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And the real losers in this fight here are Hongkongese citizens, who fought for their freedom and ultimately are losing it, on top of facing an economic crisis.
by m-p-3 6y ago
And the real losers in this fight here are Hongkongese citizens, who fought for their freedom and ultimately are losing it, on top of facing an economic crisis.
- f00_ 6y agoyeah, hopefully they just move to taiwan
- gpm 6y agoOr the UK, or really anywhere else outside of CCP control.
- magicsmoke 6y agoThe smart ones already moved out in 1997 to Hongkouver. The ones left in HK are those without the money or skills to emigrate.
- elliekelly 6y agoFriendly reminder that wealth does not equal intelligence.
- tasogare 6y agoYet Taiwan is also under threat from PRC. Also emigrating (ie leaving born place, family, friends, etc) is not that easy even when money/job is not an issue.
- ericmay 6y agoIt's a much different threat, however. As I've covered in other threads, CCP action against Taiwan will result in an actual war which may or may not involve the U.S. and to an unknown degree.
- pkaye 6y agoElsewhere I've ready that Hong Kong and Taiwan have a lot of differences like Mandarin vs Cantonese. Also Hong Kong has a much higher GDP per capita.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago> like Mandarin vs Cantonese Noob question, how much do these differ? Also does it go further, perhaps a difference in culture as well as language?
- av_engr 6y agoThey are quite different. Personal take, imagine Scottish English vs American English but 2x that.
- bobthepanda 6y agoIf you're talking about spoken, probably the difference is something more like English v German. Individual words can look similar but combine them into a sentence and you probably wouldn't be able to parse it on a first take (if they were transcribed into romanized letters), and there are some grammar differences.
- dmoy 6y agoIt's even worse than English v German imo (speaking both, and descendant from Cantonese, married to a mainlander) The german grammar is a fair point though. Makes every sentence sound like churchill trying to be annoying on purpose. It's like English v German, but imagine that German had a bunch of sounds that seem identical to you but are actually different sounds (you just can't hear the difference). Imagine that German Wasser (water) and Wäscher (washer, ish) sounded exactly the same to you, and you couldn't tell the difference. Now imagine that literally every single word had dozens of those identically-sounding-but-actually-different-sounding-to-native-speakers examples. The issue imo is the increase in tones. Mandarin has 4-5 tones, cantonese has like 6-9. And the tones in Mandarin are much easier to distinguish.
- redisman 6y agoWhat all of them?
- ecf 6y agoHow convenient for the Chinese government, huh? It’s almost like this Pandemic came at a perfect time for them.
- OBLIQUE_PILLAR 6y agostop polluting HN with comments like this
- supernova87a 6y agoAs I genuinely asked in my comment separately in the thread, what practical freedoms are being lost by the everyday person in Hong Kong that would not be considered crimes in the US (or Hong Kong prior to this), for example?
- marcinzm 6y agoThe freedom to not have China dictate it's laws.
- dade_ 6y agoRandom detention for annoying the CCP will now be the actual law.
- ng12 6y agoA reasonable degree of self-representation.
- vore 6y agoWhat practical freedoms are being lost by the everyday person in the US if the US decided to replace public courts with shadow puppetry? Probably none, but I would be terrified.
- bobmcbobface 6y agoNone until you actually interact with the system. Then, potentially, all of them.
- jcranmer 6y agoThe obvious answer is criticism of the Chinese government, which is I believe a Chinese constitutional right that is ignored in practice. Although, practically speaking, this has already been lost in Hong Kong ever since the abduction of the bookseller.
- bobthepanda 6y agoThis will become a lot more obvious though; the government will probably start feeling emboldened to do things like revoke media licenses.
- davidw 6y agoI saw the suggestion on twitter that the US and other countries should hand out visas to people from Hong Kong who want to live in a free country (with the hope that the US doesn't continue to decline, from that perspective).
- chrisco255 6y agoWe should go one further and carve out a territory for a New Hong Kong and let them re-build there.
- BubRoss 6y agoHow would that work and what would that accomplish?
- eastbayjake 6y agoGov. Jared Polis (D-CO) liked a tweet this week where someone proposed a charter city for Hong Kong in Colorado - the thread shows why that's probably a bad idea, but clearly surprising levels of support outside the Libertarian think tank world for charter cities in the US: https://twitter.com/ariarmstrong/status/1264628307586248704 https://twitter.com/ariarmstrong/status/1264628307586248704
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI think the major moral objection people have to charter cities is that they feel exploitative of the host nation. Proposals seem to take the form "we'll take some rich Westerners, and put them in a host nation where they don't have to follow the local rules, and the host nation will benefit because the Westerners will hire them for labor" - it's very hard to distinguish this from colonialism. Few people think it's a bad thing to have e.g. Indian tribal governments, which are indistinguishable from what a charter city would be.
- 0max 6y agoCharter Cities sounds like the old Open Door policy but with extra steps https://blog.prepscholar.com/what-was-the-open-door-policy-china https://blog.prepscholar.com/what-was-the-open-door-policy-c...
- nickff 6y agoI am reminded of the proverb: 'when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers'.
- vmception 6y ago> who fought for their freedom and ultimately are losing it Okay so lets rewind like a year ago, what did you or anyone realistically think was going to happen? 100% of the will of the people can only make up for a fraction of the political consensus in Hong Kong, with corporations making up the rest. This isn't unique to Hong Kong, The City of London within London has a similar form of representation. The corporations derive their power and hegemony from mainland China. The Chief Executive (Head of State) is appointed unilaterally by Beijing. The politics are interesting but if you were a betting man, what are your odds for any outcome?
- yibg 6y agoPersonally I'm saddened by this. I have a lot of friends there that I worry about and I've been fond of Hong Kong the way it was even a decade ago. I'm afraid it'll never be the same.
- mamborambo 6y agoAlthough HK appears to be the direct casualty of US change of trade status, the reality is that China is one who will bleed once the HK trade window is closed. For too long China practised a kind of hostage diplomacy where it solves its problems by taking hostages and then negotiating for concessions. For instance the two Canadians detained to pressure Canada to release Huawei CFO. Hong Kong is now another hostage of CCP, Xi betting that the US dare not tighten the screw on its tariff as long as HK is a hostage in its grip. But most likely China will fail, as HK people have prepared themselves to be sacrificed to bring down the CCP. On an individual level HKers will begin another mass exodus like in pre-1997.