How can people in Europe and US help?
I suggest not working through conventional political channels involving state actors, where the marginal utility of your participation is negligible and you are empowering state institutions which ultimately disempowers individuals and communities.
Study up on direct action techniques; if you're in the right area, protest things like companies who supply riot equipment to police; disrupt, get attention, and use that as a platform to express solidarity with HK. Direct action is effective, politically empowering, and equips you to fight against political repression yourself if there is any risk that you could find yourself or your community subject to it in the future.
Hong Kong is China. No one disputes it. These protests cannot be seen as anything other than a rearguard action to cover the retreat of those who don't want to be ruled by Beijing. So give them a place to go other than Vancouver.
If it had the political will, and were less racist, the US could absorb 750k people to Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Tampa, which represents 10% of Hong Kong, and 10% the metro populations of those cities. The coast of the US facing the Gulf of Mexico is superficially similar to the Chinese coast facing the South China Sea, and there must be at least some businesses that could be transplanted without too many operational changes.
Or, if we aren't interested in doing that, contemplate this may be none of our business, just like police brutality at home is none of China's business.
Or, consider it a third way - we as a society are incapable, or unwilling in reigning in police brutality against domestic protestors. What makes you think we are at all capable of bringing such a change to another country, when we can't even do it to our own?
Look at how almost no one is willing to even acknowledge Taiwan's independence in fear of Chinese reaction. Unfortunately, HK's case is much more hopeless than Taiwan's.
Trade tools are incredibly effective in foreign policy and therefore seem very appealing to people in power but also too often ended up badly for the world when deployed. Know the history.
Sunshine on the CPC's true nature is the best disinfectant.
Franky, HK's struggle looks hopeless to me.
Do you think that is the case in HK?
1. Contacts between US consular staff and HK opposition leaders.
2. Funding by the US 'National Endowment for Democracy' of several Hong Kong groups.
3. My observations of the western media coverage of the events in the province of Xianjiang.
4. My observations of the similarities between the events in Hong Kong and other 'colour revolutions' that have the fingerprints of Washington all over them.
It seems like this is such a low bar that it would mean that nobody else could associate with people in HK without it declared "foreign intervention".
Let alone that you could declare just about anything "foreign intervention".
Those events have also become the poster child for some regimes to use to warn people about opposing them.
Unfortunately, our press doesn't ask the hard questions. No one is held accountable for the death and destruction that these policies have created. So western governments go on and try to apply the magic formula again. I believe that they are doing the same in HK.
I feel this is a cop out. We live in a global economy and so all these things are highly connected. Your statement implies that our reporting of these events is intervention. May be influence, but I'm not sure that would be intervention.
A free press writes what it likes and the act of writing a newspaper article of any sort is not an act of 'foreign intervention'. We probably agree on that.
I have a problem with the fairly homogeneous discourse that I observe in the western press about certain subjects that prepare the domestic public opinion for political and armed intervention in other countries. I know that it's happening because I remember the day when I could read a lot more opposing opions in the newspapers of my language.
But preparing the domestic public opinion for intervention is not intervention itself. I am resolutely opposed to the intervention that is desired by the powers that be.
Spain and California have human rights and the rule of law, but CPC ruled China does not. The CPC is the difference and forms a fundamental difference in the examples you list.