t a modern state, and that history is less than one century long (and full of holes).
Using your example of the British Empire, India didn't win independence through combat, civil disobedience made it politically untenable for the British to continue. That had far-ranging effects on what was left of the colonies.
One of the arguments core to an advocate of the 2nd amendment with respect to this issue is that a citizen militia, equipped with small arms, would be capable of deterring a government from taking some action. It's an increasingly absurd position.
No. Ordinary civil disobedience will do utterly nothing. You need a certain amount of violence - just look at France, only after the riots were utterly massive the government caved. The alternative is a massive general strike, which has fallen out of favor in modern times as many jobs are easily replaceable and people are afraid of getting fired.
Meanwhile, the Chinese PLA certainly doesn't suffer from any manpower shortages to contain the situation when they eventually want to.
You don't need guns. Making car bombs and IEDs requires only determination and some practice. PLA as any modern army is poorly equiped to combat urban guerilla. Such a dense maze like Hong-Kong had never been experienced by any army.
Loss of face for China would be collosal if any sort of prolonged and effective resistance happend after intervention.
But I hope it won't be necessary.
I doubt China ultimately cares about loss of face.
In a population of 8 milion you will find more then enough smart, determined, intelligent people who can learn quickly enough and innovate.
The only thing that China is afraid of is the loss of face :-)
China's style in Xinjiang is more bottom up and comprehensive with internment camps and mass surveillance.
You could say our style reflects our individualistic understanding of society while China's style represents a more Marxist collectivist view.
It happened in Iraq too, and Vietnam.
I have severe doubts that the US could contain a civil uprising scenario, especially given international pressures. About 42% of Americans *live in a household with guns according to Gallup, with approximately 30% owning them. If even 10% of those people decided to revolt, that would be approximately 9 million people.
I'd wager that's vastly more than the insurgent military forces we've lost to in the past few conflicts we've had.
I would add that the US monitors its civilians with multiple agencies, including Homeland Security and the NSA, and I would think it'd be easier to do on the domestic side than have to contend with foreign governments and the distances involved in operating overseas.
I'm not sure about the Gallup poll you're referring to, but the Pew Research poll I stumbled upon has 30% of Americans owning a firearm with an additional 11 to 12% living in a household with someone who owns a firearm. I don't really agree that means 42% of Americans own firearms. In fact, the ratio of households that own a gun has been going down for decades (You can see this here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite-mass-shootings-number-o...). The issue is there are fewer and fewer people owning guns, but those people own far more guns than they did previously. Which is where the extremism and mass shootings come in (along with our current social and political structure). Here's a quotation from the article I linked above:
>They found that those who own guns own an average of 4.8 firearms. But they also found that half of all guns — 130 million guns — are owned by 14 percent of gun owners or 7.6 million people. That's 3 percent of the U.S. population.
The international pressure angle is interesting and not something I've really thought a lot about. Incidentally, the current administration doesn't seem to care what international governments think.
My point on the "few thousand insurgents" is more specifically referring to Afghanistan, but I think both apply similarly: that the US has been unable to contain and combat relatively small insurgency movements via direct action, be that boots on the ground or through mechanized warfare. I think if a similar insurgency happened here in America, if say a percent or even less than a percent of Americans engaged in sympathetic action, that it would be nigh impossible to contain given our military's past performance against similar combatants, not even taking into account the nuances of fighting one's own citizenship and the likelihood of disobedience among the state.
Arguments that a scenario could be contained at local, civic levels are valid, but a full-scale conflict between citizens and military would be catastrophic not only for the population but for the administration as well (who wants to blow up all the infrastructure they've built?). The state has a vested interest in not provoking this scenario, which is why I imply the second amendment is important and alive in the US even today although the tides have changed.
In regards to HK, a previous comment above mentioned they have a much more comprehensive "bottom-up" structure of monitoring and enforcing compliance with their citizens. Even if they had a theoretical second amendment, they can still initiate a massive crackdown and have the infrastructure to contain and control their citizenship. Which is frankly terrifying, of course, but the solution isn't necessarily just "give the citizens guns", nor would this ever work on a cultural level.
China does actually have the resources and is in a position to contain civic revolt in nearly all cases, from my point of view. This is vastly different to America, and can't really be easily compared.
The protestors themselves may disagree with that. There’s plenty of photos of protestors holding signs that make exactly that comment. Their oppressor in this case also actually has a history of massacring unarmed civilians.
Regarding the might of the US or Chinese military, I can’t think of an example of a military winning against an insurgency.
If this was the truth why is the US military still engaged in Afghanistan? Is it possible that war is more nuanced if you don't carpet bomb locations off the map?
Americans and the US like to perpetuate the freedom myth, but it's mostly bullshit used to destroy countries in the name of liberating them to benefit the US financially or strategically. The reality is much more stark.
We crushed them (and the regular DPRK army) utterly and completely in Vietnam and Korea, but then forces that weren't “farmers and normal folk” (or even the DPRK military) got on the field (Chinese Army as we showed signs that we would roll the DPRK up completely and potentially—the concern on their side went—keep going into Communist China in Korea, the NVA in Vietnam.)
Depends, are there any nuclear or biological assets deployed in Texas?
The second amendment does not exist to arm the citizenry against the police/army, it exists to provide a militia of citizens so that government will not (because the citizenry will be both capable and, being politically empowered, will not stand for the alternative) resort to permanent professional police and armies for security.
But it turns out the citizenry, armed or not, like the government applying violence, and don't want to be bothered to be on the pointy end, so even with the second amendment we have abandoned reliance on the citizen militia in favor of professional security services, along with a weird civic cult of worship of those services.
Without meaningful ways to defend themselves, there really is no way to win against the Chinese government.
Power of public is in numbers. Revolutions happen when everybody including soldiers become the protesters.
Unfortunately in this media age thats going to be harder and harder.
Very few governments will just give away freedom and power. It needs to be take back by force.
If the HK citizens had access to weapons this entire time, the Chinese government would think twice before invading. Unfortunately, it's too late for that.
This is why the second amendment is so important in the US.
Sometimes armed rebellion has good outcomes, sometimes (probably more often) it has horribly tragic ones. Prolonged political pressure and alliances, non-violent protest, can give equally good results without the risk of creating bloodsheds like the US secession war or the current Syrian civil war (that as horrendous as it is, has yet to claim as many victims as the US secession war).
I'll spare myself the obvious retort. Not everyone has the privilege of starting an armed revolution and succeed, or simply survive. Not everyone who does is guaranteed to be in the right (for example the US states that tried to secede). And the outcome can be complete destruction for yourself, for your city and your region, and hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions displaced and homeless- many of whom couldn't care less about your "revolution".
Do I condemn armed resistance? No. Of course not, sometimes it is inevitable. But the idea that you should distribute firearms to people just in case somebody one day decides he's fed up and wants to start shooting other people for freedom, or for white supremacy, or- why not- for a religious caliphate- that is ridiculous.
No, we're here taking potshots at each other on the Internet.
Personally I think they'll just continue arresting and making people disappear to the mainland so there is nothing damaging on the news.
The Vietnamese had massive foreign support. China is unlikely to give up so easily, and no country is going to want to keep arming such a resistance.
HK has maybe a difficult terrain?