Oh man they absolutely cannot come into Hong Kong, it would be a totally stupid move. Honestly in the grand scheme of things they can afford for Hong Kong to just descend into chaos and completely collapse economically or whatever. The minute they send troops over the whole picture changes and everyone loses
The reason to send in the PLA would be to increase the level of violence, but there’s no reason to risk the backlash of sending them in when the HK police can do the job too—even if the Central People’s Government were to suddenly decide that live ammunition is needed, they would still be able to rely on the HK police. The deployment of troops is therefore almost certainly, as was noted in the SCMP, a statement of intent as opposed to a sign that there will be a deployment of troops.
This is really bad and definitely triggers memorys of the Tiananmen massacre. I'm very interested how the rest of the world is going to react to these developments considering the position of China only got stronger since the Tinanmen situation. I recognized that the reaction of e.g. Germany was considerably weaker to the HK protests than e.g. the Arab Spring protests, but I guess we just have to wait and see.
I might be misinformed but it looks to me like a lot of protests in Hong Kong are state orchestrated.
The escalation in protests seemed very sharp. The ransacking of parliament appeared to have been allowed. There was no police presence at all. Almost as if they were being purposefully held back.
I might just have my tin foil hat on. I wouldn't be surprised though if Chinese groups have escalated mostly peaceful protests while police have been held back to create a situation which requires full Chinese state involvement.
> China only got stronger since the Tinanmen situation
It's a rather remarkable difference at this point.
The US economy was 16 times larger than China at the end of 1989. Japan was nine times larger. China was only about 45% larger than South Korea back then.
China's military spending today is equal to at least a third the size of its economy in 1989 inflation adjusted.
There's a reason why there are no major protests occurring in the Middle East re Xinjiang. One would expect an enormous outpouring of anger and protest, boycott, mass demonstrations and burnings of the Chinese flag and Xi's effigy 24/7. They know it won't make any difference and it'll just anger China; they have almost zero influence to affect China's behavior. Most of the world feels that way.
Sigh. Hopefully we won't get a repeat of the Tiananmen square massacre. I've not seen any nations speak out about the HK protests. Unlike, say, when many expressed support for the Arab Spring.
How much money did private enterprise make from the Arab Spring? Hundred billion or so?
To pretend like it was a moral issue is insane. Most people don't care in the slightest in democratic countries. Virtually every country involved in sending troops couldn't point to it on a map nor talk about the region with any sort of knowledge. We walked in and replaced Hussein with ISIS. It will go down as 21st century Vietnam.
China has nukes. Absolutely nothing will happen regardless, just like 30 years ago. Perhaps some more outrage on twitter I guess?
The previous strongmen regimes were rather better for foreign investors than the current regimes and foreign investors would probably rather have seen stable governments gradually improving rights for foreign investors (certainly as an investor in one of those countries at the time through my work, from a purely business perspective I would have preferred a more peaceful path towards democracy). I don't think foreign investors were cheerleading the Arab spring therefore.
China has shown (again) in their treatment of Hong Kong that they don't care about past agreements. The least that anyone can do, even in the presence of nukes, is to get their business out of China, and that is already happening to some degree. And of course be welcoming to people who choose to emigrate from Hong Kong.
Unlike the governments of the countries in the Arab Spring, China knows the west won't try anything (overtly), so a statement would only look foolish and help their claims that the protests are orchestrated, rather than serving as a warning.
When this guy says "military", we need some specificity. Is this the People's Liberation Army, or the People's Armed Police? They may look the same on the surface but they are very very different organizations with different uses and implications. Stuff I've already read suggests the PAP is in Shenzhen on standby, not the PLA.
Well, yes, language does have its inherent tone that culture adopts - "arriving to Shenzen" certainly sounds like a normal behaviour, however this seems anything but normal.
We should have applied the same policy of containment to China, that was used against the Soviet Union. But instead we let our greed get in the way, and now we've created an (arguably) evil superpower.
Strange how putrid governments find members of society happy to oppress other members of the society. Such as those soldiers happily waiting to execute orders against the freedoms of their fellow citizens.
I'm assuming you're privileged enough to have never been an enlisted soldier in a military? This isn't hordes of men clamouring to "oppress" someone. Often people are conscripted or come from such a poor background that enlistment helps their life significantly.
After the first 6 months in the military, you'll have been broken enough to have lost a lot of sense of individuality and are willing to just blindly follow orders. After your initial training, you're likely dumped into an established unit where you are at the very bottom of the totem pole. Until about 20 years ago in western militaries, you'd experience physical violence on the first day of your first posting into a "real" unit just to show you your place. I'm assuming this still happens in China. If there are soldiers in those trucks it is very likely they haven't been told a single thing about their mission.
It's very easy to live your comfortable life and talk about how evil the individual soldiers are but in reality, the troops holding the rifles on the ground are simply a tool of those higher.
The post doesn't contain much in terms of commentary, but it does include a quote describing this as a "psychological warfare tactic", so it doesn't seem to be that biased yet.
I actually thought that the whole "mainland infiltrates HK police" conspiracy was just PRC-phobia (which is a real problem in HK when it becomes xenophobic, sadly) but there's actually been evidence of it (albeit not much). If you're interested you can find videos of a riot policeman saying 「退後一點」 to protesters (and other weird sentences), which is extremely awkward in Cantonese (instead Cantonese would be 「褪後啲」 or something, sounds totally different), especially if you're in an intense situation.
1. Hong Kong, at least on paper, is ruled by a governing entity elected by Hong Kong people. Mainland party hasn’t acted yet because, again, on paper, this is a Hong Kong issue. But things could get messy when Hong Kong government cries for help
2. The protest started when a bill that many feared could be used to target and deport anti-China citizens. Hong Kong government was quick to withdrawn and eventually kill that bill but the protest got bigger regardless as they see the government is too pro-China
3. Many protesters are now actively attacking police force even if unprovoked. Some even send threats to police officer’s families whilst some caught getting cash handed to them for taking part in protests by foreigners
4. Sentiment in mainland China is mostly against these protests as they see Hong Kong benefits financially a lot from China since its return, and Hong Kong’s real issue is its ever increasing wealth gap
Getting back to the news itself, this is indeed very alarming.
No such bill is killed "for good" as long as the people who proposed it are still in power and the protesters know that.
> Many protesters are now actively attacking police force even if unprovoked.
If true this is very regrettable, but once you go up against the institution which has the monopoly of using violence what other realistic means are there? Afaik they did try the non-violent way a couple of years back but those protests gave no concrete results and their leaders were eventually arrested nonetheless.
Every story has two sides and things on the other side - police officers bitten to bleed or eyes flashed by high power laser pointers. The sad thing is, we gotta take whatever the media feeds us:)
HKers are protesting because (for historical and economical reasons) they have been blessed by an incredible fortune, a fortune that's shaming away.
We could talk about reasons and sides, but that's misleading and unproductive. The sad reality is that China is a "Unitary one-party socialist republic", a bad euphemism for an undemocratic country ruled by a single dictatorial party.
There's a lot of misinformation surrounding the violence of protesters, but let's not forget that these officers are protecting the interests of a regime.
> Hong Kong, at least on paper, is ruled by a governing entity elected by Hong Kong people
Except it's not, top leadership is elected by a small council of business owners and other high ranking members of society, the people they are allowed to vote for are selected by Beijing and anyone they don't like is vetoed out.
You can see their propaganda here https://reddit.com/r/sino This is pro-China propaganda sub-reddit. For example if you write something that they don't like then they are going to ban you for life. Very interesting, it is like from Soviet Union or North Korea.
They could be provocateurs, and sadly there’s no way to verify this for now. My point is, to judge things fair and square you gotta hear from both sides:D
Having read all your comments it seems your point is to introduce doubt and muddy the waters. It's a classic propaganda tactic which is routinely employed by the CCP. It might work on reddit but it will take more than that here.
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