China sets up Hong Kong crisis center in mainland
reuters.com
reuters.com
Landslide pro-democracy victory in HK district council elections:
Hong Kong Election Landslide Signals More Frictions With Beijing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/world/asia/hong-kong-elec...
Recently-leaked PRC government documents confirm details of the Xinjiang camps:
China Didn’t Want Us to Know. Now Its Own Files Are Doing the Talking: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/opinion/china-xinjiang-fi...
‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/ch...
Leaked China Files Show Internment Camps Are Ruled by Secrecy and Spying: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/world/asia/leak-chinas-in...
Chinese intelligence agent defects to Australia:
Would-Be Chinese Defector Details Covert Campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/world/asia/defector-spy-t...
Defecting Chinese spy offers information trove to Australian government: https://www.smh.com.au/national/defecting-chinese-spy-offers...
It starts to paint a picture of a very quiet and tactful fascist world conquering through totally legal business moves.
Also, just to get the idea out there, I'm totally down for a lesser standard of living for the sake of not putting any more gas in their tanks.
The problem: "The people in charge of manipulating Hong Kong public opinion for the CCP [the Liason Office] are also the people charged with reporting on their own success." Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/25/hong-kong-election-beij...
Minorities are almost always significantly bigger voters proportionally — a greatly counterintuitive point about democratic states.
Let me explain why I say that. To start, China faces many serious problems today, like poor demographic trends, massive bad debts, the trade war with the US, and the Honk Kong and Uighur crises. In order to deal with these problems, the government needs to make good decisions, and in order to do that it needs good understanding of the realities involved.
Now the problem with Xi's authoritarianism is that it cuts off the sort of communication needed to find out what is going on. That includes the free expression of ordinary people, university experts, and people in the lower levels of government. All of them are constrained to be silent or say what the government wants to hear, instead of the truth of what is actually happening. As a result the higher levels of government get more and more out of touch with reality and make poorer and poorer decisions.
I am guessing this will lead to some sort of collapse in the next two or three decades. For those who say no, it is not possible, just take a look at the history of China over the last century. There have been many crises and wild changes in direction, and there is no reason at all to believe that Xi has finally gotten the country on a permanently stable path.
Something else. For years in the comments here at HN, when there was a negative article about China, many China defenders would say it was false, and defend China's policies and general way of government. But in the last few months, they have pretty much given doing this, and instead their main tactic is to try to divert the conversation through false equivalency claims. It seems they have realized China as it actually is can't be defended to people who are not already strong supporters.
"If we take this US bill seriously and shrink from tackling riots, Hong Kong will suffer from an accelerated collapse of the rule of law and be erased from the modern world. [...] If riots continue, Hong Kong is doomed." [1]
I suppose replacing the chain of command in terms of Hong Kong will help circumvent the CCP and secure more 'peace and prosperity' for China.
So yeah, I agree with you the pressure on free speech that China has imposed on governments - not only corporations - but the united states government tells a story about Chinese aggression.
Ultimately, China is far more vulnerable in this trade war than the US, so I expect more belligerence from China in the same way I would expect belligerence from a 7 year old boy when his toy is taken away.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46064194-stealth-war
The West and China need to acknowledge this problem and find a way forward that does not involve conflict or war.
Sure, and if you give a monkey with a typewriter infinite time, he'll eventually write Shakespeare. The point is, we made the bet 50 years ago and China has only become less free and more totalitarian. How much longer are you willing to wait? If you keep the status quo, you'll just be strengthening the iron-grip of the anti-democracy-at-all-costs CCP party.
> Take Hong Kong as an example, nobody would image such pro-democracy would happen at such a massive scale.
I've only ever heard this line from the CCP propaganda media and biased pro-Beijing people. For most of the world it was a given.
Can you provide any link or evidence that you made the specific bet 50 years ago?
> Sure, and if you give a monkey with a typewriter infinite time, he'll eventually write Shakespeare.
Only impatient and ignorant monkeys think it takes several years to change 1.4 billion people.
US relations with China began in the 1970s during the Nixon administration. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon%27s_1972_visit_t....
> Only impatient and ignorant monkeys think it takes several years to change 1.4 billion people.
It's a matter of willingness, not time. If Xi can create a system to surveil and restrict the free speech of 1.4 billion people in less than 10 years, I'm sure he can create a system of Democracy in even less time than that.
US started diplomatic relationship with China, in order to fight USSR, not to put a bet. USSR was by far the bigger threat and the US and China had a common enemy.
> If Xi can create a system to surveil and restrict the free speech of 1.4 billion people in less than 10 years.
Have you not learned a thing in your whole life? Changing 1.4 billion people's ideology is way way way harder than building a surveillance system.
EDIT: I think you missed my point but I think I should leave you with your rose-tinted glasses on.
After the Mao era, things became increasingly unrestricted until the '89 crackdown. A second relative period of relatively lax censorship came in the new century. It has been tightening again since Xi came to power, but arguably still less strict and totalitarian than under Mao.
China is not following a similar path. The CCP has been tightening its grip, and China is arguably less liberal now than it was when Xi took power (for instance: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa...).
The CCP has been much more successful at fusing authoritarianism with capitalism than anyone anticipated.