Hong Kong ISP Association’s Statement on Selective Blocking of Internet Services
hkispa.org.hk
hkispa.org.hk
Point is if HK moves behind the GFW, I'll have some servers for sale.
EDIT: I'll let my stupidity stand, but for correctness: Singapore has around 15 submarine cables as of 2018, but only 3 landing sites.
How do you check that? The DPI works mostly in async way, mirror traffic to standalone servers to extract key data points, if found a match, send RST to drop the TCP stream and maybe further blacklist the IP indefinitely.
Is there a new mechanism that requires synchronised data stream check? Making a DPI on backbone internet with <100ms latency would be extremely impressive achievement.
searched for "Great firewall latency" on my mobile. Took the first result with numbers, and saw mainland latency around 100ms higher than HK.
> The DPI works mostly in async way, mirror traffic to standalone servers to extract key data points, if found a match, send RST to drop the TCP stream and maybe further blacklist the IP indefinitely.
If it works async like you describe then it invalidates my worries about latency. But it doesn't solve the "why the hell is my SSH stream getting a RST?!" because their firewall is dropping SSH by policy or because of a false positive in the traffic.
Found few blog posts, it looks like network congestion.
Yeah it may well exists, because if DPI servers can't handle all the oversaturated traffic, it may well just cap the backbone bandwidth, dropping packets, etc.
So if your packets has to be retransmitted it creates latency.
In this particular case, we don't have any business interest in mainland china, so I'm willing to speculate based on other people's measurements. Acting on speculation is very different from planning. As smarter people than me have said: "plan for the worst; hope for the best"
This is really put the hands where the mouth is, instead of words and criticism show support by action.
In 1997 Singapore allowed HK permanent resident to get permanent residence in SG, follow the same. Also there was a large exodus of people to Canada, some to USA. But many returned back.
It feels like the seventies or eighties again in terms of the stupid, and inconsistent attitudes. Some people think it's OK to be visibly racist again.
He is in a position of huge influence in the new government, which I think some people underrate. A great admirer of Bismarck, I very much doubt he cares much for the policy opinions of the people he pandered to to get power.
Morally, the British people owe the people of Hong Kong citizenship. Economically, it makes a great deal of sense, especially as those who move will most likely be younger people.
It will be interesting to see what he does. Though no Bizmark, he has a sort of hacker mindset to politics that is unusual in this day and age.
From an outsiders perspective, I like free trade and free movement of people, but I hate stultifying bureaucracy.
Or to put it another way: I like it when governments compete for citizens and capital. I dislike it when they have the capacity to coordinate against same.
So I consider the EU as something of a mixed bag.
Problem is you can make that same moral argument for all of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.
Idunno man, I don't think hardly anyone would have a problem with tens or hundreds of thousands of largely civilized, decent, educated people entering Britain; provided it was not in addition to what they're used to from other places. At least, this is what I gather from speaking a lot with Brexiters and marginal remainers.
(1) Made recognition of PRC conditional on PRC agreeing to an indefinite extension of lease on New Territories, such that no handover of HK was required
(2) Threaten that, if PRC didn't agree, UK would return New Territories to ROC instead, with British troops deployed to defend it
(3) Make clear to PRC that any military action against UK-controlled (or ROC-controlled) HK would result in a war between two nuclear weapon states (UK vs PRC)
(4) Give HK real democracy back in the 50s/60s/70s/80s, rather than waiting until 5 years before handover
(5) Build nuclear-powered desalination plants to remove HK dependency on mainland water
China’s army bigger, China’s army bigger, China’s army bigger.
The only hope in hell for Britain would have been in Clinton. Given American optimism at the time, that would have been fruitless.
UK has nukes. PRC has nukes. Did PRC want a shooting war with another nuclear power?
> The only hope in hell for Britain would have been in Clinton. Given American optimism at the time, that would have been fruitless.
You are talking about the 1990s. If you read my original comment, I was talking about the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. If at the height of the Cold War, Communist China had attacked a British colony, how would America have responded?
Probably with fascinated interest. America was pressuring the UK to decolonise, and had been since 41. HK was not as strategically significant as Berlin or Korea, besides Korea had both China and the USSR supporting the invasion.
I visualise something nearer Suez than Korea 2.
HK independence in the 50s would have been difficult as most of the land area - 100x smaller than Taiwan - was leased. Not sure how ignoring that lease would play out internationally, but I suspect more provocation to CCP China than solution. HK island is just a few square miles, the rest - the leased portion - is part of the Chinese mainland. Taiwan is a few tens of thousands of square km of defensible island.
Giving to ROC? I heavily suspect had that been an option at the time the US would have damn near insisted on picking it up, just as had happened with a number of the tiny naval and air bases. So it would probably have stayed as British territory, leased to the US.
Actually passing to ROC would have to wait until after Chiang Kai Shek achieved some measure of stability. The US spent much of the 50s expecting Taiwan and Chiang Kai Shek to fall. By the 60s HK is developing in its own right, but Eisenhower had started to support Taiwan militarily. Now it's getting trickier.
Not back in the mid 80s, when the agreements were struck.
UK is too far.
UK's war claim on basically Chinese soil is laughable.
>UK is too far.
The UK whacked Argentina pretty good.
While obviously China would have been able to put up a much better fight the UK can project force on the other side of the world if they need to.
Not really due to fear of military invasion, but due to fear of economic fallout on UK and giving up some luxury for its own citizens for a right cause. Lavish lifestyle funded by colony's money is more important for UK than fight for the rights of the people of its colonies.
They have milked every one of their colonies resources until the very last minute they left. Also before leaving they always sow seeds of division and failure. That's what they did for Hong Kong too.
So saying they wanted to give democracy to HK is outlandish.
The PRC fought the combined UN forces to a standstill in the Korean war in the 1950s, and the British empire had already fallen apart and was in no shape to fight China then in the context of the cold war.
It's the same old story of old British empire in every colony, where they will promise but never keep it. They were just hypocrite, the main intention was always that colony should not prosper or challenge British empire in future, after they leave.
Your dislike of the UK seems to be blinding you to historical facts? Or do you have sources that prove these statements incorrect? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_development_in_Ho...
“Records declassified in 2014 show discussions about self-government between British and Hong Kong governments resumed in 1958, prompted by the British expulsion from India and growing anti-colonial sentiment in the remaining Crown Colonies. Zhou Enlai, representing the Communist Party of China at the time, warned, however, that this "conspiracy" of self-governance would be a "very unfriendly act" and that the Communist Party wished the present colonial status of Hong Kong to continue. China was facing increasing isolation in a Cold War world and the party needed Hong Kong for contacts and trade with the outside world.[19][20][21]
1960s Edit China's leaders explicitly wanted to "preserve the colonial status of Hong Kong".[21] Liao Chengzhi, a senior Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong affairs, said in 1960 that China "shall not hesitate to take positive action to have Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Territories liberated" should the status quo (i.e. colonial administration) be changed. The warning killed any democratic development for the next three decades.[22]“
We'd just had the Korean War, Britain alone wouldn't have won a rerun, the West might. Support for doing it again, without hostility from the other side first is just about unthinkable. Britain might have been able to achieve better terms on Kowloon and New Territories a hundred years previously during Pax Britannica, but those territories were only there as uninhabited military buffer zone for the transhipment port, naval base and coaling station. So when Britain could, no one thought it important, there was no one there.
Development and them mattering came much, much later. Only really after the Chinese revolution started to provide an endless stream of well educated workers and families with a dislike of Communism. Now the UK started moves to democratise - there was getting to be a population that cared, and which fit with the policy of majority rule before independence, in the post war decolonisation era.
And the UK gave in to PRC's threats. Was PRC really willing to start a war with the UK? Or were they bluffing, and the UK fell for PRC's bluff? Or maybe, the UK was never really that keen on HK democracy, and PRC's threats were just a convenient excuse to avoid doing something they weren't very keen on doing anyway?
> We'd just had the Korean War, Britain alone wouldn't have won a rerun, the West might
The Korean War is not exactly comparable. Neither North Korea nor South Korea were nuclear armed states (during the 1950s), although they both had nuclear powers as allies. A war between UK and PRC in the 1960s would have been a shooting war between two nuclear powers. Would the PRC really had been willing to risk such a thing? Especially given the state that PRC itself was in (millions of deaths in the Great Leap Forward, followed by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, its isolation the Sino-Soviet split, an economy vastly weaker than it has today, etc.)
Err, there were 5x more Chinese troops in the Korean War than North Korean, and Soviets flying air cover. It would be directly comparable, if there were a Communist invasion, except I really doubt there'd have been support from the Western Allies without that invasion first. Even then I'm not sure - there were repeated concerns Korea could have escalated into WW3.
A HK airlift would be logistically challenging to say the least, and I don't believe it would have had similar chance of being successful. Look at Kai Tak, and its famously awkward mountain avoiding approach back in the 1950s. Berlin was universally acknowledged as strategically important in the newly hatched Cold War. The East and West had been nose to nose militarily in Germany since 45. Berlin was served by multiple source airfields, several air corridors and flying boats onto the lakes. HK would probably have had to be entirely sourced from Taiwan.
Yet Berlin succeeded as much from the counter blockade, that actually turned out to be surprisingly damaging to the East, as the huge scale of the sustained air lift. I can't picture a HK airlift around the same era as being nearly as successful.
I just don't see it playing out OP's way at all. Events would rapidly turn it to something very different and dangerous.
In wondering how, I end up with only lots of unanswerable questions. Cut half our presence in Germany so soon after the Airlift? Cut the naval and air shadowing of Moscow? Move a couple of carrier groups to HK? What;s the USSR going to do in response in Europe? How to work the nuclear threat? Polaris didn't arrive until the end of the 60s. So move all our 50s nuclear deterrent, which was only ready mid to late 50s, to Malaya with then Communist inclined rebels maybe? I think Victors, Vulcans and Canberras needed more runway than Kai Tak then had. They weren't carrier capable. So where you going to put them? Taiwan? Except Taiwan was predicted at risk of falling through the 50s, which is why US military support didn't come until the end of the decade. Besides, that starts to look like the West mobilising for WW3. A robust response becomes more and more likely.
OK I can't make this novel's plot work. :)
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/hong-kong-immigr...
But I guess no one call it HongKongese yet
If you really want to talk about varieties of Chinese then its quite a complex topic.
"Classifications of Chinese varieties in the late 19th century and early 20th century were based on impressionistic criteria. They often followed river systems, which were historically the main routes of migration and communication in southern China. The first scientific classifications, based primarily on the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials, were produced by Wang Li in 1936 and Li Fang-Kuei in 1937, with minor modifications by other linguists since. The conventionally accepted set of seven dialect groups first appeared in the second edition of Yuan Jiahua's dialectology handbook (1961):
1. Mandarin
2. Wu
3. Gan
4. Xiang
5. Min
6. Hakka
7. Yue
The Language Atlas of China (1987) follows a classification of Li Rong, distinguishing three further groups:
8. Jin
9. Huizhou
10. Pinghua
Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect of northwestern Hainan, Waxiang, spoken in a small strip of land in western Hunan, and Shaozhou Tuhua, spoken in the border regions of Guangdong, Hunan, and Guangxi. "
Mainland Mandarin vs. Taiwan Mandarin for example ~ there are a ton of phrases, especially for modern things like "credit card", "take out"..., that people use different words/phrases for. This is also the same for HK Cantonese vs. Cantonese used on the mainland where there was no British influence.
It's like UK english vs. US english.
So probably the better place for Hong Kong people is to look to UK to grant asylum or citizenship if they care about HK.
I believe I have seen pictures of Hong Kong protesters waving American flags, so would imagine many might accept the idea. The flag caught my attention especially after I was shown pictures of protestors from Portland, Oregon waving Soviet flags. That contrast is just mind-boggling to me, especially growing up hearing stories about families who were sent to Siberian labor camps by the Soviet government and never to be seen again.
Rightly or wrongly, the US is still seen as a bastion of freedom and democracy by many around the world, and that's what the protesters are fighting for. More specifically, they are asking for support from western peoples and governments for a struggle that they believe free people can identify with. Seen after last week's "Hong Kong Way" event: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ARht6bNnEGTBFmnw9
Also, there's been a few right-wing/alt-right USians who've tried to hijack the protests for their own agenda, thinking they're among anti-commie friends. They don't represent anything mainstream, and they're not particularly welcome...
Lack of talent is one of the problem with HK. There are lots of lack of talent about HK in the news for the recent years.
Also note food issues with pork diseases & the army worm ravaging their crops. The CPC is facing an existential crisis.
Note: I think the CPC can & should reform. Same with the US government. All citizens of the world would benefit from transparent governance & overall wealth, health, & prosperity will increase for all. I just want to point out the apparent issues that the CPC faces & the game of international chicken being played.
The CPC is relying on increasing totalitarianism, which puts internal pressure within their regime. All of this surveillance tech & concentration camps need to be paid for somehow. If there is an embargo against their organ harvesting, they lose the ability to profit from harvesting organs from people. If there are increased tariffs, they cannot finance all of their services such as rail systems or food production. The CPC is communist so there is heavy central planning. They use & don't follow the rules of international markets, but if the international markets reject this behavior, the CPC is running a centrally planned government which will quickly collapse.
There are plenty of people in the US government who are aware of the CPC's threat. The CPC has even impinged on the sovereignty of the US, including exporting Fentanyl into the US and compromising government & corporate officials. This is war & the US is forced to take action if it intends on protecting it's sovereignty.
The CPC can also reform & follow the rules of international trade & human rights; with action, not just promises. That would be the best case for everybody & would be the best chance to fulfill the "mandate of heaven".
Are we disputing or disagreeing with the human right of seeking asylum? Or discussing the economic pro's and cons of asylum seekers?
There are a few student protestor who were back home in HK over the summer and came back to the US to continue their graduate program. They are the poster child for the Chinese government on how the US sends people to HK, stir up trouble and then give them protection. They are labeled as cowards for abandoning HK and how they themselves do not believe in the movement because they fled. The Chinese media airs this to discredit the protestor and remove support.
IMHO at this stage, it would cause more harm than benefit to their cause.
A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.
The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.
Whether bringing the Great Firewall to Hong Kong rises to that degree of a human rights violation is a very reasonable question, but as a blanket rule? You can't say all corporations should always follow all laws. That isn't a just society, that's one full, excuse the parlance, bootlickers to the oppressors.
Also many in the NSDAP were brought over to America via Operation Paperclip. Many went to the Soviet Union, Argentina, & remained in West & East Germany.
If all of them refuse to help implement your new internet censorship regime, it's a problem for any authoritarian government, just as much as if your police force stops following orders. You can start firing people and hiring replacements who will toe the line, but at a certain point you're going to end up with second and third rate talent, and correspondingly shoddy ISPs.
Talented network engineers such as those who have the equivalent of 'enable' on the twenty largest ISPs in HK can choose to go elsewhere and work in free countries. There's sufficient demand for their skills that refusing en masse to cooperate is not an incredible risk for them.
I work in the field and try to teach junior NOC people that there is such a thing as ethics in network engineering. Just as there is in any other professional field where people rely upon critical systems. This means, among other things, don't try to MITM your customers' traffic (Kazakhstan, recent incident comes to mind), don't get into intrusive DPI, don't fuck with neutrality of content, and absolutely never cooperate with anything that slightly resembles the great firewall. The combination of modern technology/human tracking systems plus full autocratic state control of ISPs could result in something that would be the wet dream of east germany's Stasi.
We are long past time for real professional ethics in our professions.
If we are so bold as to claim the title "engineer," where are our obligatory professional standards? Our licensure? Our - gasp - liability?
If a structural engineer designs a bridge in a way that ignores established best practices, and the bridge fails and causes injuries, the engineer is held responsible.
Why are our professions different?
Largely because of the industrial exemption. The liability you want is already absorbed by employers. The only thing that industrial exemption doesn't apply to is structural designs. I see no reason to treat software any different than chips or automobiles, so I don't really think it would change much. Certainly we wouldn't hold network engineers personally liable for outages or whatever else you have in mind.
The principle is the same: If your job functions at layers 4-7 in the OSI model, don't create software that does something terrible with personal data for financial gain, and if your job concerns OSI layers 1-3, don't fuck with the Internet.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/harvard-works...
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/the-spark-guide-to-life-episo...
But an ethics course is mostly CYA for the company.
Do we say that engineer is unethical, and that he should never have participated?
The thing with ethics is everyone has ethics, its just their ethics might be different than yours.
Given the right pay/benefit I'm happy to work on those
As much as I despise the great firewall and the associated surveillance state, reasonable people can conclude that such measures are in fact in support of "safety, health, and welfare of the public." Ethics in this area are not as concrete as say physical construction, where punishments for a flawed building design or implementation date at least to the code of Hammurabi and seems fairly consistent across cultures. Norms and ethics around surveillance and the role of the state are far less universal. An ethics review board from mainland China could come the conclusion that not creating or implementing these features would be unethical.
I do think that engineers should do exactly as you recommend, but I also doubt that our shared sense of ethics are universal enough to get the outcomes we want.
Then you fire all of them and hire new ones with different values.
The reason it's a problem if your police force stops following orders is the same as if the military stops taking orders: there's a command and control structure that can operate autonomously and topple your government.
It's a little bit unrealistic to think of all the network engineers in HK somehow overturning government policy by refusing to act. They have no collective power because they have no collective structure outside of the companies they work for. The most they can do is sabotage or blow the whistle, and ultimately if there is no political will to go against the status quo then all this will eventually prove futile anyway.
I hope you teach them also that there's no avoiding politics, and there's no avoiding ethical responsibility for doing nothing even when nothing you can do seems to have a chance.
So sure, “miracle for millions” is kind of true, but also omitting the majority.
One of the big convenience store chains here, FamilyMart, the workers have 7 day a week, 15 hour day shifts. I've seen some employees in the same FamilyMart for years. They stay because it's better than what they'd be able to get at home. They work vastly more hours than the middle class do, mostly, but they're earning about the same per week as kindergarten teachers here do, with their degree and much better job, about 8,000 yuan a month. You know what the annual income is in the countryside? 10,000 to 20,000 in Anhui, maybe four hours travel from Shanghai. People work these terrible jobs because they're used to working harder, for less money. Subsistence farming is an awful way to earn a living and people get the hell out as soon as they can, in China now and for the past thirty years just like in the UK during the industrial revolution. People left the countryside to work in the dark satanic mills because the countryside was worse. People choose to work in FamilyMart when there are other convenience store chains with shorter shifts and days off so they can save money so they can do things like buy a house, same as offshore oil rig workers or sailors spend months away from their family.
People make choices, in circumstances you or I would never wish on anyone but they're free to make those choices. They're not slaves.
Good chart for people interested in exploring the change in income distribution of people in different countries, including China.
Largely because they can't afford education[1], children become migrants. That's largely the group I'm talking about.
Apparently, the current numbers stand at ~300 million migrant workers[2] in 2015 (stats I quoted was from 2008), BUT that's largely due to reclassification of the workers to "urban" as opposed to "migrant" class. Which means they can stay in their residence without a job. That does not mean they can afford things like education. Implying there's likely still closer to that ~700 million number who can't break out of poverty.
The gap has closed not because HK has became poorer, but because mainland became richer.
Businesses relying on VPN'ing home to function, those believe its a human right to choose their leadership.
Why shouldn't the fragrant harbor enjoy same autonomy the rest of these received?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_that_have_ga...
What's there to fear? Do Hong Kongers not share the same kindred blood, language (as far as Cantonese, at least in Guangdong), culture.
Why not let Hong Konger's vote for independence? Scotland had a chance in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Scottish_independence_ref.... What keeps it together? I don't know. Trust? Respect?
Is there trust and respect between HK <-> China? I've been between GZ/HK many times. They're different places. If PRC wants to be an example to others of their own philosophy and system, they should do it by building trust over time, not by using a hammer.
Probably the same reason Spain doesn’t let Catalonia vote for independence.
I've likened Hong Kong to Singapore. It's leaning toward being fully independent and the momentum seems unstoppable. The question I'm wondering is why stop at HK? I want my access to KuGou back. That's what did it for me.
Spain and Catalonia both use the Euro. Catalonia has its own judicial system, but I believe they both are set to the EU in terms of bigger picture things.
HK and PRC have separate currencies. HK uses traditional chinese characters and speaks Cantonese. Not everyone in neighboring Guangdong speaks Cantonese, and they use simplified chinese characters.
Hong Kong has its own famous movies. It has its own cellphone companies and ISPs. Its own stock market. They drive on different sides of the road (left in HK, right in China). HK has trams. HK has its own customs. The legal system is in english and its a common law system and dramatically different than China's.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/21/hong-kongs-inconvenient...
>the city looks to the mainland for most of its resources.
So does Singapore, which looks to Peninsular Malaysia for most of its resources (water and food).
That's the main problem with that opinion piece.
Here's the real difference:
- Singapore was expelled from the federation of Malaysia by politicians keen to keep their racialist affirmative action policy. AFAIK Malaysia has no official irredentist policy when it comes to Singapore.
- Hong Kong is in no danger of being expelled from the PRC because the PRC has an officially proclaimed irredentist policy regarding Hong Kong.
Kuala Lumpur shows no sign of wanting Singapore back because Singapore would significantly alter Malaysia's demographics and push for racial equality, which is not what the ruling Malay political class wants.
Beijing, however, sees every reason to keep HK. Not just the irredentism: have a look at the map and you will see that HK is on the NE entrance of the Pearl River. HK may not be as economically important as before, but just like Macau on the other side of the mouth of the Pearl River, it is of immense geostrategic importance to the security of the river delta region.
Here, let me wiki that for you (lmwtfy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Catalan_independence_refe...
>I've likened Hong Kong to Singapore.
I love how people pull out Singapore (hey, why doesn't Hong Kong become an independent "authoritarian democracy", like Singapore?) at this point, but the analogy is spurious. The historical and geopolitical situations of these two cities are night and day.
I mean, lmwtfy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore
Here's the relevant timeline:
1959: Singapore achieved full self-government as a British colony.
1963: In defiance of massive skepticism, Singapore merged with Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak to form the federal constitutional monarchy of Malaysia.
1963-65: Massive protests rocked Singapore because of disaffection with the racialist affirmative action policy of the federal government in Kuala Lumpur.
1965: To avoid further unrest, the federal government of Malaysia decided to expel Singapore from the federation.
For your analogy to work, you'd have to substitute "Malaysia" in the above for "China", since Hong Kong depends on China for its food and water, as Singapore does. But the result of that substitution looks nothing like the actual history of Hong Kong.
Your analogy also breaks down for the following reasons:
- Malaysia does not have an official irredentist position regarding Singapore. The official irredentist position of the PRC is well-known when it comes to Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
- Many Malaysian politicians at the time, including the then ruling party UMNO, were skeptical of Singapore's entry into Malaysia, and were quite relieved to be rid of Singapore. In contrast, the PRC's position is that Hong Kong is an integral part of its territory, come what may.
- Malaysia does not have any troops garrisoned in Singapore. There are PLA troops garrisoned in Hong Kong.
>Spain and Catalonia both use the Euro. Catalonia has its own judicial system, but I believe they both are set to the EU in terms of bigger picture things.
The EU, as a community of sovereign nations, is wary of being seen as supporting separatism within its member nations. This is one of the reasons why it let Spain do what it did to Catalonia.
>HK [...]
These are superficial differences. Power is power, as some have said. No matter how much you and others would like to liken Hong Kong to Singapore, the fact remains that they face vastly different geopolitical realities.
Without establishing any ground rules, (what similarities are we talking?) It's hard to do.
India, Canada, Pakistan, New Zealand, Australia, USA, Brunei. Former British colonies with bigger historical differences, isn't the final destination sovereignty?
Wouldn't Singapore be more analogous to HK than them though? For instance I never considered that Singapore broke away from Malaysia after Britain left.
Extradition bill in HK with support from the capital. Affirmative action policy in SG being imposed by the capital. Those kind of play toward the concept of a proud city-state breaking apart of a larger, country that doesn't seem to grasp what the people are feeling.
It reminds me of an unattuned parent trying to force their child behave a certain way when they're already stressed out by something else. If it goes too far, it creates this spiral and the child suffers, and has to leave the family. Obviously having people who don't care to understand your feelings in charge of your life isn't tenable.
What if HK were to decide "enough is enough", to move out, and live their own life? They have a developed economy, their own legal system, health care, and civil servants. They can make their own decision without a power thousands of miles away with a totally different organizational philosophy trying to control them.
Aside: If we wanted to contrast HK <-> SG, I'd probably pick different things. For instance Singapore speaking Mandarin and being more diverse culturally/linguistically. It's really cool. Look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Singapore#/media/...
All right, ground rules. My arguments are evidence-based and I assume that you'd have read any evidence I've cited. Any arguments that you make that are contrary to the evidence I've presented will be interpreted as being made in an attempt to distort the evidence.
>what similarities are we talking?
That was my question: what similarities are there between HK and Singapore? I only see differences that are critically important to the question at hand.
> Former British colonies with bigger historical differences, isn't the final destination sovereignty?
Sure, and the decolonization process took place under the auspices of the UN Special Committee on Decolonization.
However, there's a huge twist to the story when it comes to HK, which made it unlike any former British colony.
After the ROC was expelled from the UN by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 in 1971, the PRC's UN representative, Huang Hua, wrote to that Special Committee in March 1972 to assert China's sovereign right over Hong Kong and Macau:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handover_of_Hong_Kong
This was acceded to by the Special Committee in its 1972 report (Ref: A/8723/REV.1[VOL.I](SUPP)):
https://www.un.org/ga/search/viewm_doc.asp?symbol=A/8723/REV...
Specifically, if you read that document I linked to above, on p.64 of the document, para. 183 states:
>The Special Committee also continued its review of the list of Territories to which the Declaration is applicable. In the light of the close examination of related matters, the Committee agreed that it should recommend to the General Assembly the exclusion of Hong Kong and Macau and dependencies from the list [...]
The list referred to is this list of territories that are subject to the decolonization process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_list_of_Non-Sel...
This report was approved in para. 3 of UN General Assembly Resolution 2908, which passed 99-5 on 2 Nov 1972. You can read the text here:
https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/2908(XXVII)
The upshot of this is that, while the General Assembly believed that it voted in favor of the "Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples", it also voted for the removal of Hong Kong and Macau from the decolonization list by approving the Special Committee's report in para 3 of the resolution.
In short, UN General Assembly Resolution 2908 derecognized HK and Macau as territories to be decolonized, thereby recognizing China's assertion of its sovereign right over them.
>Those kind of play toward the concept of a proud city-state breaking apart of a larger, country that doesn't seem to grasp what the people are feeling.
That's a nice concept, but the proof of concept doesn't work.
Again, Singapore didn't "break away" from Malaysia. In fact, prior to the formation of Malaysia, the Singapore leadership had campaigned vigorously for Singapore to be incorporated into Malaysia.
Unfortunately, the political leadership in Malaysia was set on having its race-based affirmative action policy - which favored the race of the ruling Malay majority, by the way - and so it decided Singapore had to go.
Let me reiterate that: Malaysia made a unilateral decision, without consulting the people of Singapore, to evict Singapore from the federation. Singapore was kicked out. It didn't "break away".
Today is Malaysia's national day. I'd appreciate it if you could get your facts right before commenting on Malaysia going forward.
>What if HK were to decide "enough is enough", to move out, and live their own life?
They can't. They depend on China for their water and most of their food.
The same is true for Singapore: it depends on Malaysia for its water and most of its food.
The big difference is this: Malaysia is quite happy for Singapore to be independent; China sees HK as an inalienable part of itself.
>If we wanted to contrast HK <-> SG, I'd probably pick different things.
What, like this:
>For instance Singapore speaking Mandarin and being more diverse culturally/linguistically.
This is completely irrelevant to the issues at hand.
>It's really cool. Look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Singapore#/media/
I know.
>I just don't see it that way.
You're free to continue not seeing it this way, but inattention to detail can be costly (c.f. UN Resolution 2908).
You'll sometimes see leaders proudly support independence movements abroad while insisting people pushing the same sort of ideas at home are criminals or terrorists.
In my experience nothing really works, because the Chinese firewall is more like a whitelist than what it used to be.
OpenVPN over WebSocket proxy works, sometimes. Some commercial VPNs work up to a point, but expect very low bandwidth and frequent annoying disconnects.
A lot of hotels in GZ have internet through HK for some odd reason I can’t fathom, it was nice browsing Facebook in my hotel room without a VPN.
Plus even just to get a SIM card you need passport/id. So to be able to speak freely some kind of secure anonymization layer is needed.
Outline integrates with DigitalOcean (easiest to use), Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. It also works with any other Linux server host.
Shadowsocks is resistant to the detection methods used by the Great Firewall, but has been steadily declining in effectiveness according to user reports on GitHub. It's still much better than OpenVPN, which reportedly gets interrupted frequently.
If you want a more comprehensive solution, you can also use the Streisand tool to set up a variety of VPN protocols, including OpenConnect, Shadowsocks, and WireGuard. On Streisand, Shadowsocks can be equipped with the V2ray plugin to help evade detection.
https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand
Streisand's setup process is slower and less reliable than Outline VPN's. There's no management console here, just a shell script (using Ansible) to deploy the services to a server. You are given instructions for manually setting up third-party client software (also open source) after the server deployment is complete.
I think this is a problem that needs a political solution, not a technical one. The protesting in HK is probably the best way to go about this.
The practice is also so common that it would likely be impractical to make the penalty more severe.
That said, you should just use Lantern. Recently international links out of China are insanely unreliable, but we’re continuing to improve it. There are hiccups, but it works.
1. Censorship-resistant chat: Something DHT-based preferrably, I am looking at Status.im right now
2. Mesh Internet over the air, something like DN42 but over wireless links
While my personal experience in Hong Kong has just been mediocre (have lived in APAC for 13 years - China, Taiwan, Hong Kong), the open access to news, social media, etc... is part of the local culture. Hong Kongers seem to have a similar cynical / critical view of all media - they want to validate the spin by their experience and other data points - a characteristic that is often seen as "western." This contributes to westerners feeling comfortable with Hong Kongers. It would be sad to see HK lose this.
Of course, the wider Internet's concentration of critical network infrastructure in organizations like Cloudflare, Google, and others mean that even the "free" Internet is not fully free or truly egalitarian. The world needs infrastructure-level solutions to the overall troubling trend of great firewalls, malicious cert. authorities, bad actors, etc... that can be trusted by all and maybe even be a ray of light for Hong Kong's future.
With that said, if any restrictions come into place, I'll definitely fast track my plan to leave, probably before the end of the year.
There is good reason to expect China's global influence to continue to increase. HK is basically a front line.
If you look at countries like Australia you can see that this style of government is already starting to spread in some ways.
The US population is only 23% the size of China's yet the US has much more territorial and resource control globally.
My concern is that Chinese people will eventually not want to tolerate this disparity in resource control anymore.
At the moment the Chinese military is not capable of doing anything about it as far as I know.
However, if that changes, it is unlikely that the US will cede control voluntarily. In that case there would be a war.
However, since war involves mass killing, and people do not do that without some moral justification, people will need to find this ethical cause. What scares me about the protests is that "freedom" is the type of cause that people will commit mass murder for.
I think that the people who might push for a war do not really care about freedom or anything other than money and they do not respect human life.
I think it may be necessary to find non-violent ways to integrate Eastern and Western cultures and logistical controls in order to avoid a war. So I believe that should be a national security priority.
Granted, you spent the first half of the comment criticizing China, so it probably isn't.
Overall, I can't discern what you are trying to say.
It will be a strategic war like all of the other ones, with the goal for each country to maximize its own power and control.
The people pushing for war will be both American and Chinese. The American military strategists will be asking for overt military action in order to combat incringement upon their dominant naval and air control. The Chinese will be looking to increase their area of influence and resource control. The primary drivers of the war push will be from military analysts, as well as industrial and economic interests that see profit potential in war.
So these military, industrial, and economic strategists may at some point see overt military action as the most effective strategy. However, as in all wars, they will not be able to convince any politicians to accept military authorization on a strategic basis. Therefore, military analysts on both sides will create propaganda programs designed to motivate the war on a moral basis.
This marketing effort for the war will be based around slogans like "freedom" from the American side. For the Chinese, I don't know what they will say, but it will be a moralistic slogan.
Freedom is very important, and this is the hard part because it will not fit in with most American's worldview, but in terms of war, it is just a slogan used to promote an agenda provided by people who seek profit and power and have no respect for human life.
I think people who are concerned about freedom need to actively pursue it in many ways. The HK protests are one good way, but in no way are they adequate. We have wildly divergent worldviews and cultures that are inevitably coming into conflict. A battle to the death for one's own worldview and power is not a safe approach.
To resolve the conflict safely, cultures and power structures need to be integrated. It is quite a massive undertaking and almost always is done by force through warfare. But if we value freedom and human life then we must try to find alternative ways to do this that do not involve mass killing. We have powerful communications and other technologies that might make this feasible this time.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-officials-may-undersea-ca...
org.hk is an entry in it, which means you should display the next section "up" from that, so that would be hkispa.org.hk as wanted here.
ac.uk: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/blob/master/public_suff...
go.th: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/blob/master/public_suff...
For example, the maintainers of .ac.uk should very much care about the owner of "foo.ac.uk" not being able to set a cookie for "bar.ac.uk", which is partly what the PLS is used for!
They'd consider these to be the .hk TLD's: .hk com.hk edu.hk gov.hk idv.hk net.hk org.hk 公司.hk 教育.hk 敎育.hk 政府.hk 個人.hk 个人.hk 箇人.hk 網络.hk 网络.hk 组織.hk 網絡.hk 网絡.hk 组织.hk 組織.hk
They also consider dreamhost.com to be a TLD, so it's probably not the right list for some other use cases.
It seems like a response to rumors but are there primary sources to the speculations they're alluding to?
Anyone that's been watching HK for the past 20 years would find it obvious that the PRC government intends to slowly integrate it into mainland China, and absorb it into the same legal framework, slowly but surely. Eventual end state goal would be laws indistinguishable from across the "border" in Shenzhen.
I don't think there was really any indication counter to what you're describing since.
There has been so much incomplete news spreading that it’s hard to tell what is real.
Just two weeks ago, there were videos of APCs “going into Hong Kong,” and people were saying a takeover was imminent. Instead it turned out to be some regular drill in Shenzhen.
Just a few days ago, there were posts of HK police shooting at a kneeling bystander. Turns out if you watch the full video, the “bystander” was throwing bricks at the cops and a huge mob was attacking the cops with spears.
Edit: To the people downvoting me, can you explain why? Am I mistaken about the events that happened? If so, please let me know. I’m just trying to weed out all the rumors get posted.
Edit 2: If it’s because of my green status, I usually use throwaways when posting on sensitive topics. So I can understand if my interpretation of events upsets some people. Just to be clear, I do support the people of Hong Kong and hope they succeed. I just think it’s important to have a true accounting of the facts.
However what is obvious is that the HK government has a number of measures to do before it resorts to complete censorship or invites the army to take over. For example here in Denmark wearing masks in a public demonstration has been against the law for the past 10 years. Meaning that the police can arrest you immediately if you wear a mask and also (probably) dissolve the demonstration.
Sounds like a bad sign.
_COMMENT_ENDS_
Nobody has been anywhere near a runway, and it would be very hard to argue that they shouldn't be shot if they tried, but Hong Kong Airport was shutdown twice by the government because of protests there.
Ports, meh, it's just cargo, nobody cares. Port workers went on strike a few years ago and companies just rerouted.
Many highways have been blocked for short periods in 2019, and in 2014 major roads on Hong Kong Island were occupied for months.
The economic impact so far has been modest, but noticeable. The overall state of the regional and global economy is a much bigger factor in Hong Kong's economic situation.
We don't want anyone to die, police or protester. There have been cases where that has been a real possibility, recently, and that's mostly the red line that nobody wants to cross.
*Screen cap: https://i.imgur.com/tnTvaAJ.png