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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a HKer, but I often her them say things along the lines of "country over party" or "love the country, not the party". I definitely have heard discussion about a desire to unite with mainlanders, but my understanding is that they are having a hard time spreading the message to the mainland. I think reasons for that should be apparent given this particular discussion about censorship.

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FWIW, I have mainland Chinese friends who generally identify as patriotic, but who also use VPNs etc. to better inform themselves. They went to Hong Kong during the National Day celebrations and shared their observations on Weibo. They took note of the fact that there was lots of graffiti, but the only vaguely patriotic slogan was "love the country, not the party". The post wasn't taken down, as far as I know, so the message spread at least slightly, despite the censorship.

If possible could you please provide some sources? Or it’s just heard in person? I’ve been living outside of China for years and read many pro independent sources especially during the protests but haven’t seen any on uniting with mainlanders. And during the protests I’ve seen reports of protesters trashing businesses that are related to mainland and infrastructure connecting to mainland. I don’t think they think every mainland business is CCP sponsored don’t they?

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/crn4qr/im_startin...

I'll admit, on /r/HongKong the "unify with mainlanders" posts don't rise up. It is not trendy. Probably because a lot of people interact with mainlanders that are against their movement. Which my understanding is that this is a selection bias (mainlanders that support them aren't seen). But this is going to happen in any movement that has a lot of fear in it (there is clear justification for the fear).

Communicating/Interacting with ppl who have different opinions is hard enough. But what I meant by allying is even harder than that. It's to help them get the freedom they wanted first. It will be a long process but I think that's the only solution. Only when China is more free then HK will surely not lose its freedom. It's some effort to protest and wave US/UK flags during a protest. It's some effort to get US/UK to have economic sanction against CN. It's some effort to say we have done our best to inform mainlanders of what's going on. Not all of those effort will help and for the ones that help they are probably not enough. Only mainland citizens can make China more free. We can install a "democracy" in China tomorrow but if the citizens don't have the knowledge to use it then HK might end up in a worse situation, facing the full strength of the tyranny of the majority.

There were protests at the border checkpoints trying to reach out to mainlanders and inform them of what the protests were about, and counteract mainland government propaganda.

Informing is good, but that's far away from uniting/allying them.

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