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Comment by jonathannat | Hacker News Reader

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/18/hong-kong-huge...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48656471

At many different times in 2019, 1.7M-2M Hong Kong citizens, or 25% of the population, proudly protested in the streets and requested for their freedom. If only something good had came out of it.

Now it's sunk to what China's best at:

false arrests: https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/mc5bah/young_man_...,

arrest for accessing online information https://restofworld.org/2021/hong-kong-journalist-on-trial-f...

brainwashing https://hongkongfp.com/2021/03/23/hong-kong-will-distribute-...

removal of religious freedom https://hk.appledaily.com/news/20210322/ZUYEZROAIFB4NK2274RB...

fake democratic system https://hongkongfp.com/2021/03/16/why-and-how-i-ended-my-par...

Imagine if you were a proud free parisian, and all of a sudden, you now live under nazi regime with concentration camps. That's probably what it feels like.

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Regarding arrest for accessing online information, I have become fascinated lately with the concept of legal warfare. It is the use of legal constructions to align other governments or subordinate bureaucracies to your strategic goals. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, they used the pretext that only volunteers from Russia were traveling to Ukraine to support a legal separatist movement.

Now none of these claims withstand any sort of legal scrutiny, but that's not the point. In the year or so it takes the Hague to spell out the obvious, that the Russian military in coordination with the Russian presidency created a bogus legal argument that aligns with their strategic goal of annexing as much of Eastern Europe as possible, the invasion is already completed and Donetsk is effectively a Russian vassal in the middle of Ukranian territory.

Just like in the time of the American Revolution guerilla tactics were innovations to the stodgy preconceptions of war that the British had, where they believed a gentleman's war should be fought by squares of men taken broadsides at regular intervals, we must recognize that armed conflicts today are always accompanied by legal warfare, the legal activities that support broader strategic objectives.

is this not just propaganda by another name?

Seems to me that everyone wants to cast their war as a just war [0]. If that means deniable approaches or false flag operations [1] then so be it. In particular I found this excerpt from [1] ironic in the context of your comment:

> Russo-Swedish War

In 1788, the head tailor at the Royal Swedish Opera received an order to sew a number of Russian military uniforms. These were then used by the Swedes to stage an attack on Puumala, a Swedish outpost on the Russo-Swedish border, on 27 June 1788. This caused an outrage in Stockholm and impressed the Riksdag of the Estates, the Swedish national assembly, who until then had refused to agree to an offensive war against Russia. The Puumala incident allowed King Gustav III of Sweden, who lacked the constitutional authority to initiate unprovoked hostilities without the Estates' consent, to launch the Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

We can define propaganda in contrast to psychological warfare. Whereas psychological warfare is the dissemination of cultural products by a military to the population of a foreign adversary in pursuit of a strategic objective, propaganda is the dissemination of cultural products by a government to their own people in the pursuit of strategic objectives. This definition serves the discussion of propaganda in the broader context of warfare well.

Where in your classification would you place outlets like RT or Voice of America then?

That would be considered propaganda. I was too strict by claiming propaganda can only be done to a government's own citizens.

In contrast a good example of psychological warfare would be when Russia organized a protest and an attendant counter-protest in Texas that were made to appear "organic."[0] So the difference between the two is that one proudly has an official "Russia" label on it and the other is clandestine.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-pag...

Some classification of these new forms of interventions:

Ukraine is more hybrid warfare.

HK is more lawfare.

Chinese maritime disputes is more gray zone warfare.

In all cases, the goal is to establish a truth on the ground independent of political posturing. Of course, someone can call your bluff on it!

IMO the political posturing is paramount. Ultimate goal is to provide an sufficient truth calibrated to deter bluff calling. Fundamentally most countries don't want to or have capability to intervene, so the purpose is to give competing parties a credible "out" with manageable political cost, i.e. reduce bluff calling to angry letters / sanctions versus hard military retaliation. Gain objective while deter / mitigate the most unwanted responses.

So you might consider acts such as arresting journalists for accessing public databases as a form of legal warfare, where the strategic goal is to incapacitate any sort of democratic activity in Hong Kong, and abusing the legal system to criminalize the behavior of democracy activists ex post facto can then be considered a sort of "weapon" in an extremely broad sense of the word.

Not taking a side here, just pointing out the fact that the tactic was known and used well before the Crimean events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_King...

The current difference is that now it's happenning during a live broadcast, and the actions are being tried to be justified (as "justice") through existing legal frameworks.

That's one of the ways Empires grow their periphery regions. Another way is when an Empire spreads its culture and abundance to orbiting regions, so that inhabitants of the periphery get a personal interest in becoming the part of the Empire and bringing a change to their governing bodies to align with the metropolis.

> The current difference

Just as a point of comparison (not justifying russia or the US), the region of donetsk (and crimea) was supermajority ethnically russian, and by the time the US overthrew the hawaiian kingdom, ethnic hawaiians were a minority within the (mostly imported) population, so in the case of both russia and the US's actions the majority of local populace gained political power in the aftermath of the takeovers:

https://www.hawaiiankingdom.org/info-census1890.shtml

By comparison if you consider HKers ethnically distinct from mainland chinese (on cultural bases), the situation is dramatically different.

fair point, my reference to "the current difference" was more about the ongoing Crimea situation rather than the HK situation, I should have been more clear in that regard. I still believe that in the HK case there's a vested interest of certain political elite (rather than economic) strata to be aligned with Beijing.

The irony is that HK is being used as a model to get rid of peaceful protest in the U.K. - 10 years in jail for peacefully walking up the road with a sign that annoys an MP.

What are you referring to?

I think he was referring to this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-outlaw-protest...

The US is doing similar things, via a combination of long sentences for petty crimes and abuse of arrest and pretrial detention powers.

I live in HK. 1.7M-2M is a really large exaggeration.

What is your estimate, and how did you measure it?

I live in Paris where most of French demonstrations take place (including the yellow vest movement) but I can't pretend to have better estimates than all local and global media sources and public observers.

Historically, HK protestors grossly over exaggerate for optics, but MSM usually endorses organizer headcount uncritically. Reality consistently closer to police (under)estimates. Professionals at crowd control are better at estimating crowd sizes. Study from HKU of pre 2019 protests:

https://graphics.reuters.com/HONGKONG-EXTRADITION-PROTESTS/0...

Another analysis with machine learning, about 1/2 protestor estimates.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/03/world/asia/ho...

And another, estimates protesters had to occupy 18 miles of streets to pack 1M protestors, actual protests occupied 1 mile. Acknowledges not exact science, but leans towards conservative estimate of 250k... incidentally close to police estimates.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/how-many-marched-protests-hong-...

IMO just average protestor and police reports for ball park figure.

The articles you are referring to doesn’t show the full picture. In all protests only a part of the crowd is visible on the streets, the majority of the day is spent trying to get up to the streets from the MTR.

HKU has 15 years of data points on HK protests. There is reliable pattern of protestor organizers significantly overestimating and police mildly underestimating. Overall HKU and Police estimates are much more aligned. These two parties are actual subject matter experts vs protest organizers, ergo based on historic data and expertise, organizer estimates should be presumed to be less reliable / credible. Doesn't mean 2019 protests weren't massive. They're just likely half as massive as what makes for good headlines.

So what source do we trust on the numbers?

Satellite imagery is likely the best way to estimate.

The massive crowds in slow march peaceful protest videos I saw were astonishing.

However if we extrapolate that not everyone who'd support it or are silently supporting it - what % of people available to protest/march were out?

Edit to add: downvoting a question asking for trustworthy, quantifiable sources - you're failing.

It is not an exaggeration. I was there, joining several protests including the CHRF 2M protest. In addition, the police estimates is always wrong (of course they want the numbers to be as low as possible). One example was a protest around Victoria Park. According to “official police figures” it was 180k attending - but they only counted the people in the limited Victoria Park square, it was completely PACKED. They didn’t count the hundreds of thousands of people outside the square who couldn’t fit in, they also didn’t count the people stuck in the MTR next to the park, who couldn’t even fit on the streets. The “official police statistics” is always off by a magnitude of x.

I was also there, but in my opinion 1.7M was an exaggeration. Don’t get me wrong, there were A LOT of people, the whole area from Victoria Park to Tamar Park was packed with people. There was also a constant flow of people coming in from North Point, a good 20 minute walk to the starting point.

Police estimates were definitely wrong, but the estimates from organisers are also always exaggerated, for the same reasons you mentioned the police estimates are wrong.

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