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This is another nail in the coffin of the Hong Kong we knew and loved… I was a resident for many years, I witnessed the peaceful protests of 2014, I witnessed

• xwolfi 5y ago
  While I agree, as a current resident, I also witnessed the insane destructive behavior of Apple Daily, who did exagerate quite a bit the situation and was far from a neutral observer. I'd even say that telling kids the police murdered 2000 people was not exactly helping them strategize rather than throw themselves in desperate waves at the police... These guys all pushed the situation towards a point of no return for the communists, which could have been instead worked around. Ofc a strong and self assured nation would be able to swallow it, and China shows us how weak and self doubting it is, but I won't cry too many tears for that newspaper. I'm even a tad annoyed Lai is presented as a glorious press freedom figure when I felt reading it that it was on the abusive side of freedom. I guess we all need now to redraw the line at which we collaborate vs resist and Im not yet at the resist stage.
  • jollybean 5y ago
    We don't cry tears because of the kind of journalism, we cry tears because it was on some level journalism or at minimum freedom of expression and the clampdown means the same it will happen to you if you try that route. Anyone who contradicts Putin and gets any stickiness or popularity ends up dead. You don't have to agree with Putin's antagonists to realize why that is bad.
    • hungryhobo 5y ago
      tell that to twitter or facebook
      • seattle_spring 5y ago
        Was Apple Daily regularly sharing outright falsified stories?
        • xwolfi 5y ago
          Yes, I dunno what you call regular, but they repeated taiwanese rumours that were vastly exagerated. In 2019 saying the police didnt kill 2000 people in secret would warrant you a slap in the street, because of these newspapers that were a bit... activist ? Kids that were arrested were hollered by these Apple Daily journalists to display their ID card to the camera in case they disappeared, creating a climate were they felt like oppressed freedom fighters rather than overly violent political activists. Honestly me and my wife, at the beginning of Jimmy Lai s arrest were relieved because we felt it could stop the insanity a bit. Ofc China will go too far as usual but that's the feeling some of us have. Dunno how common it is, as it's hard to discuss calmly in HK. Either people feel their little pride shattered by all this anti China discourse, or they feel invaded and tortured by the fact we're a Chinese city. Hard to discuss a middle ground where we ignore each other like we've done for 2 decades.
          • jollybean 5y ago
            There's no middle ground really: China has taken over, you have no rights. That's it. If you speak ill of someone powerful, you'll disappear one way or another.
        • jjcc 5y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Daily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Daily It's interesting that most people here don't read Apple Daily. Those who can read Apple Daily and know the real nature don't want to talk too much because the opinion doesn't align the majority of HNer's belief based on partial information. It's a tabloid newspaper but more than that, it's full of hate and anger. That's its strength because there's a big market for it.
  • throwawayHK 5y ago
    The situation is clearly asymmetric tough. The Apple Daily is not a great paper and they got more coverage than they deserve but they are symptomatic of a need for people to voice opposing opinions. Now there is basically nothing left. Local news outlets will censor themselves because the law is overly vague and will be systematically interpreted in the broadest possible way. Journalists are harassed and intimidated, if not threatened physically. The independence of justice is also in peril with judges being replaced and pressured into compliance. There is no turning back for HK, it's just terribly sad. It could have been an example for China, an experiment. Anti-China sentiment was comparatively fairly low while there was some token respect for the 2-system. I agree with you that China only shows us how weak it really is with its display of comically over-the-top caricatural retaliation against any form of dissent. I'm not sure what resisting can look like though. No cooperation is granted but while I'm a resident, I'm also a foreigner and a guest here. Options are limited apart from being an observer. I love HK with all my heart and it kills me to see it go through that transformation into a pro-CCP satellite. The tank has breached the border -figuratively- and I don't think anything will stop it now. I expect freedoms to slowly erode a lot further over the next few years as the CCP increases its hold over the various representative bodies (only patriots allowed!).
    • fighterpilot 5y ago
      It sometimes goes beyond harassment and intimidation of journalists into outright assault: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_attack_on_Kevin_Lau https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_attack_on_Kevin_Lau
  • Bayart 5y ago
    >These guys all pushed the situation towards a point of no return for the communists Ah yes, the victim left absolute no choice to the aggressor than to punch them in the face ! What sort of logic is that ? You don't arrest bad journalists, just like you don't burn bad books or censor bad movies out of the excuse that they're bad. On first principles, the nature of things is more important than their subjective value.
    • xwolfi 5y ago
      You dont but they do. So we have three choices: lick their boots, throw ourselves at their jails, or discuss alternatives until we find one. I'd rather continue discussing than say it's already too late, but I live in it and you dont so maybe that's why.
      • tpm 5y ago
        There are no alternatives in totalitarian regimes, the only other option is to leave. Yes, I have lived in one.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    > These guys all pushed the situation towards a point of no return for the communists, which could have been instead worked around. It couldn't have been worked around. It doesn't work this way. There is no other way, in 2048, or in 2022, no other way around. That's the goal of Beijing. Tell us if it's something else. On other hand, if HK turns into mini-Syria, it would've mobilised way more people, even the most inert, and apolitical. For Beijing, it will also be a guaranteed loss both ways then. They lose 2048, and HK on the platter as it is, with its access to world financial markets. I believe only a scare of this kind have a chance to make Beijing to back off. Third, HK is the seat of Western money in Asia. If the bank where their money is will literally burn to the ground, at least then they would've not pretend that nothing happens. Some times, a solution to violence, is bigger violence.
    • xwolfi 5y ago
      Well the goal of Beijing is for the party to survive, there are many solutions between murdering us all and let HK become a country. I mean we're a city, we have no army, what do you propose ? I propose to work around the party, like Macau, sing the anthem from time to time and basta, the problem can only be fixed by China as a whole, not at our level. Beijing cannot "back off" more violence, they can only double down. Put yourself in their shoe: if they're a mafia in need of legitimacy and survival, that committed too many crimes to welcome honest competition, how can a HK citizen think that burning a local metro station will make them "oh right, freedom is too important for HK, we should maybe even copy them". Before immediately jumping to desperate violence, maybe we can try to bribe them. Which is what we did before, and what we now do albeit with a bit more cost to re-assure that yes yes we're good patriots until the dragon goes back to sleep... I prefer to discuss about things in a less free Hong Kong than starve and steal in a mini Syria but you're welcome to solve problems that way where you live :D
      • baybal2 5y ago
        > if they're a mafia in need of legitimacy and survival, that committed too many crimes to welcome honest competition, If you back down to a mafia in need of legitimacy and survival, you support the mafia, and you become a man without honour. Such people never returned a punch to the face, and never prevailed. > I mean we're a city, we have no army, what do you propose ? For the amount of money an average HK billionaire has, you can buy enough arms from Bulgaria, or Balkans to arm the whole HK population 10 times over.
• hkai 5y ago
  Hopefully this is a good lesson for the US because I see their media going the same way. Try voicing any opposition to the Democratic Party's point of view and you're done. No PayPal, no bank account, no social media profiles, people forced to cut ties with you, you get fired from your job. Before 2019, Hong Kong was probably one of the freest places on Earth in terms of what you can say and do (no elections though).
• _tik_ 5y ago
  This happened under British Hong Kong too. The British never tolerate dissenting voice.The 1960 and 1967 protest, the British label it as Riot, end in violence too. I think Hong Kong can only be peaceful if they solve the huge inequality. The image of wealth and poverty living side by side is very dystopian.
  • arafooo 5y ago
    This is bs whataboutism. The riots in the 1960s were lead by the communists. At the same time they were busy starving their own people in the Great Leap Backwards to Starvation and Mao's latest rampage. If we're looking at whataboutisms, what about all the dirty communist money in Australia. Million dollar houses bought by family members close to Xi? No. The British were not perfect, but the CCP is 1000000 times worse.
  • cntrmmbrpsswrd 5y ago
    The British tried to hold democratic elections during that time, but it was the Communist Party that pressured them not to. The riots you're talking about were Hong Kong Communist going against the British. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Hong_Kong_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Hong_Kong_riots
    • _tik_ 5y ago
      I read wikipedia. I just realized that the suppresion is more brutal than what I imagined. Are u referring to HK 1997 election? That election is after the British reluctantly agree to handover HK. From the CCP point of view the elections is a plot to sabotage the Handover. It is not that iI agree or disagree with CCP view or British motive. There are many anti colonial politicians in Asia suspicious of the British motive.
      • arafooo 5y ago
        Everything is sabotage to the CCP. When there is flood, I'm surprised they don't try to arrest god.
  • 5y ago
• jjcc 5y ago
  Any idea that this happened only recently? There are already raids earlier along with other punishment. Without new provocation, this one seems totally unnecessary. A reasonable interpretation about this raid, based on the timing and some knowledge about China and CPP, would be: this is a response to G7's recent communique. But I bet not many people get the message because with some existing ideology that people usually are not aware of, casual relations among events are often ignored.
  • Bayart 5y ago
    I have the same take a you do. Those implicit signals make sense in a Chinese cultural context but are much harder for the non initiated to pick on. This being said, State actors in the West have their analysts and certainly know what's afoot, cue the official response from the EU and Britain. But the general public can't parse it, which is important in democracies.
  • ackbar03 5y ago
    This shows the importance of cultural understanding and the lack of it when western commentators look at events in China. July 1st marks the 100th anniversary of the CCP, its pretty simple. It was probably done just to make ensure stability and so that it goes by without a hitch and nobody tries anything stupid. This sort of stuff is pretty typical of them, especially near important dates.
    • boredprograming 5y ago
      I may be typical but it's nuts. Send your secret police to harass your critics whenever an important date is coming up.
      • toomanybeersies 5y ago
        Technically, it was 500 uniformed officers, and not the secret police (which in this case would be the MSS).
        • 5y ago
• aw9f70gae 5y ago
  > freest laissez faire city state in the world It's just so easy to idolize Hong Kong and ignore the severe failures in its socioeconomic system for the sake of critiquing China. Please do better. cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/FD941A3D3003D8EA05ACE2C5A9C00110/S0305741000046828a.pdf/legacy_of_the_british_administration_of_hong_kong_a_view_from_hong_kong.pdf
  • sterlind 5y ago
    From your article: > The dark side of colonialism is also manifested glaringly in what many people still regard as the British betrayal of the long-term interests of the Hong Kong people in the 1982-84 sovereignty retrocession negotiations and in the subsequent British appeasement of PRC infringements of, and non- compliance with, the Joint Declaration, especially on democratization and the formation of the Court of Final Appeal. well that turned out exactly as predicted! your paper did indeed lay valid criticism on the British for abandoning HK to the PRC, not doing enough to safeguard the Joint Declaration and make sure China kept its promises on civil rights and autonomy, and foretold the disemboweling of its constitution and freedoms by the mainland.
• accurrent 5y ago
  I would politely disagree with you on the G7 front - its all talk and no action. In the end the people who will suffer for the comments made in the G7 are these journalists. The fact is all that has been done is a bunch of talking. The fact is yes there are things which CCP is doing that is very wrong, and yes they have a very low tolerance towards dissent. However, any comment coming from USA and England makes the scenario even worse. In part this is because the "west" doesn't have a particularly positive PR impression in Asia. Many view the G7 as a group of countries that take their own decisions without consulting others. For any protest to be successful, one side has to eventually reach a compromise. When the protests first started in 2019 for months they were peaceful. This was actually the time when they were the scariest for the CCP as its very hard to justify any action against them. Heck, I had friends who were PRC nationals who crossed the border to take part in them (just because they were curious what protest was and no other political reason whatsoever, and yes, they're alive and fine right now). The problems started when a few people displayed xenophobia towards PRC which unraveled into violence. At this point it became incredibly easy for CCP to smear the protests back home as all they needed to show in their local media was the few instances of violence against PRC nationals, juxtaposed against images of their own soldiers who were shown sweeping streets. Once England and USA started making comments about the human rights situation it was essentially a death knell for the protesters. This is because in China many consider USA and England's human rights comments hypocritical given that both countries grew economically by exploiting slaves (in USA's case) and colonies (in England's case). Personally, I don't think politicians making bold statements from countries halfway across the world will help at all. Xenophobia overseas will make the matters even worse. Rather than turning anti-China and uber-nationalistic what would dismantle the CCP is to actually work towards winning the hearts of the 1 billion+ population, majority of whom actually have benefited from the CCP's reign.
  • mschuster91 5y ago
    > Rather than turning anti-China and uber-nationalistic what would dismantle the CCP is to actually work towards winning the hearts of the 1 billion+ population, majority of whom actually have benefited from the CCP's reign. How is the West supposed to make that happen, against a population that is being actively brainwashed? Almost all ways of entering information into China are censored.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  The CCP aren't idiots. They knew the time was right to do it, because in western circles, that were a bit slow to understand the world around them, freedom was not in good graces with political leaders. It was the perfect time to tighten the grip. The G7 was disappointing. It was all talk in my opinion, although there aren't many venues to handle a situation like Hong Kong.
  • javajosh 5y ago
    Do you mean that Western leaders started to turn their backs on freedom, too? You are absolutely right, I fear. So much of the talk about China in the West doesn't even mention human rights, just trade imbalance or cyber security. In an age of nuclear detente, I suppose it was inevitable that democracy's most potent opponents would be homegrown. I never considered that this also means abandoning imperiled democracy abroad, but it surely does.
    • rjzzleep 5y ago
      It's actually not true. They did talk about human rights. The German embassy in China specifically released a statement on Xinjiang and how it's discussion should be based on mutual respect. It's not that the West isn't talking about human rights, it's actually that they seem to be more jealous if anything of how China does things. Oh and if you want to check on how much a country cares about their relationship with another country all you need to do is check which diplomats send there. As an example all the ambassadors Germany sends to Taiwan are completely useless bums which are just wasting oxygen and tax payer money.
      • raxxorrax 5y ago
        Germany has currently a tendency to excel in corruption and nothing else, without it having any consequences. On the topic of surveillance they also fail at every level. The left wing of our government behaves like the Stasi. This is no exaggeration, they will send the police to your home if you say something on twitter. At least judges ruled a case as blatently illegal. No consequences again... The right wing just wants to access any form of encrypted communication. China is well loved because it is an important market for the largest car manufacturers, so politicians love China too. I really hope they just ignore intellectual property in this case... It is not that laws are currently taken seriously anyway.
• deleted 5y ago
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• dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  But why would this be in any way surprising? We knew since the agreement between China an the UK that this day would come. The whole world knew. Maybe the residents of HK had some vague hope China would give them more freedom than in the mainland (why would they??) but in other parts of the world the picture was rather clear. I expected massive emigration but as far as I can tell people had the idea to stay and fight at home.
  • DaedPsyker 5y ago
    But it is early, it was supposed to be left alone for another 30 years. CCP actions, or rather Xi, imo, reflect a level of nativity or perhaps just typical authoritarian paranoia. People in Hong Kong were warming up to the mainland, more and more were identifying as Chinese primarily. If CCP had left well alone and continued on the course, they would have had a loyal Hong Kong with a new generation that could accept gradual reform, but they've poisoned that well.
    • dirtyid 5y ago
      It was late. PRC scholars warned new HK generations would culturally drift 10+ years ago. The fact that HK has existed in a national security state of exception for 20+ years, while simultaneously operating as a western spy hub outside of Chinese purview is fundamentally an untenable situation that no sane country should accede to. Reality is PRC who has always had FULL legal authority over issues of foreign policy under 1C2S post handover and was unprecedentedly patient with HK, while HKers have never demonstrated reasonable accommodation for "one country" interests. Apple Daily's Jimmy Lai met with Pompeo & Pence during height of US/PRC rivalry (read: treason) is just one of the many symptoms of why this crack down was overdue. Newer HK generations growing up on western textbooks were never going to be loyal. Currently tensions could have been mitigated if PRC rammed through patriotic education and NSL 10+ years ago instead of naively assuming an increasingly irrelevant HK relative to mainland would passively accept loss of privilege and integrate as just another mainland city. Expect newer gen of HKers under PRC cultivation to actually align with PRC interests. For CCP, resetting HK culture is the anecdote that was long recognized but administered too late.
• jbirer 5y ago
  I visited Hong Kong in January 2020 for the second time, having become mesmerized with the development, skyline and freedom during my first visit in 2018. It was a truly sad sight to see, people afraid to speak, red banners everywhere, lots of questions asked at the border etc.
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    Well, there's still Vancouver ;)
• graderjs 5y ago
  I shared your sadness at the time and have lived also there a lot over the last 10 years, including when the FOO was going to be debated in June 2019, triggering the unrest. All this is actually a good thing if you love HK. Apple Daily peddled a lot of divisive fake news, doomscrolling and rumors that 'fake justified' the violence in 2019 - 2020. Slightly more real politic take: having provided a useful pretext for the long overdue NSL, they are shut down. It's not about dissent. Dissent is useful. It's about narratives that go against the country, sovereignty and threaten security. CPC has no total grip on power. It has many internal factions jostling for power, and > 90% of the population are not party members. That's why it is so sensitive to disturbances, because it's a constant struggle to build something that lasts. HK is not crushed and silenced, it is liberated from violence and chaos, and empowered to build a new future, if only its youth will take the responsibility and do something constructive to that end. It has not been 'caught off guard' by the 'speed'. The NSL was supposed to have been implemented after the handover, over 20 years ago, and local media and people actively provoked risks to country, sovereignty and security, through 2019-2020 thus providing a pretext for NSL promulgation. Even so, it took more than a year of, as you say, "horrifying wanton violence, where we witnessed the rapid destruction of the freest laissez faire city state in the world", for NSL to arrive. It's not freedom that was destroyed tho, unless you consider 'freedom to violence and chaos' as freedom. It was a required-by-the-Basic-Law long-overdue legal-loophole that was ultimately the thing that was destroyed by all that violence, and, tragically a few people's lives who suffered terrible injuries and death. Maybe one day they can be remembered as important people who contributed, however unwittingly, to ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity in HK. To the new decade!