At this point there is really no Hong Kong of old. China now fully controls that area, breaking a treaty with the UK.
Taiwan should take note and always remember what happened to Hong Kong because everyone knows they are next on the list.
Taiwan should take note and always remember what happened to Hong Kong because everyone knows they are next on the list.
At this point there is really no Hong Kong of old. China now fully controls that area, breaking a treaty with the UK.
A lot of Hong Kong people have fond memories of the "old HK" because their living standards and socioeconomics were well above Mainland Chinese. Today, this gap is much closer which doesn't sit right in many HKers minds. They were suppose to be the higher class, westernized Chinese. How dare any Mainlanders become wealthier, more capable, more cultured than we are. It wasn't because they had "freedom" under British rule.
Do you think individuals experienced more freedom under the British monarch and Parliament or under communist rule?
It always had. The problem for them is that Trump is a bad ally. Their strategy is/was provide economic benefits to USA in return for a looming presence.
the implication being, don't try it china, its not possible, you'll lose too many people.
However thats not so much of a threat, partly because china has better anti-aircraft carrier weapons and partly because the US military has forgotten (well more accurately has fired the people who know) how to do logistics.
Hongkong was built by the British and a symbol of foreign aggression and imperialism for all Chinese (including in Taiwan actually, at least if you are more on the KMT side). It was never "free" under the British, and in fact the LegCo was only created when the British knew that they would hand HK over to China.
Why should "Hong Kong of old" remain? Why should Chinese territory not under full Chinese control? (And by territory I don't mean some far away outpost, but really the heart of the country).
There has been a lot of noise about "decolonising the curriculum" in recent years, which some have criticised as "woke", but it is striking that the narrative on HK is still fully colonial-centric with little opposing voices.
In the West we are also oblivious to Chinese politics at historic scale. I.e., the conflict between communists and nationalists, and now also democrats. When there are conflicts about freedoms in HK it does not necessarily means against China, as the people are Chinese and in China, but against the communists. Likewise in Taiwan, although there is also an "independentist" "faction" there.
No. Democracy good, autocracy bad. America is speed-running toward the latter at this point.
In a world where technology has made gentle imperialism untenable, your system has chosen honest imperialism. Wishing you didn't have to deal with this contradiction won't work. You will have to choose between getting rid of the "autocracy" and keeping the empire.
This is one of the most insightful posts I've seen on this app. Thank you.
Yeah. Words matter. I do indeed wish we were back to a time where that was the case. America has always been flawed and contradictory, but our greatness came from a shared sense of some higher ideals that we strived for, regardless of the messy reality. That's been lost, and it's sad.
As bad as the Soviet Union was, what came next for Russia was far far worse. The Soviets at least had party rule; Russia is now an absolute autocracy ruled with an iron grip of one man who is now liquidating 30,000 people a month in a pointless war. Orders of magnitude more people have died in the last four years of Ukraine than in every direct Soviet military action combined post-WW2. Remember that Afghanistan was their most infamous blunder, leading directly to the dissolution, and only killed half of what they are losing monthly now.