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Beijing says military could intervene in Hong Kong
- komali2 7y ago>In response, Ho posted a Facebook video making death threats against pro-democratic legislator Eddie Chu, who has spoken up against corruption in rural areas in the past and argued with Ho on a local TV channel on Tuesday. >Ho said Chu had “two paths” before him: “One is a path of being alive, one is a path of not being alive. You must choose which path to take. Decide soon,” he said. Jesus it's gotten bad. If ever there was a way to galvanize the populace, it's to do away with the masquerade and just tell them "step in line or die."
- onetimemanytime 7y agowelcome to most parts of the world. In US they threaten to sue, in other parts they cut through bureaucracy and threaten to wipe you out.
- devoply 7y agoUS threatens to wipe foreigners out as well. See Trump solving the war by threatening to wipe out population of Afghanistan.
- leereeves 7y agoThat's not what he said. He said he wouldn't - the very opposite of a threat. "If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people."
- Kinnard 7y agoDepends . . . are you black?
- rolltiide 7y agoReread what our Declaration of Independence says about indigenous Americans, coupled with what happened
- mtgx 7y agoThat's when you get when your country is run by a dictator with supreme powers -- everyone is at the behest of his/her mood (and of those who follow their direct orders), including other countries with which they may enter more conflicts because they are personally offended by them. There's no body of representatives to keep that mood in check.
- k_sze 7y agoNative Chinese Hong Konger here. I don't like Junius Ho myself, but I think the LA Times translation of that quote is incorrect. 生路 and 死路 in Chinese don't literally mean "path of being alive" and "path of being dead". They are figurative, more appropriately translated as "free/open path" and "dead end". So Ho isn't really making threats about Chu's life, but more like abstract "consequences", maybe legal, maybe career-wise, maybe popularity-wise. Frankly, I don't know what Ho can do. I don't think Ho has enough evidence that Chu's supporter(s) vandalized his parents' graves and that Chu knows the exact perpetrator(s). Otherwise Ho would have provided that evidence to the police and the police would have made arrests already.
- r00fus 7y agoAnyone not expecting this? It's fairly clear that the newest bridge to the peninsula was directly intended to enable such intervention. This is not a judgement against China, but a nation that plans massive infrastructure projects, has a history of single-party rule (and rule by dynastic monarchs) and also is responsible for the Uighur re-education camps, doesn't really sound like a country unwilling to wield it's military might. While it's citizenry and residents are much more diverse and identify not as Chinese but seperate, HK has historically been part of China, and only really a separate state/entity for a couple of centuries.
- pm90 7y agoUsing the military on an backwater province is different from deploying troops to a dense city filled with millions of people. Not saying they might not still do it, just pointing out that a PLA invasion of HK would command significant attention and sympathy worldwide.
- alasdair_ 7y ago>Using the military on an backwater province is different from deploying troops to a dense city filled with millions of people. Not saying they might not still do it, just pointing out that a PLA invasion of HK would command significant attention and sympathy worldwide. And, sadly, like in Tienanmen Square, little would change. The "international community" may condemn the violence and human rights abuses but, well, the "international community" still does business in Saudi Arabia, so the chance of the condemnation changing anything seems minimal.
- avip 7y agoPretty apt "Where was Gondor" case. HK-ers are alone. No one will help them.
- luckydata 7y agoTienanmen and how little the West leaned on China for that is the original sin that led us to the current situation. It's essentially the West' fault for not cutting ties and putting sanctions on China immediately after that. We're paying the price for our cheap electronics.
- austinheap 7y agoI'm afraid they've lost: there are patently zero countries with the political will to defend Hong Kong.
- ryanlol 7y agoLuckily we now live in a world where this could change rather quickly. Information moves much faster than it did decades ago.
- Causality1 7y agoSmart approach would be offering blanket asylum status to Honk Kong residents. The US could certainly use seven million educated, hardworking people.
- headsoup 7y agoYeah but they also like democracy and I don't think that's in the current US administration's interests...
- remarkEon 7y agoThis would absolutely risk an actual shooting war, so no it is not a "smart approach". I get it that people are mad that democracy is under attack in Hong Kong, but this drift into considering extreme reactions is getting ridiculous.
- barry-cotter 7y agoHong Kong is not now and has never been a democracy. The PRC government informer the British they’d invade if they instituted democracy and they haven’t gotten any friendlier to the idea since.
- remarkEon 7y agoI'm aware. I said that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because "defending democracy" is a favorite method of building up a case for military intervention.
- jwilbs 7y agoA few weeks ago, I never would have expected China to profess/commit violence openly, just because of the comparatively open press in Hong Kong + ubiquity of cell phones. After the triad attacks, and now this, I’m worried how far China will go to suppress any unrest. FWIW, any Americans looking to (try to) help may write their Congress representatives to support the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.
- devoply 7y agoYeah I think US should send troops, build a base, and annex Hong Kong.
- Marsymars 7y agoI expect the PRC would treat that similarly as the US attempting to annex Shanghai, or any other major city in China.
- devoply 7y agoLet them, let's see what they will do. I wonder who would win such a conventional war. Though I guess afterwards there would be no Hong Kong left protecting.
- meowface 7y agoSetting up the pre-conditions for World War III sounds like a fantastic idea.
- praptak 7y agoWho says it stays conventional?
- PKop 7y agoWhat does winning look like? Certainly both would lose many lives. Why would any American want to die for this crisis? Why would you imagine China would give up or be unable to defend territory so near their mainland?
- King-Aaron 7y agoDon't worry, nothing happened in 1989 that might give some indication of what the Chinese government is historically prepared to do to protesters.
- jedmeyers 7y agoI just did a Google search from China and nothing is coming up. I guess you are right, we should not worry as nothing had happened. information is organized and is universally accessible and useful.
- pas 7y agoIs Google accessible at all from mainland China?
- kino123 7y agoI don't get why you referred to the year 1989, absolutely nothing happened in that year. Tiananmen? What's that?
- siphon22 7y agoSounds like a brand of instant ramen.
- dawhizkid 7y agoI have to say, these protests in Hong Kong have really surprised me. This is my own prejudice speaking (as an American-born Taiwanese), but my wrong assumption about young East Asians was they'd be too distracted, disaffected, and generally uninterested in politics to have rallied like this.
- idlewords 7y agoDo you see this as a cultural difference between Taiwan and Hong Kong, or a misreading of the younger generation?
- mtgx 7y agoFrom what I've seen it's the millennials, the ones who are supposed to be disinterested about everything, who employ a high-level of activism. Millennials seem set to ruin one more thing: government corruption. The progressive revolution you see in the U.S. is also due to them.
- H8crilA 7y agoIt is always students that protest the most. Remember tiananmen square? Remember protests in Soviet Union satellite countries? Framing it as a millennials problem omits the actual pattern at work. It is also not surprising. Who has the most incentive for long term sensibility in nation management? People that have many years left to live. On top of that students often live in ideological bubbles that are ripe with underutilized manpower.
- pas 7y agoMost of millennials are long out of school. The pattern seems to be more about had that particular age cohort (generation) already tried protesting? If no, they will try it. It usually doesn't succeed, they will then never try it again. Plus the students as you mentioned.
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- tangmonk 7y agoHK belongs to China
- alasdair_ 7y ago> HK belongs to China And the USA belongs to Britain.
- Kusse 7y agoThat is always such a funny statement. The Hong Kong people don't want to be Chinese. Nobody wants to be Chinese. Even the fucking Chinese people don't want to be Chinese. So what exactly is it that belongs to China? An island? The buildings and roads? I can sure as hell tell you that the hearts of the majority of the people will never ever belong to China. Freedom of the people is a one way street and any attempt to reverse will always be met with resistance. China will maybe learn this one day, when it stops being a corrupt shithole full of uneducated farmers in the claws of of the worlds most successful PsyOps machine. Forget your fancy high rise cities and shallow facades that are Shenzhen and Shanghai. Those cities are so far from representing China as anything in this world could ever be. Behind those shiny and polished exteriors lies a rotten police state, which will not think twice about cracking down on you, your family or your friends, if you dare to challenge them and their brittle egos. Go to any shithole village in China. I can guarantee you that in the top 5 of questions you will get, will be some variant of "Do you hate Japanese too?". Because that is the only button the government has to play with: Indoctrination of hate towards some external force, which is supposedly always responsible for all their hardship. Night after night after night they sit in their little shithole villages in literally shithole houses and watch retarded movies about the Sino-Japanese war, when they are not watching people crying on brain dead soap operas. Killing, crying, killing, crying in an endless cycle. Now you should ask yourself: "Why suddenly is the Chinese government telling the people in China about the ungrateful rascal rioters in Hong Kong?". Really.. You should ask yourself this question.
- ycombonator 7y agoThey have experience with Tianenmen and got away with murdering their own citizens before. https://www.pulitzer.org/article/army-clears-tiananmen-square https://www.pulitzer.org/article/army-clears-tiananmen-squar...
- Animats 7y agoCoverage in the South China Morning Post is better.[1] [1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3019854/chinese-military-can-be-deployed-hong-kongs-request-contain https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3019854/chi...
- mtgx 7y agoBetter how? By focusing more on China's point of view?
- Animats 7y agoThe SCMP isn't as unbiased as it used to be, but it's closer to the situation. They seem to have talked to all the players and quote them, but avoid drawing any conclusions.
- facethrowaway 7y agoYou just cited a newspaper owned by one of the richest members of the Communist Party. Not exactly an unbiased news source. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46353767 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46353767
- atr_gz 7y agoYes, the ownership situation isn't great. But as someone following the Hong Kong situation, I have to agree with Animats. They have the best coverage so far - it's really quickly updated and pretty balanced.
- cdmckay 7y agoYou’re right, a newspaper owned by a rich capitalist will be much less biased.
- odiroot 7y agoIf you want to link to native media better link to Hong Kong Free Press. SCMP is not at liberty to tell "the truth" (by western standards).
- majia 7y agoThis is mostly rhetoric and political posturing. Chinese government has so far refrained from taking any action. Beijing is not an benevolent actor, but is smart enough to leave Hong Kong people alone and let Hong Kong people see for themselves what a HK version of Arab Spring/Orange Revolution can deliver. If the protests lead HK to a state of chaos and recession, Beijing will gain more leverage.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> Beijing is not an benevolent actor, but is smart enough to leave Hong Kong people alone Nothing Xi has done in the past year with Hong Kong has been smart. It’s short termed decision making, optimised for his political survival over the country’s long-term interests. When dictators’ economies slow, they tend to pick from one of two handbooks: scapegoating a minority or launching pointless wars.
- cdmckay 7y agoWhat has Xi done that you feel is in short-term interests?
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> What has Xi done that you feel is in short-term interests? Most Hong Kongers, until recently, identified as Chinese moreso than Hong Konger. The transition in 2047 would have been uneventful. Now, Hong Kong is pissed off. Taiwan has seen the writing on the wall. China’s multi-decade integration strategy must be rethought because Xi didn’t think he could survive Hong Kongers criticising his leadership.
- pas 7y agoCan we see the popularity graphs for the pro-Beijing party plummet in Taiwan?
- jhanschoo 7y agoWhat quickly comes to mind is the removal of term limits (detriment to China, favorable to Xi). There are lots of things that China has done since Xi that are bad for foreign diplomacy that makes neighbors nervous, which seems like a detriment in the long run, though it's hard to say. Some examples: (more hostile climate to foreign businesses, claiming the south china sea, cyberespionage, oppression in xinjiang)
- remarkEon 7y agoA bunch of jawjacking in this thread about how the US should "intervene", whatever that means. He's a quick rehash of what the American military has been up to for the last 2 decades: * Fighting a failing (read: failed) counter-insurgency, that has surely atrophied the necessary skills and experience of field-grade and above officers needed to fight great land and sea wars * Mopping up the mess left from the above I don't doubt the fighting ability of the line infantryman (I was one), but this idea that we could do anything about Hong Kong without engaging in a full-scale war is ludicrous. It ignores a) the actual military engagements this country has gotten into for the last 20 years, and b) the actual geo-political situation in the region. Perhaps consider what strategic interest to the United States Hong Kong represents before advocating that we get into yet another endless war with nebulous objectives and mystical thinking about how easy it would be.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> this idea that we could do anything about Hong Kong without engaging in a full-scale war is ludicrous Fighting a land war against China for Hong Kong is ludicrous. Making a second Tiananmen Square painful for Beijing is not. From sanctions, to weapons sales to Taiwan et al, to providing protesters and resistance pockets with intelligence, there are options. Whether they’re worth it is the question.
- remarkEon 7y agoI mean, we're already in a trade war with them. I'm struggling to understand why, after 50+ years of trying the same thing over and over again and seeing downright horrible results across 3 continents, people still advocate the tried and true method of "just send in CIA".
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- sametmax 7y agoAmerican medias have been singing the power of the US for so long now that their population really believe they are capable fixing everything with their hammer.
- cltsang 7y agoTo the more fortunate among us who live in the civilized parts of the world: please proactively fight for your democratic system and basic human rights. They are hard-earned, but can be easily eroded.
- qbaqbaqba 7y agoWell done UK.