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Supporting HK in gaining independence wouldn't have been an act of Colonialism. It would have been enabling self determination of a population. Colonialism is "
by ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
Supporting HK in gaining independence wouldn't have been an act of Colonialism. It would have been enabling self determination of a population. Colonialism is "the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically." Giving the HK people independence is literally the opposite of colonialism.
In contrast, the new law by by the CPC is an act of colonialism by definition as it is the CPC overriding 1 country, 2 systems and asserting political control over HK.
The British providing a path to independence could have been very similar to Belize (with CPC being equivalent to Guatemala in this case).
The British left a battalion of troops in Belize, the British Forces Belize, in order to act as a deterrent to a Guatemalan invasion.[1][2]
While China is obviously much more powerful than Guatemala, they still wouldn't have been able to invade given that it would have caused a nuclear war. Also, at that point China was much weaker economically so an economic war would have severely hurt their economic growth, undermining the key source of their power over the past 20 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belizean%E2%80%93Guatemalan_territorial_dispute#Post-independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belizean%E2%80%93Guatemalan_te...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_Training_and_Support_Unit_Belize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_Training_and_Supp...
- nathanyukai 6y agoIt would have been enabling self determination of a population. Nope, it would be to hurt China. If UK truly value this so much, then why they didn't make it a big deal about the 2017 Catalan independence referendum[1]? [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Catalan_independence_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Catalan_independence_refe...
- sasum 6y agoThe CPC cannot be colonialist against Hong Kong. HK has been part of China for thousands of years and is ethnically Chinese. Hong Kong exists today because Britain used military power to force the Chinese government to import opium. In the process they annexed Hong Kong. Not to mention, HKers DO NOT want independence. In a recent poll only 20% of HKers desire independence.
- ryan_j_naughton 6y agoWhile HKers are Chinese, they speak an entirely different language than Beijing that isn't even mutually intelligible. This is part of the manipulation of the narrative by the Chinese government. It refuses to even recognize that these are truly different languages and calls them "varieties of Chinese" or "dialects of Chinese" when Cantonese or Taiwanese are more distant from Mandarin than the Romance languages are from one another. Then it tries to pretend like there are only a single people in China and is systematically eradicating minority communities.[1] Thus, Mandarin political domination over other Chinese communities is imperialism at the very least, if not colonialism. Imperialism and colonialism aren't really that different from one another.[2] Additionally, every group always like to claim the land that they had at their maximal imperial state. But borders change over time. People move around -- even Taiwan was only recently colonized by Chinese in the 17th/18th century in large numbers and before and after that was owned by other empires. Another example is when the Dutch decolonized Indonesia. The Dutch were simply replaced by the new "foreign imperialists" of the central Indonesian government, which the Balinese people and other such peoples of Indonesia considered a different group than themselves. Furthermore, simply a region has been part of a broader empire for centuries or even millennia, doesn't mean isn't still being oppressed by an imperialist empire. The Russian Empire, Spanish oppression of other provinces and minorities for hundreds of years, etc. Thus perhaps instead of focusing on the colonialism part we should focus on the imperialism part. The aim should be to empower self determination of a people and enabling them to be free of oppressive, imperial influence. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713 [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/colonialism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/colonialism/