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The N Ireland thing is about British repression, which was mentioned. Some people like to claim the British occupy northern Ireland (they don't, the majority wa
by bennysomething 5y ago
The N Ireland thing is about British repression, which was mentioned. Some people like to claim the British occupy northern Ireland (they don't, the majority want British rule). If a free press, fair elections, rule of law are what repressing dissent looks like, then I'm not sure how the CCP stack up!
- hnfong 5y agoI haven't read as much about Northern Ireland as I would have wished to, but the parallels are quite similar, especially the legal "innovations" used to quell dissent. For example, the recent National Security Law allows non-jury trials, which seems to me taken directly from the Northern Ireland playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplock_court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplock_court There are a some interesting NI court case(s?) which I've encountered in the past couple years relating to riots that were occasionally cited in the Hong Kong court which escapes me right now. Anyway the point is that while freedoms are indeed being eroded in Hong Kong, it's a fallacy to paint the British colonial rule as benevolent just to make a point. (Most of the freedoms were granted to Hong Kong in the 1990s _after_ UK signed the Sino British joint declaration, it worked as a narrative to kind of force the Chinese government to revert a bunch of freedoms and hence the UK escaped most of the blame for making much of those those repressive laws in the first place)