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Comment by jjcc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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