Our modern tendency to compete on who can most hyperbolically denounce Western Imperialism strips us of any ability to calibrate between cultures. Do you know what Imperial Rome would have done to the nonviolent Indian revolt? They'd have executed it at its infancy and it would be a historical footnote. They wouldn't have even waited for it to become a big movement; the death penalty would have been used early and often. To some degree, even as entertainment.
My read on China is closer to first-century Rome than 20th century Britain. YMMV.
To be clear, neither I or you are certain what the majority of HKers want to trade for democracy. Realistically if they want democracy so bad, what else they can do other than the protesting they are doing? Long term striking seems to be something they can do TODAY, RIGHT NOW. Equiped with weapons or not, one of the bet they have to make is that the international community would not sit idlely while many HKers get killed.
I don't know how that's relevant to anything I said. My point is about culture. Nonviolent protest requires you to be protesting an amenable authority. There have been plenty of examples in history of authorities that will just spill as much blood as it takes. To my eye, the only constraint on China doing that is their fear that people might stop paying into their economy.
Bear in mind that if China decided to roll into Hong Kong and simply kill everybody there, it would only increase the current Chinese government's death toll against their own people by somewhere between 16% to 40%. It wouldn't even double it! This is the government that brought you the "Great Leap Forward" in which they killed 18-45 million of their own people. This is a government being credibly accused of engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Are you sure advising "nonviolent protest" against that is a good idea?
"one of the bet they have to make is that the international community would not sit idlely while many HKers get killed."
That is not something I'd advise anyone to bet their lives on.
>They are too scared of weapons and (justified, defensive) violence to make Chinese occupation unviable.
To that end I felt striking is probably a better option to try before more violent forms of fighting get involved. Maybe nonviolent protest is not a good idea, but it's probably not a worse idea than violent ones.
>That is not something I'd advise anyone to bet their lives on.
Say without international community support, is there any winning strategy you can think of?
I personally think once the confrontation becomes more heated, at least a dozen western countries would allow HKers to immigrate to their countries, which doesn't require too much resources to do? One example is last year Sweden has already started granting China's Uighurs refugee status.
We are trying our best to find a way. The recent approach is not to do any business with anyone who is Communist blue. (Well, the Communist control many things and this strategy should not work. But it hurts a bit. ) Strike is hard but we will see.
For so call violence, there is a lot of police violence and they have used this to suppress the protest, down to even sing a song in mall.
Tomorrow we will try. But how many will suffer from police we do not know.
Democracy and human rights is core to our belief. We will fight even as said here not very hopeful. Fighting a communist state with resources like that ...
It is not because we have hope we persist but by persistence we might have hope. One of our belief as well.
Or perhaps a French example might be more relevant, with a single city at stake: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
Unfortunately, the violence and instability that often accompanies secession doesn't always end up resulting in prosperity after independence. That is because violent or not, uprisings do not necessarily upset the power balance between the colonizer and the colonized. Some say the alphabet agencies that form the worldwide practice of SIGINT operate on this inertia -- well, I don't want to speculate about what I don't know about, but I think that at least my own country's declassified documents are telling. The USA has had a hand in kingmaking much of LatAm and the Middle East. Historically, I think this kind of proxying only ends when the empire itself shrivels.
We obviously can’t make a long list here, but here is one that might be relevant to think about:
Korean protests in 1987 (against a military strongman)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Struggle
Carnation Revolution in Portugal 1974 (against dictatorship)
However China is different cup of tea. They don't care about image as they can suppress and buy PR - Tibet.
They massacred their own youth, organized mass organ thief etc. They have different approach to (de)valuing human life.
I am afraid that HK is under a CPR steamroller slowly crushing the resistance.
Yes and no. China is almost crazily touchy about their image. They claim that it's an insult to their nation if anyone admits that Taiwan exists as a separate entity. You can't even mention Winnie the Pooh in China, because some people use it as a derisive label for Chairman Xi. (Imagine having the NSA notice every on-line mention of "Orange Man", and ordering the hosting site to remove it.)
Now, they may not care about their image as much as they care about suppressing Hong Kong. But the rest of the world can make them pay a price in terms of image - a price that China seems to find rather painful.