HN user
to protest a bill that would allow the government to extradite suspected criminals to mainland China, a violation of their democratic freedom.
I stopped reading after this because, frankly this sort of claim is not journalism. It's not even an opinion piece, it's just flame bait.
HN deserves better.
I'm not sure that "colonial governor suggested it" is the same as "Britain tried"...
HK courts would have decided whether to extradite to the mainland in the same way they do now when deciding whether to extradite to the US or any other country HK has an extradition treaty with.
China has also extradition treaties with some western countries. Does that mean that e.g. France is no longer 'autonomous'?
This extradition bill does not impact HK's autonomy at all. This is very transparently a pretext.
One has to wonder who's behind all of this because this is really getting more farcical by the day.
It is also very interesting that western media tend to use the terms 'China' for the mainland in their reports on these events. Clearly this is not neutral and makes Western opinion believe that HK is not China.
The British handed back HK to China and China said they would keep it largely autonomous for 50 years.
That's what happening and I don't remember that the Chinese government tried to renege on this.
But again, ultimately this is a domestic issue. Britain is out of the picture.
"One country, two systems" is a domestic policy of China. It's not any other country's business.
People seem to be outraged by vague allegations of Russian meddling in other countries' affairs but China should be treated like a colony by the West... That's highly hypocritical (if not racist).
Making a second Tiananmen Square painful for Beijing is not
That would be in no-one's interests.
Immediately after the Tiananmen Square events in 1989 the US sent a high ranking general to Beijing to reassure the Chinese that this changed nothing.
The situation has changed because now China is seen as a real rival but the US and the West still have zero interests in going down that route. Not least because China is not a small country, it's the second economy on Earth.
I think the events in HK are being spinned and that some people are really losing their sense of proportion.
Bluntly speaking: The events in HK are irrelevant globally and are regional news at best. They are not a global issue that deserve international involvement.
At the same time, it is very difficult to understand the message and aim of the protesters, and their violence made them lose a lot of credibility.
Historical reality cannot be dismissed as 'nonsense'.
I have no idea what this refers to.
You are arguing on a topic you obviously know very little about and that you don't understand, judging by your nebulous comments. And you're doing it in a very dismissive and rather rude way.
I would suggest you take a step back.
Look you’re just repeating the same nonsense they are.
I am describing the historical reality.
I think the point of HN is to be able to do that without receiving insults in return.
They are two separate countries regardless of what either sides political claims.
They are of course are de facto separate states. This does not change a thing to my previous comment.
'China' is made of the mainland and Taiwan, like 'Germany' was made of East and West Germany.
Really, the mistake of the PRC is to have prevented the use of the official name of what Taiwan is as a state: The Republic of China. That would have nipped all those "Taiwan v. China" narratives in the bud.
That's not knowing China. There is a public opinion and a strong one on these issues.
It's not faked. As mentioned Chinese nationalism is what created today's China, not the other way round. The very existence of Hong Kong as a British colony is partly responsible for today's China.
The PRC has never governed Taiwan yet essentially no governments call their imperialism what it is and tacitly accept their “unification” language.
Taiwan is internationally recognised as being part of China. What happened is that the Chinese government of the time fled there during the civil war.
The communists founded the PRC and the ROC government kept control of Taiwan.
Since then the question has been who to recognise as legitimate government. And this has changed over time.
What you're saying is like saying that South Korea never governed the North (or vice versa) or that East Germany never governed West Germany (or vice versa). While obviously factually true this does not diminish the fact that they are part of Korea or Germany as a whole. 'reunification' is the correct term, it's nothing to do with colonisation (what imperialism relates to).
Patriotism and nationalism are strong in China and this is not because of the government. In fact the government is an expression of this, not the cause.
China was attacked, invaded, humiliated from the end of the 18th century until 1945. This is what created a reaction that led to the collapse of imperial rule and to the rise of the modern parties (Nationalists and Communists).
The communist government did manage to rid the country of foreign occupation and to recover some breakaway provinces.
Hong Kong, lost to the British in the Opium Wars, was a very bitter symbol and a source of humiliation and most Chinese do credit the current government with getting it back at last.
This is a real source of legitimacy.
This is why showing the protests may be so potent on Chinese public opinion.
Protesters should be worried because if the Chinese government changes policy and starts showing these images this can only mean that they plan a more serious crackdown. Public opinion will demand it.
The protests are over a law allowing China to extradite people without any process.
That is not true that there would not have been any process.
There would have been a full legal process like any extradition: I.e. extradition would have been requested based on a legal case, this would have been examined by a HK court with the 'accused' able to defend, then that HK court would have made a decision. [That's the actual bill]
Trying to claim that these 2 million people campaign for HK independence is not honest.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for the protesters in HK.
Considering the humiliation that the colonisation of HK had been for 100+ years and the resulting nationalistic tendency of the people, if CCTV (Chinese state TV) had shown the pictures of armed protesters storming the HK parliament and some of them flying the Union Jack then the Chinese government would have been forced to fall on the protesters like a ton of bricks.
Even if I wish they could just gain independence, it seems unlikely, and it's not like any foreign power would go to war to protect HK.
I never understood this. Why would HK gain 'independence'? Why would a foreign power 'protect' HK? (protect from what?)
HK has been used to build a narrative that is rather strange... Frankly people in HK calling for independence are a bit like, say, the Texas Nationalist Movement or calling for Seattle independence. It's a fringe movement at best.
That's equally disingenuous.
HK is not a frontier of any 'cold war'.
What is happening is that some forces are trying to use HK to create problems for the Chinese government because China is getting too powerful for the established powers. And they try to create issues and frame them using narratives such as this article.
This is the same as trying to pass the extradition bill off as an attack on the rule of rule or on HK's status.
This is cynical but that's how the game has always been played.
In the end the victims will be the naive young Hongkongers who are used as pawns.
Hongkong is part of the PRC. Its situation has no similarity whatsoever with West Berlin's.
What's happened is indefensible.
Democracy and the rule of law is not to "make demands" then riot and storm the local parliament, with people flying foreign flags.
Foreign media tend to actually be very sympathetic to the pro-democracy movement but in this case however positively they tried to paint the protesters the pictures spoke for themselves.
I don't see what's civil in what's happened...
The government might have let them do it knowing how badly that would reflect on the movement. That does mean they organise it themselves, which looks far fetched. Having a single guy infiltrated to hang the flag? Maybe. However it seems it's not first time.
It's a common strategy to let a protestation movement burn itself and that's why discipline and well-thought out strategy is important.
It's difficult to understand the aim here.
This is clearly planned violence and destruction and raising a foreign colonial flag does not look like a smart thing to do.
I understand that the protesters are said to be very young and may not fully understand what they are doing here.