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Comment by phyalow | Hacker News Reader

This is another nail in the coffin of the Hong Kong we knew and loved…

I was a resident for many years, I witnessed the peaceful protests of 2014, I witnessed horrifying wanton violence in 2019, I witnessed the rapid destruction of the freest laissez faire city state in the world. Above all I feel great sadness for the people of Hong Kong.

The CCP cannot tolerate any dissenting voices as a matter of preserving their total grip on power. It was an inevitability Hong Kong would be crushed and silenced although the world and Hong Kong was caught off guard by the speed at which this has occurred. I take some consolation with the G7's recent communique.

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The CCP aren't idiots. They knew the time was right to do it, because in western circles, that were a bit slow to understand the world around them, freedom was not in good graces with political leaders. It was the perfect time to tighten the grip.

The G7 was disappointing. It was all talk in my opinion, although there aren't many venues to handle a situation like Hong Kong.

Do you mean that Western leaders started to turn their backs on freedom, too? You are absolutely right, I fear. So much of the talk about China in the West doesn't even mention human rights, just trade imbalance or cyber security. In an age of nuclear detente, I suppose it was inevitable that democracy's most potent opponents would be homegrown. I never considered that this also means abandoning imperiled democracy abroad, but it surely does.

It's actually not true. They did talk about human rights. The German embassy in China specifically released a statement on Xinjiang and how it's discussion should be based on mutual respect. It's not that the West isn't talking about human rights, it's actually that they seem to be more jealous if anything of how China does things.

Oh and if you want to check on how much a country cares about their relationship with another country all you need to do is check which diplomats send there. As an example all the ambassadors Germany sends to Taiwan are completely useless bums which are just wasting oxygen and tax payer money.

Germany has currently a tendency to excel in corruption and nothing else, without it having any consequences. On the topic of surveillance they also fail at every level. The left wing of our government behaves like the Stasi. This is no exaggeration, they will send the police to your home if you say something on twitter. At least judges ruled a case as blatently illegal. No consequences again... The right wing just wants to access any form of encrypted communication.

China is well loved because it is an important market for the largest car manufacturers, so politicians love China too. I really hope they just ignore intellectual property in this case... It is not that laws are currently taken seriously anyway.

> Do you mean that Western leaders started to turn their backs on freedom, too?

The last time the Western leaders actually cared about freedom and values instead of resources in a major conflict was 1939-1945... there was no "turning their backs", as said backs were turned all the time. The Western world never had a major problem cooperating with dictatorships, military regimes or other autocracies as long as they either were somewhat (far) right or supplied cheap oil.

China is no different, the whole world is looking away from their attempt to re-enact the Holocaust upon Uyghurs and other minorities as long as China supplies them with cheap crap and/or cheap, no-strings-attached funding for infrastructure and bailouts.

'Freedom's' problem has always been that it's a very loose term. Freedom to do what? I can't even go into a grocery store after the federal government said i don't have to wear my mask if i'm fully vaccinated, without my mask. Virtue signalling by other Americans has become more powerful than the centralized federal governments ability to restrict my rights. I believe the US is scarier because it's more akin to mob rule. China is going to collapse when they get a very weak leader but the US is going to tear itself apart.

I visited Hong Kong in January 2020 for the second time, having become mesmerized with the development, skyline and freedom during my first visit in 2018. It was a truly sad sight to see, people afraid to speak, red banners everywhere, lots of questions asked at the border etc.

Well, there's still Vancouver ;)

Any idea that this happened only recently? There are already raids earlier along with other punishment. Without new provocation, this one seems totally unnecessary. A reasonable interpretation about this raid, based on the timing and some knowledge about China and CPP, would be: this is a response to G7's recent communique. But I bet not many people get the message because with some existing ideology that people usually are not aware of, casual relations among events are often ignored.

I have the same take a you do. Those implicit signals make sense in a Chinese cultural context but are much harder for the non initiated to pick on. This being said, State actors in the West have their analysts and certainly know what's afoot, cue the official response from the EU and Britain. But the general public can't parse it, which is important in democracies.

This shows the importance of cultural understanding and the lack of it when western commentators look at events in China. July 1st marks the 100th anniversary of the CCP, its pretty simple. It was probably done just to make ensure stability and so that it goes by without a hitch and nobody tries anything stupid. This sort of stuff is pretty typical of them, especially near important dates.

I may be typical but it's nuts. Send your secret police to harass your critics whenever an important date is coming up.

Technically, it was 500 uniformed officers, and not the secret police (which in this case would be the MSS).

Well it's more complex now. There is a special unit for NSL matters, and the NSL permitted the state agencies to openly operate in HK (they were thankfully already operating but not openly), but I think it's mostly done with the coordination of the NSL unit, which is also connected to police. So probably some of the people in the raid were staff from the NSL unit.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/30...

But why would this be in any way surprising? We knew since the agreement between China an the UK that this day would come. The whole world knew. Maybe the residents of HK had some vague hope China would give them more freedom than in the mainland (why would they??) but in other parts of the world the picture was rather clear. I expected massive emigration but as far as I can tell people had the idea to stay and fight at home.

But it is early, it was supposed to be left alone for another 30 years.

CCP actions, or rather Xi, imo, reflect a level of nativity or perhaps just typical authoritarian paranoia. People in Hong Kong were warming up to the mainland, more and more were identifying as Chinese primarily. If CCP had left well alone and continued on the course, they would have had a loyal Hong Kong with a new generation that could accept gradual reform, but they've poisoned that well.

It was late.

PRC scholars warned new HK generations would culturally drift 10+ years ago. The fact that HK has existed in a national security state of exception for 20+ years, while simultaneously operating as a western spy hub outside of Chinese purview is fundamentally an untenable situation that no sane country should accede to.

Reality is PRC who has always had FULL legal authority over issues of foreign policy under 1C2S post handover and was unprecedentedly patient with HK, while HKers have never demonstrated reasonable accommodation for "one country" interests. Apple Daily's Jimmy Lai met with Pompeo & Pence during height of US/PRC rivalry (read: treason) is just one of the many symptoms of why this crack down was overdue.

Newer HK generations growing up on western textbooks were never going to be loyal. Currently tensions could have been mitigated if PRC rammed through patriotic education and NSL 10+ years ago instead of naively assuming an increasingly irrelevant HK relative to mainland would passively accept loss of privilege and integrate as just another mainland city. Expect newer gen of HKers under PRC cultivation to actually align with PRC interests. For CCP, resetting HK culture is the anecdote that was long recognized but administered too late.

> It was late.

> PRC scholars warned new HK generations would culturally drift 10+ years ago.

Data suggests that the drift of HK generations [1] in the past two decades are swayed by what happened in China: Hong Kong people identified themselves more as Chinese during 2008 (especially during the Beijing Olympics), less so after being denied universal suffrage despite promises in the Basic Law (the Umbrella Movement in 2013), and when Hong Kong people started to accept TikTok (Douyin) and the like from China, Hong Kong once again diverged from China after 2019 (the extradition Law, its opposing protests, and the Covid-19 outbreak starting in Wuhan).

[1]: https://www.pori.hk/pop-poll/ethnic-identity-en/q001.html?la...

> The fact that HK has existed in a national security state of exception for 20+ years... For CCP, resetting HK culture is the anecdote that was long recognized but administered too late.

What you said explains a lot why Hong Kong people, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and others alike, want to distance themselves from China: CCP does not want diversity and inclusion, that the perceived security (of the party) trumps everything else. CCP wants control, not better governance or de facto long term security, which requires leaving minorities alone. To govern by doing nothing that goes against nature, as in Taoism, is an ancient tradition of China that CCP does not get.

> Apple Daily's Jimmy Lai met with Pompeo & Pence during height of US/PRC rivalry (read: treason) is just one of the many symptoms of why this crack down was overdue.

This explains very well what I mean.

The meeting of Jimmy Lai with Pompeo and Pence did not pose any material threat to national security or the security of CCP—after all, in this information age, the US can learn what they need to learn without such meetings, so the meeting is largely symbolic, and to reduce such information flow CCP can only rely on a Great-Firewall-style censorship in Hong Kong, which is considered unacceptable by many. To consider such immaterial meetings as treason shows sheer insecurity (paranoid) of CCP, and this insecurity is what brings its de factor insecurity, because it is worrying too much and overreacting.

Breakdown by demographics and shift in "HKer" identity is driven by 30s and below [0], i.e. the generations influenced by reintroduction of political education leading up to handover. Curriculum under colonial rule was much more apolitical. Clear trajectory of influence. Most countries underling decolonization do not promote politics of their colonizers. PRC allowed this arrangement to persist under 1C2S for as long as tenable, but last 10 years demonstrated those who anticipated blowback were prescient.

[0] https://www.economist.com/img/b/1280/935/90/sites/default/fi...

>perceived security (of the party)

Hundreds of terrorist's attacks in XinJiang, Tibetans being weaponized by CIA for decades, HK being vulnerable spyhub into PRC activities... none of this is perceived. XJ/Tibet was left relatively alone by old oblast model and sheer inability for poor PRC to project influence, HK had 20+ years to ratify NSL. Doing nothing failed.

>not pose any material threat

It's pretty charitable to assume Apple Daily had no material influence on protests. There is zero reason for HK media tycoon to coordinate with US Secretary of State / ex CIA Head during period of Sino/US tensions and have it quoted on US state department website as discussions that has material impact on PRC foreign policy [1]. Thinking otherwise is naïve. Or assuming CCP merely over reacting when they have credibly demonstrated ability to expose foreign intelligence assets. HK is spy capital of Asia after all, CCP good at catching spies and crushing foreign influence.

[1] https://2017-2021.state.gov/secretary-pompeos-meeting-with-h...

There's probably some alternative chain of events where HK met PRC half way by introducing NSL that would have opened up for some political reforms HKers wanted. No sane government would grand _more_ privileges to subjects not beholden to national security, less flaunts against it, which is an absurd arrangement in the first place.

This happened under British Hong Kong too. The British never tolerate dissenting voice.The 1960 and 1967 protest, the British label it as Riot, end in violence too. I think Hong Kong can only be peaceful if they solve the huge inequality. The image of wealth and poverty living side by side is very dystopian.

The British tried to hold democratic elections during that time, but it was the Communist Party that pressured them not to. The riots you're talking about were Hong Kong Communist going against the British.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Hong_Kong_riots

I read wikipedia. I just realized that the suppresion is more brutal than what I imagined. Are u referring to HK 1997 election? That election is after the British reluctantly agree to handover HK. From the CCP point of view the elections is a plot to sabotage the Handover. It is not that iI agree or disagree with CCP view or British motive. There are many anti colonial politicians in Asia suspicious of the British motive.

This is just utter nonsense, and I say this as someone who grew up in northern Ireland. So you think HK will be better when it's more equal?

I am not really familiar with Northern Ireland and how it relates to Hong Kong. Most of youngster in HK are quite pessimistic on their economic future. Working hours are long. Houses are very expensive, small and crowded. The strange things is most of the population don't speak English but in corporate the language are English. This make a lot of locals was overlooked in Job Promotion.

This won't change if the BJ overlords move in:

Working hours and conditions on the mainland are even worse than in HK, famously so.

If the office language gets pushed more towards Mandarin that doesn't help locals. The uneducated don't speak Beijing'r Mandarin just like they don't speak flawless RP English. They will still get overlooked, but now the their bosses will be princelings from the north instead... Yay?

The N Ireland thing is about British repression, which was mentioned. Some people like to claim the British occupy northern Ireland (they don't, the majority want British rule). If a free press, fair elections, rule of law are what repressing dissent looks like, then I'm not sure how the CCP stack up!

I haven't read as much about Northern Ireland as I would have wished to, but the parallels are quite similar, especially the legal "innovations" used to quell dissent.

For example, the recent National Security Law allows non-jury trials, which seems to me taken directly from the Northern Ireland playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplock_court

There are a some interesting NI court case(s?) which I've encountered in the past couple years relating to riots that were occasionally cited in the Hong Kong court which escapes me right now.

Anyway the point is that while freedoms are indeed being eroded in Hong Kong, it's a fallacy to paint the British colonial rule as benevolent just to make a point. (Most of the freedoms were granted to Hong Kong in the 1990s _after_ UK signed the Sino British joint declaration, it worked as a narrative to kind of force the Chinese government to revert a bunch of freedoms and hence the UK escaped most of the blame for making much of those those repressive laws in the first place)

I would politely disagree with you on the G7 front - its all talk and no action. In the end the people who will suffer for the comments made in the G7 are these journalists. The fact is all that has been done is a bunch of talking. The fact is yes there are things which CCP is doing that is very wrong, and yes they have a very low tolerance towards dissent. However, any comment coming from USA and England makes the scenario even worse. In part this is because the "west" doesn't have a particularly positive PR impression in Asia. Many view the G7 as a group of countries that take their own decisions without consulting others.

For any protest to be successful, one side has to eventually reach a compromise. When the protests first started in 2019 for months they were peaceful. This was actually the time when they were the scariest for the CCP as its very hard to justify any action against them. Heck, I had friends who were PRC nationals who crossed the border to take part in them (just because they were curious what protest was and no other political reason whatsoever, and yes, they're alive and fine right now). The problems started when a few people displayed xenophobia towards PRC which unraveled into violence. At this point it became incredibly easy for CCP to smear the protests back home as all they needed to show in their local media was the few instances of violence against PRC nationals, juxtaposed against images of their own soldiers who were shown sweeping streets. Once England and USA started making comments about the human rights situation it was essentially a death knell for the protesters. This is because in China many consider USA and England's human rights comments hypocritical given that both countries grew economically by exploiting slaves (in USA's case) and colonies (in England's case).

Personally, I don't think politicians making bold statements from countries halfway across the world will help at all. Xenophobia overseas will make the matters even worse. Rather than turning anti-China and uber-nationalistic what would dismantle the CCP is to actually work towards winning the hearts of the 1 billion+ population, majority of whom actually have benefited from the CCP's reign.

> Rather than turning anti-China and uber-nationalistic what would dismantle the CCP is to actually work towards winning the hearts of the 1 billion+ population, majority of whom actually have benefited from the CCP's reign.

How is the West supposed to make that happen, against a population that is being actively brainwashed? Almost all ways of entering information into China are censored.

> The problems started when a few people displayed xenophobia towards PRC which unraveled into violence. At this point it became incredibly easy for CCP to smear the protests back home as all they needed to show in their local media was the few instances of violence against PRC nationals,

A nuclear power with 9000 tanks don't need reasons, let alone one which did many worse things with even less remorse.

The thing is, the Hong Kong government didn't give a shit to peaceful protests. After 1 million people protested peacefully on 9th June 2019, the official response from the government was "The Second Reading debate on the Bill will resume on June 12.". All these people were ignored. It made people realise they need something else to make the government respond.

People only vandalised at first. Some actions by protesters were over the top to outsiders, but they came after many peaceful protests and after police and triads colluded to attack protesters[2] (the producer of this documentary was arrested and charged). Protesters had to protect themselves at least at first.

In short, China tolerated peaceful protests in Hong Kong for a reason - they did no damage, and the government could safely ignore them and pretend Hong Kong still had autonomy. Once they had impact, authorities were quick to silence the people by any means.

[1] - https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201906/09/P2019060900587...

[2] - https://www.rthk.hk/tv/dtt31/programme/hkce/episode/706428?l...

> freest laissez faire city state in the world

It's just so easy to idolize Hong Kong and ignore the severe failures in its socioeconomic system for the sake of critiquing China. Please do better.

cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/FD941A3D3003D8EA05ACE2C5A9C00110/S0305741000046828a.pdf/legacy_of_the_british_administration_of_hong_kong_a_view_from_hong_kong.pdf

From your article:

> The dark side of colonialism is also manifested glaringly in what many people still regard as the British betrayal of the long-term interests of the Hong Kong people in the 1982-84 sovereignty retrocession negotiations and in the subsequent British appeasement of PRC infringements of, and non- compliance with, the Joint Declaration, especially on democratization and the formation of the Court of Final Appeal.

well that turned out exactly as predicted! your paper did indeed lay valid criticism on the British for abandoning HK to the PRC, not doing enough to safeguard the Joint Declaration and make sure China kept its promises on civil rights and autonomy, and foretold the disemboweling of its constitution and freedoms by the mainland.

I shared your sadness at the time and have lived also there a lot over the last 10 years, including when the FOO was going to be debated in June 2019, triggering the unrest. All this is actually a good thing if you love HK. Apple Daily peddled a lot of divisive fake news, doomscrolling and rumors that 'fake justified' the violence in 2019 - 2020. Slightly more real politic take: having provided a useful pretext for the long overdue NSL, they are shut down.

It's not about dissent. Dissent is useful. It's about narratives that go against the country, sovereignty and threaten security. CPC has no total grip on power. It has many internal factions jostling for power, and > 90% of the population are not party members. That's why it is so sensitive to disturbances, because it's a constant struggle to build something that lasts.

HK is not crushed and silenced, it is liberated from violence and chaos, and empowered to build a new future, if only its youth will take the responsibility and do something constructive to that end. It has not been 'caught off guard' by the 'speed'. The NSL was supposed to have been implemented after the handover, over 20 years ago, and local media and people actively provoked risks to country, sovereignty and security, through 2019-2020 thus providing a pretext for NSL promulgation. Even so, it took more than a year of, as you say, "horrifying wanton violence, where we witnessed the rapid destruction of the freest laissez faire city state in the world", for NSL to arrive.

It's not freedom that was destroyed tho, unless you consider 'freedom to violence and chaos' as freedom. It was a required-by-the-Basic-Law long-overdue legal-loophole that was ultimately the thing that was destroyed by all that violence, and, tragically a few people's lives who suffered terrible injuries and death. Maybe one day they can be remembered as important people who contributed, however unwittingly, to ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity in HK. To the new decade!

While I agree, as a current resident, I also witnessed the insane destructive behavior of Apple Daily, who did exagerate quite a bit the situation and was far from a neutral observer. I'd even say that telling kids the police murdered 2000 people was not exactly helping them strategize rather than throw themselves in desperate waves at the police... These guys all pushed the situation towards a point of no return for the communists, which could have been instead worked around.

Ofc a strong and self assured nation would be able to swallow it, and China shows us how weak and self doubting it is, but I won't cry too many tears for that newspaper.

I'm even a tad annoyed Lai is presented as a glorious press freedom figure when I felt reading it that it was on the abusive side of freedom. I guess we all need now to redraw the line at which we collaborate vs resist and Im not yet at the resist stage.

We don't cry tears because of the kind of journalism, we cry tears because it was on some level journalism or at minimum freedom of expression and the clampdown means the same it will happen to you if you try that route.

Anyone who contradicts Putin and gets any stickiness or popularity ends up dead. You don't have to agree with Putin's antagonists to realize why that is bad.

tell that to twitter or facebook

Was Apple Daily regularly sharing outright falsified stories?

Yes, I dunno what you call regular, but they repeated taiwanese rumours that were vastly exagerated. In 2019 saying the police didnt kill 2000 people in secret would warrant you a slap in the street, because of these newspapers that were a bit... activist ?

Kids that were arrested were hollered by these Apple Daily journalists to display their ID card to the camera in case they disappeared, creating a climate were they felt like oppressed freedom fighters rather than overly violent political activists.

Honestly me and my wife, at the beginning of Jimmy Lai s arrest were relieved because we felt it could stop the insanity a bit. Ofc China will go too far as usual but that's the feeling some of us have. Dunno how common it is, as it's hard to discuss calmly in HK.

Either people feel their little pride shattered by all this anti China discourse, or they feel invaded and tortured by the fact we're a Chinese city. Hard to discuss a middle ground where we ignore each other like we've done for 2 decades.

There's no middle ground really: China has taken over, you have no rights. That's it.

If you speak ill of someone powerful, you'll disappear one way or another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Daily It's interesting that most people here don't read Apple Daily. Those who can read Apple Daily and know the real nature don't want to talk too much because the opinion doesn't align the majority of HNer's belief based on partial information.

It's a tabloid newspaper but more than that, it's full of hate and anger. That's its strength because there's a big market for it.

I contradict Xi proudly. I wouldnt tell children the police killed 2000 of them in secret, under the cover or repeating taiwanese news, to excite some sort of defensive behavior in them.

If the police killed 2000 kids like this newspaper sometimes proclaimed, then all the violence the protesters used felt justified. That's why im on the fence in this case, and that s also why China is hysterical at that paper that did more propaganda than them.

Genuinely curious, what do you tell kids about the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square?

In every country in the world, when you claim that police murdered 2000 people, you will get in trouble. It has nothing to do with freedom of expression, exept when you have very good evidence but even then it's dangerous to make such claims.

This is not true.

Go on to Twitter right now and say those things. In almost every democracy, nothing will happen to you.

Put up a website and make that claim.

You might get banned from Facebook.

If the Apple journalists published information about the roughly 10 000 people that were killed in Tianamen protests, would they get shut down as well? [1]

Do you see somewhere in the UK or the US where 500 police raid a major news entity?

They might do that if the paper leaked sensitive military information ... but even then that'd be extremely rare and it would not happen merely for making ridiculous claims.

Anyone who challenges Xi or the CCP will end up in jail.

The obvious solution would be to allow Hong Kong residents to vote in their own leaders and decide for themselves.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42465516

No you won't. There are lots of conspiracy theory lunatics running around in Western (or many other) countries claiming stuff like this and nobody is arresting them if they don't also propagate or participate in violence.

The situation is clearly asymmetric tough. The Apple Daily is not a great paper and they got more coverage than they deserve but they are symptomatic of a need for people to voice opposing opinions.

Now there is basically nothing left. Local news outlets will censor themselves because the law is overly vague and will be systematically interpreted in the broadest possible way. Journalists are harassed and intimidated, if not threatened physically.

The independence of justice is also in peril with judges being replaced and pressured into compliance.

There is no turning back for HK, it's just terribly sad. It could have been an example for China, an experiment. Anti-China sentiment was comparatively fairly low while there was some token respect for the 2-system.

I agree with you that China only shows us how weak it really is with its display of comically over-the-top caricatural retaliation against any form of dissent.

I'm not sure what resisting can look like though. No cooperation is granted but while I'm a resident, I'm also a foreigner and a guest here. Options are limited apart from being an observer.

I love HK with all my heart and it kills me to see it go through that transformation into a pro-CCP satellite.

The tank has breached the border -figuratively- and I don't think anything will stop it now. I expect freedoms to slowly erode a lot further over the next few years as the CCP increases its hold over the various representative bodies (only patriots allowed!).

It sometimes goes beyond harassment and intimidation of journalists into outright assault:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_attack_on_Kevin_Lau

>These guys all pushed the situation towards a point of no return for the communists

Ah yes, the victim left absolute no choice to the aggressor than to punch them in the face ! What sort of logic is that ?

You don't arrest bad journalists, just like you don't burn bad books or censor bad movies out of the excuse that they're bad. On first principles, the nature of things is more important than their subjective value.

You dont but they do. So we have three choices: lick their boots, throw ourselves at their jails, or discuss alternatives until we find one. I'd rather continue discussing than say it's already too late, but I live in it and you dont so maybe that's why.

There are no alternatives in totalitarian regimes, the only other option is to leave. Yes, I have lived in one.

> These guys all pushed the situation towards a point of no return for the communists, which could have been instead worked around.

It couldn't have been worked around. It doesn't work this way. There is no other way, in 2048, or in 2022, no other way around. That's the goal of Beijing. Tell us if it's something else.

On other hand, if HK turns into mini-Syria, it would've mobilised way more people, even the most inert, and apolitical.

For Beijing, it will also be a guaranteed loss both ways then. They lose 2048, and HK on the platter as it is, with its access to world financial markets. I believe only a scare of this kind have a chance to make Beijing to back off.

Third, HK is the seat of Western money in Asia. If the bank where their money is will literally burn to the ground, at least then they would've not pretend that nothing happens.

Some times, a solution to violence, is bigger violence.

Well the goal of Beijing is for the party to survive, there are many solutions between murdering us all and let HK become a country.

I mean we're a city, we have no army, what do you propose ? I propose to work around the party, like Macau, sing the anthem from time to time and basta, the problem can only be fixed by China as a whole, not at our level.

Beijing cannot "back off" more violence, they can only double down. Put yourself in their shoe: if they're a mafia in need of legitimacy and survival, that committed too many crimes to welcome honest competition, how can a HK citizen think that burning a local metro station will make them "oh right, freedom is too important for HK, we should maybe even copy them".

Before immediately jumping to desperate violence, maybe we can try to bribe them. Which is what we did before, and what we now do albeit with a bit more cost to re-assure that yes yes we're good patriots until the dragon goes back to sleep...

I prefer to discuss about things in a less free Hong Kong than starve and steal in a mini Syria but you're welcome to solve problems that way where you live :D

> if they're a mafia in need of legitimacy and survival, that committed too many crimes to welcome honest competition,

If you back down to a mafia in need of legitimacy and survival, you support the mafia, and you become a man without honour.

Such people never returned a punch to the face, and never prevailed.

> I mean we're a city, we have no army, what do you propose ?

For the amount of money an average HK billionaire has, you can buy enough arms from Bulgaria, or Balkans to arm the whole HK population 10 times over.

The average HK billionaire is rich because of China. They aren't going to bite the hand that feeds them.

Since when is Bulgaria and the Balkans a military industrial complex? I thought the Bulgarians made tomatoes and peppers and the Serbs made slibovitz and plum jam. Both countries are homes to great food. North Macedonia too.

Guessing by your name, you are a local? South-East Europe is a huge producer, and trade centre for small arms, sometimes to the big surprise of their own citizens.

While small arms are peanuts in comparison to jet fighters, and missiles by value on the world's arms market, they are still there, and Balkan makers have good prices, and collaborative governments.

This article[1] sheds some light on small arms proliferation. Bulgaria and Serbia aren't even mentioned. While there are still lots of unlicensed rifles in the West Balkans[2], the bulk of small arms still comes from the US, Russia, China and Western European states. They're sold to dictators or given to rebel groups in conflict areas. The former are then stolen, smuggled and resold to rebel groups and civillians.

  1. https://social.shorthand.com/ymuntaiwan/ug53Pq2PhT/disec-i-proliferation-of-small-arms-and-light-weaponry
  2. http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/G-Issue-briefs/SAS-AV-IB4-Western-Balkans.pdf

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