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The 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 Brit

by sasum 6y ago

The 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 ago
While 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/
- UIZealot 6y ago
  > Cantonese or Taiwanese are more distant from Mandarin than the Romance languages are from one another. Please kindly refrain from making statements about things you clearly know very little about.
  - sasum 6y ago
    Even if this were true, there are millions who speak Cantonese in mainland China. And Hong Kong is still part of China. Regardless of whether or not some westerner on Hacker News wants to believe that.
  - ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
    Instead of an ad hominem, could you actually cite some facts. Here are several citations to back up my claim: "The varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be regional variants of ethnic Chinese speech, without consideration of whether they are mutually intelligible. Due to their lack of mutual intelligibility, they are generally described as distinct languages (perhaps hundreds) by linguists who sometimes note that they are more varied than the Romance languages.[b] Investigation of the historical relationships among the Sinitic languages is just getting started. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups, based on often superficial phonetic developments, of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (about 800 million speakers, e.g. Southwestern Mandarin), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese) and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese).[4] These groups are unintelligible to each other and generally many of their subgroups are mutually unintelligible as well (e.g., not only is Min Chinese a family of mutually unintelligible languages, but Southern Min itself is not a single language). There are, however, several transitional areas, where languages and dialects from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility between neighboring areas. Examples are New Xiang and Southwest Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu and Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin and Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka)."[1] David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages."[2] Linguists in China often use a formulation introduced by Fu Maoji in the Encyclopedia of China: “汉语在语言系属分类中相当于一个语族的地位。” ("In language classification, Chinese has a status equivalent to a language family.")[3] Norman (1988), p. 1. "[...] the modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of languages [...]"[4] DeFrancis (1984), p. 56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China."[5] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language [2][3][4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#cite_note-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#cite_note-5
daemin 6y ago
China has existed for thousands of years as a rough idea and not as a continuous country for all that time. For many hundreds of years it was a set of countries like Europe and for others it was a single entity. So to say that China has always been a single continuous entity for thousands of years is kind of pure propaganda. Also when the British took Hong Kong it was only an island with some small fishing and charcoal making villages. Not the same as the huge metropolis it is today. So it exists today because of people going there and building the place up. My guess is because it wasn't part of communist China proper so you could do and say things that you couldn't on the mainland.

by sasum 6y ago

ryan_j_naughton 6y ago

While 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/

UIZealot 6y ago
> Cantonese or Taiwanese are more distant from Mandarin than the Romance languages are from one another. Please kindly refrain from making statements about things you clearly know very little about.
- sasum 6y ago
  Even if this were true, there are millions who speak Cantonese in mainland China. And Hong Kong is still part of China. Regardless of whether or not some westerner on Hacker News wants to believe that.
- ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
  Instead of an ad hominem, could you actually cite some facts. Here are several citations to back up my claim: "The varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be regional variants of ethnic Chinese speech, without consideration of whether they are mutually intelligible. Due to their lack of mutual intelligibility, they are generally described as distinct languages (perhaps hundreds) by linguists who sometimes note that they are more varied than the Romance languages.[b] Investigation of the historical relationships among the Sinitic languages is just getting started. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups, based on often superficial phonetic developments, of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (about 800 million speakers, e.g. Southwestern Mandarin), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese) and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese).[4] These groups are unintelligible to each other and generally many of their subgroups are mutually unintelligible as well (e.g., not only is Min Chinese a family of mutually unintelligible languages, but Southern Min itself is not a single language). There are, however, several transitional areas, where languages and dialects from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility between neighboring areas. Examples are New Xiang and Southwest Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu and Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin and Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka)."[1] David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages."[2] Linguists in China often use a formulation introduced by Fu Maoji in the Encyclopedia of China: “汉语在语言系属分类中相当于一个语族的地位。” ("In language classification, Chinese has a status equivalent to a language family.")[3] Norman (1988), p. 1. "[...] the modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of languages [...]"[4] DeFrancis (1984), p. 56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China."[5] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language [2][3][4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#cite_note-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#cite_note-5

daemin 6y ago

China has existed for thousands of years as a rough idea and not as a continuous country for all that time. For many hundreds of years it was a set of countries like Europe and for others it was a single entity. So to say that China has always been a single continuous entity for thousands of years is kind of pure propaganda. Also when the British took Hong Kong it was only an island with some small fishing and charcoal making villages. Not the same as the huge metropolis it is today. So it exists today because of people going there and building the place up. My guess is because it wasn't part of communist China proper so you could do and say things that you couldn't on the mainland.