Um, no? At what point are the citizens of a country responsible for changing it for the better? The citizens of Hong Kong need to stay and fight for the rights they desire, not run away to another country.
Ultra was able to successfully decrypt Enigma messages because the British evacuated Polish code breakers, so I suppose it's a good thing those people didn't stay and fight.
The Polish resistance saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust and gave a ton of information to the Allies, so I suppose it's a good thing those people did stay and fight.
Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers (under the direction of the Polish government in exile) fought with the Allies throughout the war, so I suppose it's a good those people left and fought.
Just some random thoughts, everything is complicated.
Not to offend anyone, but Americans haven't really demonstrated any ability or will to fight for their rights as a nation in the past 100 years, this posturing I see all the time from Americans about freedom is like a peacock displaying its feathers, not having done anything to earn them - you were just born with them.
Examine Hong Kong’s strategic resources at the moment and tell us how you would deploy them in a fight.
The best thing the US (Europe and others) can do, is bleed off Hong Kong's talent, those that want to escape before the door closes. It's not going to severely harm China, however every Elon Musk or Jensen Huang that the US can get to its shores is a win.
The US should immediately set up a special, aggressive immigration program just for Hong Kong and Taiwan. After China is done consolidating the situation in Hong Kong in the near future, they will turn more of their attention and aggression to Taiwan (Taiwan is aware they're up next after HK, you can tell by their recent behavior and statements; Taiwan is sweating bullets, properly so).
I’ve never understood the place-over-people mentality. The rights Hong Kong is fighting for exist overseas. The people can keep their culture and spend their lives thriving in America, or stay put and fight what looks to be a losing battle against Beijing for the rest of their lives.
Nobody would force anyone to emigrate. All that’s proposed is a choice. If you can’t convince your countrymen to stay and fight, you don’t have a legitimate fight.
Eventually they did, in a roundabout way. The rise of the US, causing Britain to lose its lucrative colonies (and the future potential value of their North American holdings), helped break the British Empire. They could not sustain their empire with its shrinking assets. Empires bloat, ossify and become more expensive to maintain over time. To counter that, you need an outsized injection of new value coming in, which the North American colonies could have potentially provided. At best it might have bought the British Empire some more time.
In this case fixing means returning Britain to being a normally functioning nation state, instead of an overseas, overstretched empire.
What eventually broke it was the World Wars.
Note that I am not arguing that their responsibility is derived from their colonial past; but rather, from the handover itself. (arguably this whole mess really started with the New Territories lease. "99 years". Foolish.)
The difference isn't quite as large as the one between the US and European countries, but it's significant.
And how would they do that?
The HK citizens by themselves will not win this fight, the writing is on the wall. They either get help from abroad or flee.
It's naive to think that a region with a population of less than 10mi will make China backdown, considering China's history.
Your comment was arguably a straw man, however, as it attacked a point which the article did not make (i.e., Hong Kong should not be responsible for itself) instead of any of the actual arguments (which focused on the benefits to the United States: strategic, economic, and political).
If we’re looking at human rights violations (North Korea), then the world stage should be involved, not a singular country.
The Hong Kong circumstance isn’t a human rights violation, more of a diplomacy incident.
What about mass surveillance, isn’t that a human rights violation? I would like it to be, but if that were the case, there are few places in the world to go to. Sure China is most explicit and egregious, but we have to have international court rulings before we begin to condemn and sanction based off surveillance (with many participating countries being hypocritical to an anti-surveillance ruling)
This is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Imposing a dictatorship on free people is a violation of human rights.