Hong Kong Protests: The most striking illustrations from the movement so far
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What still is shocking is how many Chinese people I know who are nice and rational people, but once the word Taiwan or HK is spoken, become angry tape recorders spewing hate. This is proof nationalistic religious-style patriotic education in China is dangerous to both Chinese and the world.
What is shocking is how many Western people I know who are nice and rational people, but once the word China is spoken, become angry tape recorders spewing hate. This is proof nationalistic religious-style racist education in Western society is dangerous to both Westerners and the world.
You see, Chinese and Western reactions are completely predictable, none better than the other.
China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.
The West' "view of China," like the West's view of the HK situation, is just a fantasy. It has nothing to do with actual evidence, facts or serious research. Like Iraq, the entire narrative is being driven by anonymous sources that do nothing but validate the Western hatred of China.
> China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.
Oh, the irony. As we speak American bombs are being dropped on Yemen, slaughtering thousands of children and escalating what the UN has repeatedly called the worst humanitarian situation on planet. But yes it's China that's engaged in human rights atrocities.
> Reports of "millions" being forced into camps are pure propaganda
Might it be possible for you to tell us what the actual number of Uighurs is that are are being forced into camps (and the number that are going there willingly, if some are doing so), as well as how you came to know the truth (actual numbers) of what is going on?
It takes a great deal of courage to learn the truth of the American military endeavours that have plunged the world into chaos and war for decades now. This concept is too scary for most Americans - even, Westerners in general - to deal with, and therefore: it continues.
It's not primarily about who does bad things, it's about the victims, and how to help them. That's what empathy is, and that's why punishing evildoers even matters, not because the evildoers do. And yeah, I said evildoers instead of bending over backwards to say the same thing in more bloated language.
I myself have helped multiple refugee families get their lives back together again. You?
Nah, I dont engage in and normalize sophistry, and still acknowledge them, and I don't use straw men to look the other way.
-- George Orwell
And it's not continued murder and pretending it and Tiananmen etc. never happened, all sorts of flowers can bloom on that:
https://shanghai.ist/2019/09/05/this-group-of-scholars-have-...
Very few people may be truly intentionally evil, but we are flawed, greedy and lazy. I have every reason to believe that this is universal. I don't believe that the inherent nature of westerners or Chinese people is any different.
I also know the democracy is not the wonderful perfect mechanism we like to imagine, it is an arena, in which the contest is heavily weighted towards government and the powerful. People who fight in this arena against power are brave and rare. Most of us, in China or the west do not do this.
I admire the Hong Kong protesters, not because I see them as representing the west against the east, but because I believe they are individuals bravely standing together against power. I have stood in more modest protests, before lines of Australian and American police, and I know how scared I was and how limited my own bravery was.
Nationalists who embrace government propaganda without thought are frightening whether they are Australian, American or Chinese nationalists.
Knowing these things, I believe any argument that presents the Hong Kong protests as a conflict between east and west, regardless of whether they take a pro-western or pro-Beijing stance, is using a grain of truth to tell a dishonest story. But it's a story that will continue to be told because seems to be something we all enjoy about hearing a story in which the the most generous, idealistic view of ourselves or our group is contrasted against the most negative achievable portrait of the other group.
So I am not surprised to hear, that mixed into the Hong Know protests is an offensive caricatures of mainlanders. If it were not true, it would be the perhaps the first conflict in human history to rise above petty unproductive insults
So many of the squabbles on this an other forums seem to begin with people who have models of reality, perfectly suitable for navigating their own lives, and assuming with no evidence that their model is also adequate for describing other peoples lives, shouting their models at each other without a lot of listening.
There's well deserved disapproval here of the 'whataboutism' approach to debating, but a some whataboutism is necessary. You need to be able to see the ways in which Tiananmen square and the Nagasaki bombing are similar events in order to get past a cartoon view you, your group and the other.
However, she has a friend who moved to Hong Kong who's firmly pro-Beijing. Her friend even organizes counter protests and marches in support of the police. Both are statisticans. My colleague works as a data scientist in my team, her friend works as a quant in Hong Kong.
It's fascinating how two people can come to such different opinions on this. As a Swede this looks so clear cut to me.
When HK accounted for 1/4 of Chinese GDP, it had an industrial and service sector that supported a comfortable middle class life. The joke was that even HK taxi drivers could support multiple secret families on the mainland. Then mainland manufacturing made HK Detroit. HK also had a vibrant media/culture scene that has diminished in softpower. So you have a generation of kids who are doomed to live at home in cramped apartments with very few economic prospects watching themselves be economically, culturally, politically eclipsed by mainland "locusts" [1]. The same way alt-right dog whistles about immigration politics when there's perceived privilege change in the social order. HK is not a woke place. See drama over HK/Singapore beef, treatment and valuation of foreign domestic workers according to ethnic hierarchy. HKers want suffrage and autonomy, it's all very nice to western ears, but implicit in that desire is to keep HK for HKers because when China sends their people they're not sending their best.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/article/991355/anger-mainland-visitors-...
>A row between Hongkongers and mainlanders is reaching boiling point after internet users raised more than HK$100,000 in less than a week to finance a full-page 'anti-locust' advertisement in a Chinese-language newspaper in the city.
...
>Mainlanders have already crossed our bottom line,' said Yung Jhon, who refused to disclose his real name. 'Why are mainland mothers flooding in to take up resources in public hospitals, getting our benefits and social welfare? Why do mainlanders ... refuse to follow our rules and order? We can't accept that.
This is not an isolated incident but popular sentiment that culminated from increasing mainland immigration to HK since handover. By law HK has to accept ~150 one-way permit holders from mainland per day under family reunification plan. That's 55k a year or ~1million mainland immigrants (in a city of 7 million) since handover. These mainland immigrants are disproportionately elderly and impoverished, "draining" HK social services. There's also extremely affluent mainlanders buying up property in HK, flaunting their wealth in shopping day trips. Spoiled, rich mainland Chinese kids whose parents were pig farmers a generation ago makes people's blood boil around the world. HK is no different.
Granted. Not all Chinese people are like that. Some I personally know are very level headed and see clearly when the state is trying to manipulate them.
I just hope there are more level headed people in China than there are hate-filled individuals that keep calling other people “cockroaches”. Propaganda is truly frightening.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/search/?q=cockroaches&incl...
If worst comes to worst, the people who try to silence you today will tomorrow lie about having done that.
It's in response to Hongkongers calling mainlanders "locusts". IOW, Hongkongers started it. You might want to know the whole story before deciding to pick a side.
I took your advice and did a quick google search.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Kong_Qingdong_incident
> In January 2012, Ken Wai, a Hong Kong passenger, asked a Mainland Chinese woman and her child to stop eating on an MTR subway in Mandarin Chinese on a train bound for Mong Kok East Station.[15] Eating and drinking is prohibited on the MTR. While the kid stopped eating, the mother reacted with hostility towards Wai.[16] This infuriated Mr. Wai, who began to shout at them passionately in Cantonese... On 18 January Mr. Wai conducted an interview with Xinhua News Agency on the issue and expressed his anger.[16] (by calling Hong Kongers dogs)
It seems like it was not Hong Kongers that started this but a Beijing professor that called people "dogs". And the incident was pretty clear-cut on who was wrong. Although, the old man could have handled the situation better, the professor calling people "dogs" was inappropriate.
Were you genuinely misinformed? May I ask where did you get your information?
And I don't really care who started it. Two wrongs does not make one right.
I am not condoning the word "locust" either. All these words are disgusting, and have no place in a civilized discussion.
A Google search and one Wikipedia article do not give you the whole story.
Please refrain from jumping to conclusions and spreading partial truth, unless you intend to misinform and mislead.
2) When I find the truth, you say I am saying its the partial truth.
So basically, what I am getting, is that you are right because you said so.
> you intend to misinform and mislead
You made an accusation and I refuted it. The person misleading others is not me as I like you to recall that you are the one accusing Hong Kong of "starting it".
Please provide some evidence to back your claim instead of just saying you are Chinese (I am assuming not from Hong Kong). That means absolutely nothing in the context of the argument.
https://i.redd.it/w8q24l4r10l31.jpg
This along with Hong Kongers singing "Do You Hear the People Sing" really make it another great revolution just like the French Revolution.
The US has denied Puerto Ricans democratic rights for almost 120 years now.
Brexit is bad because it’s a shitshow that was never seriously believed would happen let alone be properly planned. It will leave the UK in an objectively worse position in terms of power, economy and politics.
Catalan independence is bad because it won’t improve anything, it’s a pride of culture movement that will likely negatively affect the population. The EU stated that it wouldn’t accept a Catalan state as a member, so the economy and movement would be heavily restricted.
HK independence is good because the Chinese government and state apparatus is evil. Having your home and culture consumed and extinguished is not something anyone would wish for. Maintaining independence is objectively better than being controlled by China.
The propaganda is strong with this one.
No, everyone deserves it. It's just that people not under brutal dictatorships observably more often already have it.
This is not what I usually see reflected in the comments here and the wider media narrative. If we criticize one country for being a dictatorship and criticize another for giving people a vote and following through on that vote it's certainly worth looking at how we came to those opinions.
A vote that is substantially cast on the basis of disinformation or lulz is not a legitimate vote, and despite occasionally overwhelming public outcry to the effect that they want one, the people haven't been given the chance to recast it.
A clown, indicating every intent of not following the vote of the Parliament he leads, into an action which the polity he and that Parliament represent seem, largely enough, not to want that a new referendum is the only not-insane choice, is an existential danger to democracy. There is nothing to reconcile between these not-exemplary-of-anything-but-themselves cases.
You're not wrong I suppose, but I don't quite understand why it's not considered possible for a nation to have sovereign independence and still function reasonably well. I'm sure being a member of the EU offers some advantages with respect to standards and efficiency, but I don't get why a nation can't remain independent and interact with other nations (complying with any necessary standards), at a cost of say 5%-10% to their economy due to the disadvantages of not being fully integrated.
But the referendum to leave was essentially pitched as “we will maintain all of the benefits, have more money, and get rid of those immigrants”. It probably would not have gotten nearly as much support if it were pitched honestly as “we will lose 10% of our economy, lose free movement to our nearest neighbors, and will lose tremendous leverage in international negotiations”
It seems to me you're describing the exact situation in Hong Kong right now.
HK would lose movement to the world by being absorbed by China.
If Spain were an authoritarian regime like China the Catalan would have been extinguished, punished and redistributed to other parts of Spain, while they and their family were observed for insubordination for the rest of their lives.
The caption reads: ️Full of love, pure love for Hong Kong #GodBlessHongKong #GodBlessStudents
It's a real shame the canvas doesn't do justice to the artists' illustrations.
EDIT: visit lihkg.com and search "ycombinator"
Shows they really see this as an "Us vs Them" situation...
Its a deliberate racial characterization in an unfavorable style, despite the fact they're either the same racially or very very similar.
Not saying I like or agree with it, just that its socially interesting.
This piece actually refers to a specific incident where the protestors attacked uncooperative bystanders (presumably fellow HK'ers) on a train at Prince Edward Station, one of whom used a hammer to defend himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IpfKRRbiEQ
Later the police were called by the subway authorities, and went ahead to arrest the now cowed protestors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-wKmycZ_DA
The news only reported on the second video. You can also see how "Resist Girl" manages to turn reality into a completely distorted narrative.
3rd world war: U.S. against China, winner take all (the planets)
Just because it hasn't hit any Western shores doesn't mean civilization isn't being utterly destroyed by those with the military means to do so.
So at this point, you don't even fully know what you're doing your whataboutism with.
If you care to look, you can see the truth in the eyes of the children who have lost their parents or brothers or sisters, or arms and/or legs. They're out there, but of course, if you are living the high life in the good ol' USA, you'd have to take a long flight to see, for yourself, the truth.
Not everybody here even is American, I for one am not.
Of course it's whataboutism. When I say "hey, did you know drinking bleach is bad?" and you talk about how alcohol kills more people, that's whataboutism, regardless of how true what you distract with is.
> Some of us are on the lines with the refugees and the orphans
I also helped refugees, I just don't need to parade that around, in order to justify my whataboutism, because I don't engage in whataboutism.