To effectively argue that "Hong Kong is of course part of China because it's right next to it on the map" opens the gates to all kinds of jingoism. Just for the record, to me the Falkland war was a war between two imperialist countries. Contrary to what was popular belief among my peers back in the day, I did not and do not think Argentina has more rights to the Falklands than the UK just because it's "right next to it" and not "thousands of miles away" like the UK.
China is always adamant that this or that region is "a natural part of China". For some reason people have to come to accept the state of affairs regarding Xinjiang, Tibet, the Spratly Islands. If they don't change their minds then there will be no stopping the fascist juggernaut. Mongolia, parts of northern India, Taiwan and Vietnam are to China what Belgium, Poland and so on were to the Germans in 1939.
But now they are breaking some of the terms of that deal. And that's not nice to the people in Hong Kong.
When people do not understand any context, they are lead to believe the situation is absurd and is occurring for no reason at all.
Full context allows the public to have a sense of things.
Here is an honest attempt building a storey via several separate but related facts:
(1) In the 1800s, Europe had essentially lost a tradewar with China. The Chinese economy was somewhat of a marvel of the 1700s-1800s, studied by US presidents and founding fathers like Ben Franklin even.
(2) The UK couldn't produce anything the Chinese wanted to buy (a goal to help the UK economy), but ultimately hatched a plan to smuggle a well-known deadly and addictive drug into Chinese ports: Opium, which has been known to grow well in the India colony / Afghanistan and is also related to heroine / morphine / opioids.
(3) The UK's drug smuggling cartel via the British East India Company and backed by their navy eventually causes huge problems for Chinese citizens and their every day life. People are dieing. The Chinese government then organizes special anti-drug smuggling operations to end the illegal drug cartel's drug smuggling.
(4) War starts. The Opium Wars. Plural. The UK navy steps in, the Chinese military was defeated, and this was all to force the Chinese to permit the UK drug cartels to continue operating. Part of the treaty ending one of these Opium wars allows Hong Kong to be leased to the UK for them to set up an offensive post on Chinese territory from which to continue poisoning the Chinese public.
(5) HKs economic miracle was propped up by drug smuggling and money laundering and tax haven status. It wasn't much of a miracle. Drug smuggling and tax dodging are universally condemned both in the West and China.
(6) The public in HK is losing features of Western civilization (like a free press and anti-beijing school programs) as they transition back to governance by the broader Chinese civilization.
(7) There IS a small degree of turmoil as HK society is re-organized, but it should be understood in context. Transition from Civ A to Civ B, who both have completely different systems of law.
In short, China's leadership today has pressure to right historical wrongs. We, as Westerners, should work to understand them so that we can make sense of their behavior as a nation state.
China has two major historical enemies with wrongs that the leadership can stand up to:
(1) The UK for the opium wars (and the 100 year fallout).
(2) Japan for WW2 (and, you know, the whole genocide / killing babies for sport thing).
When the CCP does anything involving these two nations, you can always assume the history and the pressure on the leadership is a factor.
The Hong Kong public disagrees with this, and does not see themselves as 'adversaries'.
My posts do not justify or take a side, they merely aim to provide a more expert understanding of the motives and reality.
They actually do, and consistently so. You are from where I'm sitting consistently arguing China's case without a word of consideration for the people of Hong Kong.
With a country like china which claims thousands of years of history you can always find historical pretext for anything and everything.
See my other reply. I am not excusing the behavior of treaty breaking so much as I am saying their leadership has pressure to behave in this way due to the mandate to "right historical wrongs" versus their enemies who killed and attacked them.
I am not the world's leading expert on China, history, or political science -- but I would guess that the fentanyl smuggling operations they are doing are directly related to points (1) through (5) and are some form of revenge in the eyes of their leadership. It probably isn't a coincidence that fentanyl is an opioid, is killing countless Americans, is being laced onto random pills and foods sold, and is all being done by China's intelligence agencies. You know, maybe these events are related!
Regardless of one's feelings towards China, this statement from the US state department, themselves a part of the conflict, more or less describes the events in almost exactly the same way.