And the real losers in this fight here are Hongkongese citizens, who fought for their freedom and ultimately are losing it, on top of facing an economic crisis.
New Hong Kong City, Colorado. I like the sound of that.
Colorado, would become the new Mecca of delicious Cantonese cuisine and Dim Sum eateries. As well as, all the technical, math, financial, and medical talent, that you can extract from the Hong Kongers. Their children would become the future engineers and doctors in America.
It would unleash a new golden age for Colorado! And bring in massive amounts of tax revenue too!
(Explaining the joke: that's where the alternate history in _The Yiddish Policemen's Union_ put its post-WW2 Jewish diaspora.)
Probably none, but I would be terrified.
Also search warrants were originally needed for the police force to break into private properties (not that the Hong Kong police respect any of the current laws now though), after passing the law, they are no longer need.
The scariest part, however, is how vague the law is. One can never truly define what is criminalized. For example, what is "foreign interference"? The HK government has been criticizing the protests as being "influenced" by the US. It's their say to impose a crime upon you. Most "criteria" for acting against the "law" are speculations.
This is because systematically, over the course of hundreds of years, those in power abused those without power, over and over and over and over again, based on their own personal gain. ESPECIALLY if you don't care about the people you're in power over. This is basically why the American Revolution happened, England ran out of money fighting wars and tried to squeeze America for it. America said, no way, you don't give 2 pence about us.
Yes, your practical freedoms may not be affected in the micro timescale of the days and weeks, but over the course of centuries, countless people lose their lives and livelihoods, not their freedom, because of any number of reasons, none of them being that they did a crime to deserve it.
If history has taught us anything, you could lose your life for being:
1) A religious minority
2) A racial minority
3) A friend of someone who the person in power wants to get rid of
4) Too rich / powerful and a threat to governance
5) Well educated or with radical ideas
and much more.
You could also lose your livelihood or future by any number of means:
1) being taxed unfairly so that you make next to nothing
2) being forced to do things in a way that would benefit your mother country, at the expense of yourself
3) needing to follow laws that you have no control over that inconvenience or ruin your trade or businesses
4) needing to report to the government suspicious persons or activities
And just to be clear, I'm talking about themes from the American Revolution and escaping from the tyranny of European influence, not current affairs.
This situation is not in the same ballpark of possible outcomes as "Facebook exposing your private data to advertisers", of which only minor inconvenience is at stake. It's a lot more than that.
So is this actually an argument about the influence / authority of China and the extent of their power, or about the specific laws being passed?
Or is it about making sure the 27 years left on the clock are as close to the system that people knew before as possible? Because I don't think the influence of China battle in Hong Kong going to be won, in the long run.
-- edit: btw I equally don't understand (well I do, but for the sake of argument) why China/Xi is so in a rush to accelerate the 27 years left for Hong Kong. If it's going to be reverted to 1 system guaranteed eventually, what's the need to do this right now?
-- further edit: btw I also don't understand why Carrie Lam is so eager to do Beijing's bidding. If she's an independent/educated/Hong Kong native, what's her motivation? Or do they have some dirt on her? If she's worried about being extradited, you would think she'd be most advocating for an independent legal system.
China does not want to see any of this happen today, because mainland China is still developing. But theoretically, once China has developed, it would no longer need an independent and semi-free or semi-autonomous Hong Kong any longer, and Hong Kong could be merged into China with relatively little impact to China as a whole. Peacefully or otherwise.
The United States and the west generally do not want to see any of this occur, for reasons that should be painfully obvious.
So nothing about either China's actions towards Hong Kong, the people of Hong Kong's desires, or America's response here has anything to do with the freedoms of individual people today, China's current influence, or current laws proposed or being passed by any of the three participating societies.
Its about what everyone knows is going to be passed in a year, or 5, 10, or 40. The play from Hong Kong and the west is too draw out the unification period as long as possible, because you never know what could happen in the future. China feels the opposite.
This is happening now, because China has been pulling democratic governors out of Hong Kong legislative bodies by force. And because they are currently setting up a secret police network, legally, in Hong Kong, to enforce their power structure there, the same way it is done in mainland China. That means, that regardless of what "laws" Hong Kong passes, Hong Kong is no longer independent.
And America is responding that if China is going to rule Hong Kong as part of its mainland country, and abandon the rule of law that currently exists in Hong Kong, then America will no longer respect Hong Kong as a rule-of-law based, independent, society. Quite simply, it will no longer be safe for the west to invest money into Hong Kong, the way it has in the past.
This is both good self-preservation for the west, as well as making good on what, previously to today, was one a limited number of good reasons for China to respect Hong Kong's separate legal system and status. Theoretically, China could, tomorrow, roll back their pressure on Hong Kong, and America would roll back this announcement, though I rather doubt that either country is incentivized for that outcome.
As for your last two questions:
1 - Internal Chinese politics. I can't imagine you would ever get a correct answer about this on the internet. China does not work like the west. No one who understands it well is going to discuss it in a public forum (you understand why?), unless, possibly, you're talking about a western academic.
2 - Because she is legitimately a stooge, in the fundamental sense of the word. Its worth looking up Hong Kong's governmental structure. Its not a real democracy. Its more or less what you would expect a government to look like, if the wealthiest people in a country all knew each other, and the country wanted a democracy, but the wealthy wanted to ensure that they always held all the positions of power, with limited accountability. Hong Kong is only, really, democratic compared to China. There's a reason the protests were demanding universal elections... Hong Kong doesn't have them. So Hong Kong's government is just doing what it has been designed from the start to do: give the Hong Kong people some semblance of democracy, while simultaneously bowing to the most powerful people in the society, who are, increasingly, placed there by China.
This is usually the reasoning for the CCP supporters that other countries have similar laws. That is true but this is not a similar comparison when you are talking about a democratic society where there are checks and balances like judicial independence.
The CCP has a track record to remove and silence its oppositions.[1] The proposed law will give the government even more power since it carries severe penalties and were used in the mainland to jail dissidents.[2]
> So is this actually an argument about the influence / authority of China and the extent of their power, or about the specific laws being passed?
Prior to this, HK carried over the British colony tradition of independence of judiciary, albeit slowing eroding since 1997. But if the bill is passed, it will be the first time that the Chinese government bypass the HK government to directly legislate. Hence the reaction from HK + the world
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3035285... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo#Arrest
Here is another example: Mandatory Mandarin proficiency exams at university: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education/article/213041...
I have lived in HK and know many people there, and their day to day doesn't seem impacted, but culturally I suspect a massive gradual change is inevitable.
It would be like asking: does living in China differ tremendously from living in the US, for you and I? Not that much really, on a day-by-day basis!
One thing being fought over is disrespecting the Chinese national anthem. Sure, I might not be “the average person” but that’s the point, small deviations are criminalized.
Stretching a bit, we call it the freedom from fear (of unjust prosecution), which is the—arguably justified—distrust of the rule by law in China (not the rule of law that Hong Kong previously had). Note that Hong Kong people are using “Freedom from Fear” [1] differently from how US is using it [2].
Chinese courts work very differently from Hong Kong ones: they swing with politics. Many people have been—as perceived by Hong Kongers—unjustly detained or prosecuted (such as the milk powder incidents [3], the two Canadians in China after the Huawei case [4], or the more recent whistleblower Li Wenliang). And those people, in some cases, are sued for charges such as spying or subversion, which is the main theme of the national security law.
Given that Chinese agents extracted Hong Kongers in the Causeway Bay Books disappearances [5], Hong Kongers fear that the new national security law (which allows state agents to police Hong Kong [6]) means that Hong Kongers (and perhaps foreigners) may face state agents extraction from Hong Kong. To many Hong Kongers, voicing out for social injustice could mean instability in China, and could mean theft of state secret or subversion as CCP see it.
Hence it is limiting freedom of speech.
[1]: “Freedom from Fear” is a slogan in Hong Kong protests, see for example this image https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/181114165731-hong-kon...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_from_fear
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
[4]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/asia/canada-china-kovrig-spav...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearan...
[6]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-to-allow-state-security-a...
- freedom of association
- freedom of religion
- freedom of the press
- the right to privacy
- the right to a democratic, representative government
- the right to a fair trial
- freedom from cruel and unusual punishment
The CCP is one of the most oppressive regimes on Earth, depriving its people of even the most basic of rights and freedoms.
Okay so lets rewind like a year ago, what did you or anyone realistically think was going to happen?
100% of the will of the people can only make up for a fraction of the political consensus in Hong Kong, with corporations making up the rest. This isn't unique to Hong Kong, The City of London within London has a similar form of representation.
The corporations derive their power and hegemony from mainland China.
The Chief Executive (Head of State) is appointed unilaterally by Beijing.
The politics are interesting but if you were a betting man, what are your odds for any outcome?
I'm afraid it'll never be the same.
For too long China practised a kind of hostage diplomacy where it solves its problems by taking hostages and then negotiating for concessions. For instance the two Canadians detained to pressure Canada to release Huawei CFO.
Hong Kong is now another hostage of CCP, Xi betting that the US dare not tighten the screw on its tariff as long as HK is a hostage in its grip. But most likely China will fail, as HK people have prepared themselves to be sacrificed to bring down the CCP. On an individual level HKers will begin another mass exodus like in pre-1997.
Noob question, how much do these differ? Also does it go further, perhaps a difference in culture as well as language?
Individual words can look similar but combine them into a sentence and you probably wouldn't be able to parse it on a first take (if they were transcribed into romanized letters), and there are some grammar differences.
The german grammar is a fair point though. Makes every sentence sound like churchill trying to be annoying on purpose.
It's like English v German, but imagine that German had a bunch of sounds that seem identical to you but are actually different sounds (you just can't hear the difference). Imagine that German Wasser (water) and Wäscher (washer, ish) sounded exactly the same to you, and you couldn't tell the difference. Now imagine that literally every single word had dozens of those identically-sounding-but-actually-different-sounding-to-native-speakers examples.
The issue imo is the increase in tones. Mandarin has 4-5 tones, cantonese has like 6-9. And the tones in Mandarin are much easier to distinguish.
taiwan has national health care, really good public transportation system, really liberal government (gay marriage recently) despite the low gdp. I would move there if they legalized weed which is sadly unlikely
now that hong kong is a part of the PRC, maybe they'll be forced to use the national language (mandarin) lol