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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

Ehh. I’m not really inclined to call my representative and advocate that we get involved in yet another foreign entanglement. What does “save Hong Kong” mean? Undoing the agreement that’s in place for hand-over to China?

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For starters it means not integrating them into a country with concentration camps, kills journalists, suppresses dissent

Hong Kong was a democracy, it getting eaten up by China is horrendous.

> Hong Kong was a democracy, it getting eaten up by China is horrendous.

Hong Kong was never a democracy in the modern sense. Its citizen only elect half of the members of the legislative council. And the Chief It had Rule of Law, freedoms of press and assembly and other factors, but it was never a full democracy.

Hong Kong will likely be integrated, and any military action would be a disaster. But we can make swallowing Hong Kong hurt, politically and economically.

On the on hand we have a degree of outrage that China can influence corporate America.

In the same discussion we have calls to hurt China politically and economically for implementing an international treaty.

If we expect China to measure its influene in our country, we ought to show some measure.

I think you left something out. That treaty will be used to kidnap and torture dissidents.

There is nothing wrong with calls to hurt a Communist government politically and economically.

It's a bit more complicated than that. The British Empire had some battles with China in the 1800s and took over Hong Kong. Eventually in 1898 a treaty was signed effectively ceding the territory to Britain in perpetuity, but for face-saving reasons it was written as a 99 year lease. In 1984, after multiple regime changes in China and the decline of the British Empire, a new agreement was made between China and the UK that would make Hong Kong a Special Administrative Zone as a part of China. Under the one country, two systems policy, Hong Kong would retain domestic political and economic autonomy for 50 years (until 2047). As China has grown more powerful and the UK less powerful in the past 20 years, China now has more power to try to accelerate the integration of Hong Kong. This is worrying for Hong Kong citizens, who fear they will be subject to persecution and retaliation under China's judicial system.

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