‘ No one on either side of the conflict , then or now, has a satisfactory theory of why Carrie Lam won’t form an independent inquiry into police violence, the demand that is the emotional core of the protests.’
Does China have anything to loose with an independent inquiry into police violence ?
The Hong Kong situation is still quite baffling. I initially thought that the emotional motivation was independence. But it seems like that’s not the crux of the issue
CLam is clearly under the duress of the CCP - and not just for the simplistic reasons of her maintaining her own face/position/power/etc...
She is the lynchpin of CCP control in HK.
So, lets assume she caves to the protesters... (wont happen), she would wreak the ire of the CCP - and obv, she is as much of a leach oligarch as the rest - so she clearly cant choose the cup in front of her.
Now, if she were to take the strong arm of the CCP against the protesters, she would wreak the havoc of the international sanction prospects of the world abroad.
So she clearly cannot choose the cup in front of you...
What she does know is that the global authoritarian regimes have spent the last few years building an immunity to Protester-Murder Requiring-Protester-Backlash-in-the-face-of-economic-and-geo-political-gains.
A commission would mean giving ground. It would mean China is no longer 100% protecting the thugs dressed in "police" uniforms.
Thuggery is not a new thing, common to all crime families is a "protection" for the foot soldiers. If a foot soldier messes up the boss takes responsibility, admonishes the criminal, and the criminal is thankful for getting off without justice. We see this common behaviour in the American mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, and currupt police departments, and clearly China's Hong Kong occupiers.
> I initially thought that the emotional motivation was independence.
More like autonomy: apparently Hong Kong citizens don't mind being part of China as long as they can keep their self-governance.
And that ties in to your question:
> Does China have anything to loose with an independent inquiry into police violence ?
Such an inquiry would emphasize HK's autonomy (and also paint government as potentially fallible, something the party doesn't like to see discussed). On the other hand: does China have anything to win with such an inquiry? I can't see anything (there are four more demands and giving in on this would likely increase support for demanding the rest), so for them it's all risk and no gain.
> More like autonomy: apparently Hong Kong citizens don't mind being part of China as long as they can keep their self-governance.
So they don't mind being a part of China so long as they aren't actually a part of China. I can't blame them either, the current system has worked out well for the island, and China's internal polices have not had quite as much success on the mainland.
But Chinese officials were pretty clear from the start that they intended to integrated HK eventually and that the semi-detached existence was only temporary. They see this as inevitable and the HL population is just dragging their heels on something that has to happen in the end.
I think some folk in the west naively assumed that a wealthy populace on the mainland would get tired of corruption and rule by self appointed officials, and eventually liberalise. Harmony would be achieved this way.
Instead China is implementing totalitarianism on a first world region and the Cantonese hate it.
At this point it’s to save face. Xi’s China and its media basically backed itself into a corner by painting the protests as instigated by foreign-funded terrorists. Accepting the demands would be seen as major backpedaling, and might
- cause PRC citizens to also start demanding accountability
- cause nationalistic protests about kowtowing to what was described as terrorists
A problem with that analysis is that they already caved on the chief demand (formal withdrawal of the bill), after saying all summer it wouldn't happen.
It's worth pointing out that the bill was introduced in order to extradite someone who was accused of murdering his girlfriend in Taiwan, with which Hong Kong didn't have an extradition treaty, but it wasn't sufficiently narrow in scope to do just that, which caused fear that it could have been used in future to extradite citizens to mainland China.
Yes. One of the side effects of being a liar is that nobody trusts you even when you're telling the truth; one of the side effects of having a corrupt legal system is that nobody trusts you, even with actual murderers.
EDIT: It's worth pointing out that this is why Ecuador gave Assange asylum: it was clear that the UK and US legal systems were being politically corrupted. The political corruption of the legal system is just much more systematic in China.
It's not really withdrawn, it's just postponed for 28 years. "One country, two systems" expires in 2047, and the mainland government takes the long view.
The Hong Kong situation is much more complicated than mainstream media outside Hong Kong would like the world to believe, but that goes without saying.
The issue with the current HK government at the end of the day is that Carrie Lam is a second rate administrator and is wildly unqualified for handling the current situation in HK. Worse yet, she has one of the worst cabinets / teams ever assembled (you would need to be familiar with local HK politics to know this). In other words, HK couldn't have had a worse group to lead the city at this point in time.
Having said that, Carrie is completely reliant on the police force at this stage. There is no way she agrees to an independent inquiry or any major moves against the police. At least not right now.
I'd say that the independent inquriy may be something that can be compromised on at some point. But universal suffrage is out of the question, and demands 3 and 4 would never be accepted by the rest of Hong Kong nor would any reasonable person accept it given what has taken place since the original protests. In fact one of the key issues is that "the protest" isn't just one unified movement that has been moving forward since its inception.
Interesting to me to summarise the talking points being pushed by this battleangle sock puppet account:
* Issues in HK are internal to HK. Caused by HK population and HK administrators and HK police
* There is no influence by the CCP on HK issues
* The protest in HK is asking for unreasonable things and isn't united.
* There is no evidence of people being deported out of HK or assaulted by government forces from outside HK.
Also, as you would expect, personal attacks are being aimed at witnesses of events that contradict this story. And doubts are cast at video evidence.
It's pretty clear that there is an attempt to paint a disconnect between HK China and Mainland China
I don't know, the propaganda accounts are usually much more blunt. This one has nuanced words. Painting Carrie Lam as relying on the police and force etc.
As usual, rather than offer actual counterpoints, you resort to ad hominem attacks and complete misrepresentation of what I stated.
- nowhere did I state issues in HK are internal to HK only. There's obvious influence by interested parties outside of HK as well.
- HK is under the CCP. Of course there's influence. I never stated this either. I stated that the influence is much less than what media would like you to belive.
- I specifically stated that 2 of the demands are unreasonable, and a third will never be tolerated by the CCP. The protest movement certainly isn't a united cause for Hong Kong as a whole. That's what I stated. Even in the recent local elections the pro-protest candidates garnered on average less than 60% of the votes despite record turn out on their side.
- There indeed is no hard and credible evidence that people are being deported out of HK into China. That's what I stated. I did not state that none have been assaulted by government forces.
" personal attacks are being aimed at witnesses of events that contradict this story"
umm...what personal attacks? Do you even know that the evidence of an emergency doctor saying the rapes occurred is by a "Dr. Ray" on Facebook? He also wrote in Chinese that his evidence is that "if he is lying, may the people and heavens judge him". Unfortunately most people buying into the claim don't read Chinese.
Now that I've pointed out your completely unbased claims and obvious disingenuity and lack of integrity, perhaps you want to provide evidence of claims to the contrary rather than your illogical rabble.
*yes I'm a brand new account. I usually only read posts here, but I'm from HK and it's an issue close to heart. I'm sick of the misrepresentation of what's actually happening being reinforced by people who have very little knowledge of Hong Kong if they have even ever visited or lived there at all.
I don't think you're a real person so I'm unsure as to how to respond to the accusation of an ad hominem attack.
The actions of a new participant in an online community can often be judged by what new information they contribute and whether their comments are are comprehensive and covers the entirety of the issue or whether they selectively concentrate on distractions and unimportant trivia.
If you have knowledge then share it. If you have links then share them. If you're just here to say that there is no evidence other than the videos that we've seen then you'll probably be judged as a troll.
I'm afraid you violated HN's guidelines egregiously. They include the following, for extremely good reason: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data."
An account that happens to be new and happens to disagree with your view doesn't come anywhere close to clearing the bar for evidence that they are not "a real person" or are abusing HN. Internet users are far, far too quick to jump to bad-faith conclusions and then take their own imagination as a basis for attacking others. That's not cool and not allowed on HN.
If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com, as the guidelines ask, so we can investigate. What you can't do is jump to smear other users. I know it's a popular internet blood sport in lots of places, but it's possibly the single most toxic thing that users do on HN, leading to flamewars, extremely low-quality 'discussion', and outright harm to others (see the examples below). Please don't do it again.
Real abuse by sockpuppets and so on exists, but on political topics we've seen extremely little of it on HN (basically zero, in fact), and I've personally spent countless hours investigating these things. Overwhelmingly the more common abuse is users posting accusations and insinuations to poison the discussion against someone whose comments they dislike. This is harmful. Innocent people, unfortunately, have been hounded out of this community this way, and some Chinese users have been treated shamefully here. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. Another example, which fortunately didn't have the effect of driving the user away: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21194472
I'm sure that's not who you want to be or the kind of community you want to be part of. In order to prevent HN from succumbing to that ugliness, we need every user to be mindful of the difference between imagination and evidence, and not allow our strong feelings on a topic to confuse the one for the other. It's perfectly common and legitimate for a reader who hasn't posted to HN before, to create an account when they run across a topic to which they're personally connected. All evidence is that this was the case with battleangle.
HN is a highly international community, and people across the world have very different perspectives on any issue, China-related or not. If we can't receive their contributions thoughtfully, and instead drive them out of town, we've not only done a shameful thing to another human being—we've deprived ourselves of an external perspective that we could have learned from. Let's not allow our strongly-felt views, which were formed in our own very specific personal and cultural and political context, to make us intolerant to people who simply have a very different background than we do.
> Even in the recent local elections the pro-protest candidates garnered on average less than 60% of the votes despite record turn out on their side.
I'm interested in your source for this, do you have an English language source?
I haven't seen any results per candidate, and I don't have a proper understanding of how local HK elections work, but according to SCMP:
> Among the 452 seats up for grabs, the pan-democrats were victorious in 347, the independents – many of them pro-democracy – won 45, while the pro-establishment camp had to make do with 60. [1]
Sounds like a pretty clear victory to me. If the elections are anything like my local elections such a result would be considered a landslide victory.
From what I can see, the account you're accusing of sockpuppetry here (battleangle) reflects a perfectly mainstream opinion among Hong Kongers. The accusation of sockpuppetry is unfounded and you should take it back.
Based on his reply to your post and what he says, I'm rather sceptical that battleangle is a sock puppet account...
The fact that Carrie Lam and her cabinet are extremely incompetent is what most HKers think.
HK protesters not being united and being multiple groups is a fact.
Out of the five demands, there are quite a few people in Hong Kong who don't necessarily agree with demand 2 and 3 about the riots. So he is right there. Those are the more controversial demands and not everyone in HK agrees with them.
He's also right that Carrie Lam cannot currently agree to demand 4 and form an independent committee
He also didn't say there was no influence by the CCP on HK issues.
So his post reflect an opinion that a non-small percentage of HKers share.
> demands 3 and 4 would never be accepted by the rest of Hong Kong nor would any reasonable person accept it given what has taken place since the original protests.
Why wouldn't any reasonable person accept an independent inquiry into police brutality? That doesn't sound very reasonable to me.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that Lam is just a bumbling politician failing to deal with a crisis when she's backed by the most powerful authoritarian regime in the world.
Yeah it's hard to believe, but that's part of the issue. She's never been a politician, and was a second rate administrator / civil servant at best before she was chosen for the position. I think that we often overestimate the abilities of leaders everywhere in the world...
In addition, China is happy to let Carrie and HK stumble...to a certain extent of course. But they truly have been very hands off on the HK protests. I think it's worth noting that China is perfectly fine with HK getting burned by itself just as long certain lines aren't crossed (independence, violence against PLA, etc.). They weren't worried about losing HK when it was under British colonial rule, they certainly aren't worried now.
Furthermore, things really aren't that bad considering how the media has been reporting HK. It's still an extremely well-to-do city and life goes on in most parts.
To add onto it, she was basically picked because the other potential candidate was a little too good at being a politician, and campaigned for the position without Beijing’s blessing.
Best of luck to the HK people. I called it home for better part of 2 years. I lived in Wan Chai on Hennessy rd near the computer center.
Plenty of atrocities committed - people being shipped off in train cars reminiscent of pre-WWII photos that I have only learned about in school.
Best wishes.
[EDIT]
I agree I should have said alleged atrocities. Sadly, hardly anyone left in HK is impartial but hopefully independent enough investigations are opened.
It is not a good look loading anyone in trains who is captive. True, we don't know where they're headed, could be fine - it's a bad look given the situation.
"people being shipped off in train cars reminiscent of pre-WWII photos that I have only learned about in school."
There is absolutely no corroborated evidence whatsoever that this happened. Just like the alleged rapes. I'm not saying that these things did not happen, but absolutely no credible evidence on these claims up until now.
There is video and photo evidence from multiple sources on Twitter. There have been extensive reports of victims like British consulate worker Simon Cheng being abducted to the mainland and being tortured. Obviously there wont be any "corroboration" from the PRC state security agency or police...
"There have been extensive reports of victims like British consulate worker Simon Cheng being abducted to the mainland and being tortured."
Did you even see his interview with the BBC? Legally would not say anything about his hiring of prostitutes. No medical evience of the torture he claimed. The only hard evidence that was provided were CCTV tapes of him going into local massage joint. You would think that if he didn't obtain the services of sex workers he would come out and say it. Interesting that the British also let him go.
I've seen those videos. You have to be kidding if that's sufficient evidence to say they are being shipped off to Chinese black camps. As for the alleged rapes - the evidence is even more lacking. The primary source used is a facebook account using a pseudonym who claims he's an emergency doctor who then says he "swears" that he's telling the truth.
Everyone needs to be held to a basic standard of logic and scrutiny, not a double standard simply because one might agree with the ideals of a group. There are numerous ludicrous claims on the government and police side. But the same stands for protesters as well.
That massage joint is quite popular with HK locals. We cross the border and get hotpot and cheap (legitimate) massages. I've been there for a few times. Most of the masseuses are middle aged men and women.
No, there isn't. Look at https://twitter.com/osinthk, they do a really good job getting to the bottom of this stuff.
Cheng was not abducted to the mainland; he was arrested on the mainland side of the boundary crossing at the high-speed rail station in Kowloon, coming back from Shenzhen. The fact that there's a border crossing in downtown Hong Kong is its own issue, but his case can't be called an abduction (unlike the case of the booksellers a few years ago).
Anyway, please stop spreading falsehoods, there's enough of that going around.
The claim upstream for which there's no evidence: > "people being shipped off in train cars reminiscent of pre-WWII photos that I have only learned about in school."
There's a difference between one person getting arrested and mass deportation. One should be able to criticize the former without falsely claiming that it's the latter.
This is correct and I appreciate that but even though he was on the chinese side of west kowloon hsr many would still consider it something of an abduction.
Even clarifying to people he hadn't made it across the border yet, it still feels different than if he was picked up in Shenzhen.
HK has been in a bad economic situation for many years. Without mainland China's support, it's even worse. The tension in the HK society is at the breaking point. Young generation has less opportunities to improve their life quality.
People who support CCP believe that it is the greedy capitalism caused the problem. Implementation of the CCP regime can rebuild HK. People who support democracy believe that it is the CCP iron fist caused suffocating.
No one is backing down. It ended up with a civil war.
Humans repeat their mistakes generation after generation.
Economically, a lot of businesses profit from mainland Chinese tourists (some mainly thanks to them). Reduced travel in light of this year’s events has caused a serious drop in sales of luxury products, for example.
Yesterday I talked about just that with an HKer who works in marketing. Democracy supporters acknowledge that this trend is hurting the economy, though on bright side they welcome businesses starting to target local long-term customers more.
The number of restaurants and bars I see closing on an almost daily basis is getting sad. My friends in the F&B industry here confirm that they're hurting. Bad.
Hospitality is hit even harder with hotels at 30% occupancy and many having to offer rates at 50% or higher discounts, and having to lay off staff.
HK has been over-reliant on these businesses to provide employment for a long time. Most of the F&B outfits that are closing are fly by night outfits which would only work when everyone in CBD has more money than sense. It will be a good thing if this leads to us diversifying our economy a bit more.
Hong Kong imports a lot from the mainland: food, energy, water... of course those don't come for free and Hong Kong is simply able to pay more than other cities in the region. In 2009, the Hong Kong government offered to reduce water consumption when Guangdong was hit by a drought, but that offer was rejected, probably because selling the water to Hong Kong was so much more profitable.
So it's not exactly altruistic support, but the economic entanglement means that if the mainland decided to embargo Hong Kong, the effect would be devastating.
>Without mainland China's support, it's even worse.
The Mainland hasn't been supporting Hong Kong as much as taking it over and adding to it's historic role as a gateway for FDI into China, it is now using it as a gateway for businessmen and CCP to ship money out of China into safe assets (into Hong Kong and overseas).
What the CCP has done to Hong Kong is basically neocolonialism.
The hopeless situation of Carrie Lam fronting the CCP and having to execute its policy, is what drove Hong Kong into the people's revolution of 2019. Under the CCP, local administrators do not need ideas, just obedience. Carrie Lam's misfortune was to be sandwiched between the increasing paranoia of Xi Jin Ping, and the increasing rebelliousness of HKers, and she has no strategy to resolve the two forces.
Except she could have chosen to take the HKer's side. She is after all a HK citizen and its representative even without true election. Seven million rebels can parallelize a city, but pissing off a few thousand bureaucrats in the politburo simply leads to tantrums and rhetorics. If she had done that, HK's economy would not have stalled, HKers would rally behind her, and the whole Two System debate could be channelled into a consultation process that can remain civil and reasonable.
HKers will not forgive her for her missteps and police brutality that led to thousands of arrested and hundreds of maimed/injured/raped/dead. That will always be her legacy.
But HKers can thank her incompetence for triggering the nationalistic feeling of a Hongkonger. The city of immigrants and world refugees has never been so clearly in sync, and the common enemy so in focus.
An important aspect of leadership is the courage to do the right thing, even at risk to one's own personal comfort and safety. In light of facts, you could make the argument that either she doesn't believe in the importance of sovereignty for her fellow citizens, or she doesn't have the courage to speak up for it.
No, she would not have been disappeared. Hong Kong is not a society where senior public figures and family members are purged for stepping out of line.
But let's say you believe that dark scenario. In that case, even small gestures, like visiting a school or hospital, or not calling protesters "enemies of the people", would have been a sign of sympathy.
She chose to visit injured police officers and broken Octopus machines (turnstiles in the local metro) instead of victims of police brutality.
She did visit the local mosque to apologize when the police blasted it with tainted water, after she was called out on it. She did not visit nor apologize to local churchs which experienced worse behavior.
She simply refuses to learn what Hong Kongers truly think of her. The district elections were a stinging rebuke to her administration, yet she believes that she is right.
We Hong Kongers will remember her and her cronies forever, in the same way we remember the June 4th crackdown.
Hong Kong isn't a people's revolution. There are contradicting forces operating within the protesters, and if they succeed (which of course I hope they do), the people will soon realize that they've swapped out one master for another.
And what other master is comparable (in demonstrated authoritarianism, number of tanks, willingness to roll said tanks, etc...) to the Chinese communist party?
If you believe the CIA is behind this via Jimmy Lai and others, as many Mainlanders do, you should actually talk to some protestors. This is purely local.
You say Carrie Lam isn't fronting the CCP and executing their policy, but she says her options are "very, very, very limited":
> “But, of course, I’m sure in your hearts you will feel, and I’m sure a large number of people feel that I do have a solution, that is a political one. But I have to tell you that this is where the crux of the matter lies."
> “Once an issue has been elevated to the situation [name redacted], to a national level, to a sort of sovereignty and security level, let alone in the midst of this sort of unprecedented tension between the two big economies in the world.
> “The room, the political room for the Chief Executive who, unfortunately, has to serve two masters by constitution, that is the central people’s government and the people of Hong Kong, that political room for manoeuvering is very, very, very limited."
Assuming she was being honest (no reason not to, given this was a private meeting behind closed doors), if she has no political power of her own, how is she not executing CCP policy?
She initiated the extradition bill, presumably with approval from Beijing, in response to a high-profile murder case that she thought would make it pass easily. I don't see how the comments you quote here contradict that.
Also, I would take what Carrie Lam says here (and anywhere) with a grain of salt.
Gee, how do we fix Hong Kong? Oh, how will we ever fix Hong Kong?
It's like hey, maybe if it didn't represent a choice between mandatory abortions and sterilization, or not, this wouldn't be such a big deal.
But you put that on the table, and now people consider laying their life on the line, no big deal.
If push comes to shove, a forced abortion or mandatory sterilization will put anyone in the mood for some unceremonious destruction, burn victims and brain damage, no contest. No negotiations. Sane people don't knowingly acquiesce to those kinds of laws.
What could any government possibly offer, and realistically deliver, in exchange for the general freedom to reproduce?
As an ABC who currently lives in HK but has no ties to Asia (born and raised in the US) and has no personal interest in what's happening in HK, what I observe is a global increase in pace of change affecting this generation across the entire world, with drastically different results per region / body of people based on their current economic, cultural, and political positions.
I think earthquakes are a good illustration of what's happening. Energy that builds up, friction developed between tectonic plates that gets released, either violently or smoothly, with varying levels of impact depending on the geological conditions surrounding it.
In the US, I mostly agree with the high level view that Andrew Yang ascribes (which is actually just the technocrat doom and gloom point of view) - economic changes that created waves of discontent, with an unconscious realization that problems have become too big for individuals alone to deal with, demanding escalation to the government level to solve, bringing in a feeling that we need something radically different (Trump) to handle the observed radical differences that the 21st century world is bringing in.
In Asia, the socio-economic changes that are happening are the same as the US, except instead of having the strongest economy in the world with a wealth of resources, education, a progressive history and lots of national-level experience in dealing with shocking changes, you have... exactly what you see in HK. Asian culture, stemming from confucian values, encourage and promote people to power who like to keep things the same way and discourage adaptation (harmony in society is defined as minimizing conflict which usually means not rocking the boat).
While the US (at least compared to other countries) has a system in place that can handle mistakes, has a rich history of how to handle change and how to properly push for progressive value shifts, the whole of Asia lacks all of that experience as a culture. What you have is a bunch of the older generation who are used to the old way of doing things, and see the world more similar to the godfather era rather than modern society. The rest of society has a value to not rock the boat and to care for outward harmony over bring up legitimate issues. This yields an environment where people are just not "trained for change". The actions that the current Asian political powers are taking look primitive to anyone who has lived in modern society and has observed how progressive shifts actually take place (and many have taken place over the last 5-10 years).
It will be very interesting to see how Asia adapts because modern society isn't going anywhere, it's actually speeding up and clashing more and more with how the older generation wants things to be.
Living in HK the last few months has been frustrating for me, primarily because of growing spread of misinformation and the untrustworthy reporting on the situation. It's getting hard to know what information to believe, and that's even for myself living here, who has seen all of it from my own eyes. How could you expect anyone reading the news or social media from a foreign country to be reacting to valid information?
The western media is making it sound like Hong Kong is Syria. Protester private channels makes wild unfounded claims about mass-scale executions and rapes. Chinese media makes it sound like HK is under siege by terrorists. SCMP's reporting is increasingly suspiciously lacking and pro-establishment. The government is entirely untrustworthy and straight up lying about everything and anything.
There are a few people doing good work (e.g. OSINT HK), but it's not enough to rise about the noise drowning it all out.
Of course the real situation is more nuanced. It's also all entirely pointless, with no hope for de-escalation or positive resolution.
That said, it's also not nearly as dramatic and disrupting to daily life as you'd expect. Living in HK is still far safer than in downtown San Francisco (or anywhere in the US for that matter). For those wishing to stay out of it, avoiding protests is fairly easy (I mean — unless you live in Mong Kong or Prince Edward). The handful of times I ended up right in the middle of it, nobody really cared to bother any bystanders.
The government seems to be on a mission to do anything in its power to make things worse, from repeatedly escalating the situation through violence, inflammatory policy, and generally being a party-pooper and cancelling all ordinary celebrations (e.g. Halloween).
Today, walking down the street in Sai Ying Pun, I observed workers replacing the wooden paneling they've been installing in front of the mainland Chinese banks to protect them from the thrashings with welded metal paneling. It was somewhat of a sign that they're getting ready for this to continue in the long term.
On the question of how to get reliable reporting from Hong Kong, the answer is Twitter! I've been keeping a list of great local reporters tweeting in English from on the scene. Many of them also write for established news outlets, but the tweets are more timely and very often more nuanced: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/lists/hong-kong
And while their reports don't "make it sound like Hong Kong is Syria" they do sound pretty bad, with reports about police behavior including widespread beatings and denial of access to council and medical care, arrest of human rights monitors, and in some cases shootings, vehicular assaults, torture, and sexual assault.
Man-Kei Tam, Director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, said:
“These are not policing measures – these are officers out of control with a mindset of retaliation.”
Joshua Rosenzweig, Head of Amnesty International’s East Asia Regional Office, said:
“Rather than deescalating the situation, Hong Kong’s authorities have chosen to grant themselves sweeping new powers to quash protests, demonstrating the extent of their growing intolerance for freedom of peaceful assembly,”
And Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia Director at Amnesty International, said
“The evidence leaves little room for doubt – in an apparent thirst for retaliation, Hong Kong’s security forces have engaged in a disturbing pattern of reckless and unlawful tactics against people during the protests.”
That sounds similar to what I've heard in western media.
>It's also all entirely pointless, with no hope for de-escalation or positive resolution.
That's making a pretty bold assumption that we can see all possible or likely outcomes. As with most of history, the flow of events carves it's own course, with developments surprising contemporary onlookers and only becoming obvious through hindsight.
> Western media is making it sound like Hong Kong is Syria. Protester private channels makes wild unfounded claims about mass-scale executions and rapes.
Yes, I was going to say I never got this impression listening to NPR.
>> The western media is making it sound like Hong Kong is Syria.
This comment struck me as odd, especially in this particular context. Have you lived in Syria also, or is your impression based on western media reports?
James Palmer writing in August in Foreign Policy gives what is the consensus view among journalists in Hong Kong:
"Analysts generally believe that the bill was the initiative of Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, not a measure suggested or strongly pushed from Beijing. Lam may have been aiming to please the Chinese authorities and strengthen her position, or it may have been an attempt to put a formal procedure in place in order to circumvent the Chinese authorities from simply kidnapping Hong Kongers."
Thanks, my impression was that Beijing tried to quickly capitalize on an opportunity that presented itself with the Taiwan murder - if this is really Lam's own doing then the level of either stupidity or self-dealing is staggering.
The CCP is probably content to let the HK situation continue to fester. The economic role of HK relative to the PRC will continue to wane. HK will continue to be portrayed as an object lesson in the dysfunction of democracy. The CCP can assert control whenever it needs to by simply turning off the water and electrical supply.
It's really sad to say but a vicious fight, even with no endgame seems to be the only sensible move for the Hong Kong people at this point.
At least, if they get pummeled, in the end, it will be extremely clear that whatever happened was not consensual and will set them up to fight another round down the line.
97 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadDoes China have anything to loose with an independent inquiry into police violence ?
The Hong Kong situation is still quite baffling. I initially thought that the emotional motivation was independence. But it seems like that’s not the crux of the issue
CLam is clearly under the duress of the CCP - and not just for the simplistic reasons of her maintaining her own face/position/power/etc...
She is the lynchpin of CCP control in HK.
So, lets assume she caves to the protesters... (wont happen), she would wreak the ire of the CCP - and obv, she is as much of a leach oligarch as the rest - so she clearly cant choose the cup in front of her.
Now, if she were to take the strong arm of the CCP against the protesters, she would wreak the havoc of the international sanction prospects of the world abroad.
So she clearly cannot choose the cup in front of you...
What she does know is that the global authoritarian regimes have spent the last few years building an immunity to Protester-Murder Requiring-Protester-Backlash-in-the-face-of-economic-and-geo-political-gains.
Thuggery is not a new thing, common to all crime families is a "protection" for the foot soldiers. If a foot soldier messes up the boss takes responsibility, admonishes the criminal, and the criminal is thankful for getting off without justice. We see this common behaviour in the American mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, and currupt police departments, and clearly China's Hong Kong occupiers.
More like autonomy: apparently Hong Kong citizens don't mind being part of China as long as they can keep their self-governance.
And that ties in to your question:
> Does China have anything to loose with an independent inquiry into police violence ?
Such an inquiry would emphasize HK's autonomy (and also paint government as potentially fallible, something the party doesn't like to see discussed). On the other hand: does China have anything to win with such an inquiry? I can't see anything (there are four more demands and giving in on this would likely increase support for demanding the rest), so for them it's all risk and no gain.
So they don't mind being a part of China so long as they aren't actually a part of China. I can't blame them either, the current system has worked out well for the island, and China's internal polices have not had quite as much success on the mainland.
But Chinese officials were pretty clear from the start that they intended to integrated HK eventually and that the semi-detached existence was only temporary. They see this as inevitable and the HL population is just dragging their heels on something that has to happen in the end.
Instead China is implementing totalitarianism on a first world region and the Cantonese hate it.
- cause PRC citizens to also start demanding accountability
- cause nationalistic protests about kowtowing to what was described as terrorists
EDIT: It's worth pointing out that this is why Ecuador gave Assange asylum: it was clear that the UK and US legal systems were being politically corrupted. The political corruption of the legal system is just much more systematic in China.
The issue with the current HK government at the end of the day is that Carrie Lam is a second rate administrator and is wildly unqualified for handling the current situation in HK. Worse yet, she has one of the worst cabinets / teams ever assembled (you would need to be familiar with local HK politics to know this). In other words, HK couldn't have had a worse group to lead the city at this point in time.
Having said that, Carrie is completely reliant on the police force at this stage. There is no way she agrees to an independent inquiry or any major moves against the police. At least not right now.
I'd say that the independent inquriy may be something that can be compromised on at some point. But universal suffrage is out of the question, and demands 3 and 4 would never be accepted by the rest of Hong Kong nor would any reasonable person accept it given what has taken place since the original protests. In fact one of the key issues is that "the protest" isn't just one unified movement that has been moving forward since its inception.
It's pretty clear that there is an attempt to paint a disconnect between HK China and Mainland China
- nowhere did I state issues in HK are internal to HK only. There's obvious influence by interested parties outside of HK as well.
- HK is under the CCP. Of course there's influence. I never stated this either. I stated that the influence is much less than what media would like you to belive.
- I specifically stated that 2 of the demands are unreasonable, and a third will never be tolerated by the CCP. The protest movement certainly isn't a united cause for Hong Kong as a whole. That's what I stated. Even in the recent local elections the pro-protest candidates garnered on average less than 60% of the votes despite record turn out on their side.
- There indeed is no hard and credible evidence that people are being deported out of HK into China. That's what I stated. I did not state that none have been assaulted by government forces.
" personal attacks are being aimed at witnesses of events that contradict this story"
umm...what personal attacks? Do you even know that the evidence of an emergency doctor saying the rapes occurred is by a "Dr. Ray" on Facebook? He also wrote in Chinese that his evidence is that "if he is lying, may the people and heavens judge him". Unfortunately most people buying into the claim don't read Chinese.
Now that I've pointed out your completely unbased claims and obvious disingenuity and lack of integrity, perhaps you want to provide evidence of claims to the contrary rather than your illogical rabble.
*yes I'm a brand new account. I usually only read posts here, but I'm from HK and it's an issue close to heart. I'm sick of the misrepresentation of what's actually happening being reinforced by people who have very little knowledge of Hong Kong if they have even ever visited or lived there at all.
The actions of a new participant in an online community can often be judged by what new information they contribute and whether their comments are are comprehensive and covers the entirety of the issue or whether they selectively concentrate on distractions and unimportant trivia.
If you have knowledge then share it. If you have links then share them. If you're just here to say that there is no evidence other than the videos that we've seen then you'll probably be judged as a troll.
I'm afraid you violated HN's guidelines egregiously. They include the following, for extremely good reason: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
An account that happens to be new and happens to disagree with your view doesn't come anywhere close to clearing the bar for evidence that they are not "a real person" or are abusing HN. Internet users are far, far too quick to jump to bad-faith conclusions and then take their own imagination as a basis for attacking others. That's not cool and not allowed on HN.
If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com, as the guidelines ask, so we can investigate. What you can't do is jump to smear other users. I know it's a popular internet blood sport in lots of places, but it's possibly the single most toxic thing that users do on HN, leading to flamewars, extremely low-quality 'discussion', and outright harm to others (see the examples below). Please don't do it again.
Real abuse by sockpuppets and so on exists, but on political topics we've seen extremely little of it on HN (basically zero, in fact), and I've personally spent countless hours investigating these things. Overwhelmingly the more common abuse is users posting accusations and insinuations to poison the discussion against someone whose comments they dislike. This is harmful. Innocent people, unfortunately, have been hounded out of this community this way, and some Chinese users have been treated shamefully here. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. Another example, which fortunately didn't have the effect of driving the user away: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21194472
I'm sure that's not who you want to be or the kind of community you want to be part of. In order to prevent HN from succumbing to that ugliness, we need every user to be mindful of the difference between imagination and evidence, and not allow our strong feelings on a topic to confuse the one for the other. It's perfectly common and legitimate for a reader who hasn't posted to HN before, to create an account when they run across a topic to which they're personally connected. All evidence is that this was the case with battleangle.
HN is a highly international community, and people across the world have very different perspectives on any issue, China-related or not. If we can't receive their contributions thoughtfully, and instead drive them out of town, we've not only done a shameful thing to another human being—we've deprived ourselves of an external perspective that we could have learned from. Let's not allow our strongly-felt views, which were formed in our own very specific personal and cultural and political context, to make us intolerant to people who simply have a very different background than we do.
There's plenty of previous explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
I'm interested in your source for this, do you have an English language source?
I haven't seen any results per candidate, and I don't have a proper understanding of how local HK elections work, but according to SCMP:
> Among the 452 seats up for grabs, the pan-democrats were victorious in 347, the independents – many of them pro-democracy – won 45, while the pro-establishment camp had to make do with 60. [1]
Sounds like a pretty clear victory to me. If the elections are anything like my local elections such a result would be considered a landslide victory.
1: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3039151...
Seats were divided like this: Pro-democrats (81.00%), Pro-Beijing (18.58%), Non-aligned others (0.42%)
Looks like some democratic reform is in order even if HK is able to gain universal suffrage and keep the one-country two-systems indefinitely.
The fact that Carrie Lam and her cabinet are extremely incompetent is what most HKers think.
HK protesters not being united and being multiple groups is a fact.
Out of the five demands, there are quite a few people in Hong Kong who don't necessarily agree with demand 2 and 3 about the riots. So he is right there. Those are the more controversial demands and not everyone in HK agrees with them.
He's also right that Carrie Lam cannot currently agree to demand 4 and form an independent committee
He also didn't say there was no influence by the CCP on HK issues.
So his post reflect an opinion that a non-small percentage of HKers share.
Why wouldn't any reasonable person accept an independent inquiry into police brutality? That doesn't sound very reasonable to me.
In addition, China is happy to let Carrie and HK stumble...to a certain extent of course. But they truly have been very hands off on the HK protests. I think it's worth noting that China is perfectly fine with HK getting burned by itself just as long certain lines aren't crossed (independence, violence against PLA, etc.). They weren't worried about losing HK when it was under British colonial rule, they certainly aren't worried now.
Furthermore, things really aren't that bad considering how the media has been reporting HK. It's still an extremely well-to-do city and life goes on in most parts.
Plenty of atrocities committed - people being shipped off in train cars reminiscent of pre-WWII photos that I have only learned about in school.
Best wishes.
[EDIT] I agree I should have said alleged atrocities. Sadly, hardly anyone left in HK is impartial but hopefully independent enough investigations are opened.
To the trains - I was referring to this I saw a few weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dxz3xd/transporti...
It is not a good look loading anyone in trains who is captive. True, we don't know where they're headed, could be fine - it's a bad look given the situation.
There is absolutely no corroborated evidence whatsoever that this happened. Just like the alleged rapes. I'm not saying that these things did not happen, but absolutely no credible evidence on these claims up until now.
There is video and photo evidence from multiple sources on Twitter. There have been extensive reports of victims like British consulate worker Simon Cheng being abducted to the mainland and being tortured. Obviously there wont be any "corroboration" from the PRC state security agency or police...
Did you even see his interview with the BBC? Legally would not say anything about his hiring of prostitutes. No medical evience of the torture he claimed. The only hard evidence that was provided were CCTV tapes of him going into local massage joint. You would think that if he didn't obtain the services of sex workers he would come out and say it. Interesting that the British also let him go.
I've seen those videos. You have to be kidding if that's sufficient evidence to say they are being shipped off to Chinese black camps. As for the alleged rapes - the evidence is even more lacking. The primary source used is a facebook account using a pseudonym who claims he's an emergency doctor who then says he "swears" that he's telling the truth.
Everyone needs to be held to a basic standard of logic and scrutiny, not a double standard simply because one might agree with the ideals of a group. There are numerous ludicrous claims on the government and police side. But the same stands for protesters as well.
provided by who? Would Chinese authorities provide evidence against themselves?
Cheng was not abducted to the mainland; he was arrested on the mainland side of the boundary crossing at the high-speed rail station in Kowloon, coming back from Shenzhen. The fact that there's a border crossing in downtown Hong Kong is its own issue, but his case can't be called an abduction (unlike the case of the booksellers a few years ago).
Anyway, please stop spreading falsehoods, there's enough of that going around.
There's a difference between one person getting arrested and mass deportation. One should be able to criticize the former without falsely claiming that it's the latter.
Even clarifying to people he hadn't made it across the border yet, it still feels different than if he was picked up in Shenzhen.
People who support CCP believe that it is the greedy capitalism caused the problem. Implementation of the CCP regime can rebuild HK. People who support democracy believe that it is the CCP iron fist caused suffocating.
No one is backing down. It ended up with a civil war.
Humans repeat their mistakes generation after generation.
Yesterday I talked about just that with an HKer who works in marketing. Democracy supporters acknowledge that this trend is hurting the economy, though on bright side they welcome businesses starting to target local long-term customers more.
The number of restaurants and bars I see closing on an almost daily basis is getting sad. My friends in the F&B industry here confirm that they're hurting. Bad.
Hospitality is hit even harder with hotels at 30% occupancy and many having to offer rates at 50% or higher discounts, and having to lay off staff.
If the CCP had let HK be autonomous as they agreed this wouldn't have happened.
So it's not exactly altruistic support, but the economic entanglement means that if the mainland decided to embargo Hong Kong, the effect would be devastating.
The Mainland hasn't been supporting Hong Kong as much as taking it over and adding to it's historic role as a gateway for FDI into China, it is now using it as a gateway for businessmen and CCP to ship money out of China into safe assets (into Hong Kong and overseas).
What the CCP has done to Hong Kong is basically neocolonialism.
Except she could have chosen to take the HKer's side. She is after all a HK citizen and its representative even without true election. Seven million rebels can parallelize a city, but pissing off a few thousand bureaucrats in the politburo simply leads to tantrums and rhetorics. If she had done that, HK's economy would not have stalled, HKers would rally behind her, and the whole Two System debate could be channelled into a consultation process that can remain civil and reasonable.
HKers will not forgive her for her missteps and police brutality that led to thousands of arrested and hundreds of maimed/injured/raped/dead. That will always be her legacy.
But HKers can thank her incompetence for triggering the nationalistic feeling of a Hongkonger. The city of immigrants and world refugees has never been so clearly in sync, and the common enemy so in focus.
Could she ? Wouldn’t she have been "disappeared" as well as her family ?
Not trying to excuse anything of course, she chose her side a long time ago, but still…
But let's say you believe that dark scenario. In that case, even small gestures, like visiting a school or hospital, or not calling protesters "enemies of the people", would have been a sign of sympathy.
She did visit the local mosque to apologize when the police blasted it with tainted water, after she was called out on it. She did not visit nor apologize to local churchs which experienced worse behavior.
She simply refuses to learn what Hong Kongers truly think of her. The district elections were a stinging rebuke to her administration, yet she believes that she is right.
We Hong Kongers will remember her and her cronies forever, in the same way we remember the June 4th crackdown.
China is, and Hong Kong is part of China. This is the root of the entire problem.
If she decided to "make Beijing happy", then what's the endgame?
She thought this was going to end well? And she was going to get rewarded by the CCP?
Any large movement has divisions within it with different priorities.
Interesting part of the article is that it says different. Carrie Lam initiated the crisis on her own without instructions from Beijing.
Lam's own leaked statements say otherwise [1].
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3025579...
> “But, of course, I’m sure in your hearts you will feel, and I’m sure a large number of people feel that I do have a solution, that is a political one. But I have to tell you that this is where the crux of the matter lies."
> “Once an issue has been elevated to the situation [name redacted], to a national level, to a sort of sovereignty and security level, let alone in the midst of this sort of unprecedented tension between the two big economies in the world.
> “The room, the political room for the Chief Executive who, unfortunately, has to serve two masters by constitution, that is the central people’s government and the people of Hong Kong, that political room for manoeuvering is very, very, very limited."
Assuming she was being honest (no reason not to, given this was a private meeting behind closed doors), if she has no political power of her own, how is she not executing CCP policy?
Also, I would take what Carrie Lam says here (and anywhere) with a grain of salt.
I don't say anything. I refer to the specifics mentioned in the article.
It's like hey, maybe if it didn't represent a choice between mandatory abortions and sterilization, or not, this wouldn't be such a big deal.
But you put that on the table, and now people consider laying their life on the line, no big deal.
If push comes to shove, a forced abortion or mandatory sterilization will put anyone in the mood for some unceremonious destruction, burn victims and brain damage, no contest. No negotiations. Sane people don't knowingly acquiesce to those kinds of laws.
What could any government possibly offer, and realistically deliver, in exchange for the general freedom to reproduce?
Probably only one thing: the barrel of a gun.
I think earthquakes are a good illustration of what's happening. Energy that builds up, friction developed between tectonic plates that gets released, either violently or smoothly, with varying levels of impact depending on the geological conditions surrounding it.
In the US, I mostly agree with the high level view that Andrew Yang ascribes (which is actually just the technocrat doom and gloom point of view) - economic changes that created waves of discontent, with an unconscious realization that problems have become too big for individuals alone to deal with, demanding escalation to the government level to solve, bringing in a feeling that we need something radically different (Trump) to handle the observed radical differences that the 21st century world is bringing in.
In Asia, the socio-economic changes that are happening are the same as the US, except instead of having the strongest economy in the world with a wealth of resources, education, a progressive history and lots of national-level experience in dealing with shocking changes, you have... exactly what you see in HK. Asian culture, stemming from confucian values, encourage and promote people to power who like to keep things the same way and discourage adaptation (harmony in society is defined as minimizing conflict which usually means not rocking the boat).
While the US (at least compared to other countries) has a system in place that can handle mistakes, has a rich history of how to handle change and how to properly push for progressive value shifts, the whole of Asia lacks all of that experience as a culture. What you have is a bunch of the older generation who are used to the old way of doing things, and see the world more similar to the godfather era rather than modern society. The rest of society has a value to not rock the boat and to care for outward harmony over bring up legitimate issues. This yields an environment where people are just not "trained for change". The actions that the current Asian political powers are taking look primitive to anyone who has lived in modern society and has observed how progressive shifts actually take place (and many have taken place over the last 5-10 years).
It will be very interesting to see how Asia adapts because modern society isn't going anywhere, it's actually speeding up and clashing more and more with how the older generation wants things to be.
ABC?
Living in HK the last few months has been frustrating for me, primarily because of growing spread of misinformation and the untrustworthy reporting on the situation. It's getting hard to know what information to believe, and that's even for myself living here, who has seen all of it from my own eyes. How could you expect anyone reading the news or social media from a foreign country to be reacting to valid information?
The western media is making it sound like Hong Kong is Syria. Protester private channels makes wild unfounded claims about mass-scale executions and rapes. Chinese media makes it sound like HK is under siege by terrorists. SCMP's reporting is increasingly suspiciously lacking and pro-establishment. The government is entirely untrustworthy and straight up lying about everything and anything.
There are a few people doing good work (e.g. OSINT HK), but it's not enough to rise about the noise drowning it all out.
Of course the real situation is more nuanced. It's also all entirely pointless, with no hope for de-escalation or positive resolution.
That said, it's also not nearly as dramatic and disrupting to daily life as you'd expect. Living in HK is still far safer than in downtown San Francisco (or anywhere in the US for that matter). For those wishing to stay out of it, avoiding protests is fairly easy (I mean — unless you live in Mong Kong or Prince Edward). The handful of times I ended up right in the middle of it, nobody really cared to bother any bystanders.
The government seems to be on a mission to do anything in its power to make things worse, from repeatedly escalating the situation through violence, inflammatory policy, and generally being a party-pooper and cancelling all ordinary celebrations (e.g. Halloween).
Today, walking down the street in Sai Ying Pun, I observed workers replacing the wooden paneling they've been installing in front of the mainland Chinese banks to protect them from the thrashings with welded metal paneling. It was somewhat of a sign that they're getting ready for this to continue in the long term.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/search/?country=38361
And while their reports don't "make it sound like Hong Kong is Syria" they do sound pretty bad, with reports about police behavior including widespread beatings and denial of access to council and medical care, arrest of human rights monitors, and in some cases shootings, vehicular assaults, torture, and sexual assault.
Man-Kei Tam, Director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, said:
“These are not policing measures – these are officers out of control with a mindset of retaliation.”
Joshua Rosenzweig, Head of Amnesty International’s East Asia Regional Office, said:
“Rather than deescalating the situation, Hong Kong’s authorities have chosen to grant themselves sweeping new powers to quash protests, demonstrating the extent of their growing intolerance for freedom of peaceful assembly,”
And Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia Director at Amnesty International, said
“The evidence leaves little room for doubt – in an apparent thirst for retaliation, Hong Kong’s security forces have engaged in a disturbing pattern of reckless and unlawful tactics against people during the protests.”
That sounds similar to what I've heard in western media.
That's making a pretty bold assumption that we can see all possible or likely outcomes. As with most of history, the flow of events carves it's own course, with developments surprising contemporary onlookers and only becoming obvious through hindsight.
Yes, I was going to say I never got this impression listening to NPR.
https://www.npr.org/tags/352993831/hong-kong-protests
This comment struck me as odd, especially in this particular context. Have you lived in Syria also, or is your impression based on western media reports?
"Analysts generally believe that the bill was the initiative of Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, not a measure suggested or strongly pushed from Beijing. Lam may have been aiming to please the Chinese authorities and strengthen her position, or it may have been an attempt to put a formal procedure in place in order to circumvent the Chinese authorities from simply kidnapping Hong Kongers."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/03/why-is-hong-kong-erupti...
At least, if they get pummeled, in the end, it will be extremely clear that whatever happened was not consensual and will set them up to fight another round down the line.