I wonder if the ubiquity of technology will give the Chinese government pause before doing another Tiananmen massacre.
In 1989 video, while definitely not unexistent, was relatively rare if compared to now. And distributing video within or out of the country was much more difficult.
If the tanks roll there’ll be livestreams from a 100 different vantage points and recorded video from tens or even hundreds of thousands.
It’ll be a very bad sign if China tries to cut off Hong Kong from internet access.
Up to now Hong Kong has been outside the Great Firewall; free speech and internet access is part of Hong Kong’s special privileges. A common way of bypassing the Firewall was to VPN to Hong Kong.
But you’re right: there’s no technical reason preventing them from extending the Great Firewall to Hong Kong or shutting down access.
Only to a degree… they could make it difficult to get livestreams out during the event, but it’d be very difficult to entirely shut down all outflow of information. Even inside China, China does not have absolute control over access to the outside internet.
China has absolutely been terrible through the Administrations of several Presidents. Russia absolutely pushed boundaries during the Obama Presidency.
What is different now is that with Trump (and the new GOP) in charge, there is ZERO push back. Trump’s ridiculous anti-China rhetoric is all trade-based, and his tariffs are doing more harm to America than China. China is happy to let him wage his ridiculous trade war if it means America looks the other way while China crushes Hong Kong. Worse, as mentioned above, Trump is now aping the Chinese government stance that Hong Kong’s protestors are terrorists, with all that implies. He’s doing this because he sees the opportunity to set the same narrative here in the US, branding anyone protesting against his Administration as terrorists. By the same token, Trump and the GOP have been relentlessly pushing the narrative that Russian interference in the 2016 election was minimal and blocking any efforts to actually secure the 2020 election from such interference. The reason why should be obvious. ZERO push back.
So yes, the blame for what’s happening in Hong Kong lies completely with China, but it is also correct to blame the Trump Administration for it’s complete lack of condemnation of what is happening there, or even any response at all really. Such non-interference on the part of the United States essentially emboldens China and will only lead to more strife in Hong Kong. We are failing Hong Kong and the World by our inaction, and THAT is most definitely the fault of Trump.
China WILL probably shut down internet and mobile access as it’s part of the game regimes have been doing lately, see Kashmir as an example. It isn’t just to slow the outflow of information, it’s to limit the ability of protesters to organize and relay information among themselves.
So apparently the protesters zip tied up a journalist thinking it was a Chinese spy - but it really was just a journalist. This is not how you win hearts :(
If it’s the same news story being reported, they also beat the hell out of him while tied up. Also not good.
This is from the WSJ, so filter as necessary:
HONG KONG—Police clashed with protesters at Hong Kong’s international airport late Tuesday, capping a second day of snarled travel plans with a bout of violence.
Tensions mounted after demonstrators seized a man they suspected was an undercover police officer. Witnesses said he was beaten and tied, unconscious, to a luggage trolley. Paramedics struggled to extract him from the crowd.
…
The mood turned uglier in the evening as protesters turned on a young man among them whom they suspected of being an undercover police officer from Hong Kong or mainland China.
Protesters searched his pockets and said they found a identification card from mainland China. They said they found a name matching the one on the card in an online database of police officers in Shenzhen, a city that borders Hong Kong.
At one point, some protesters suggested they would let the man go but others dissented. A handful of airport officials attempted to intervene but were rebuffed. A small group of protesters tied the man up and shuffled him around the stiflingly hot airport hall for three hours, chanting “Bear the consequences.”
Witnesses said he was beaten and tied, unconscious, to a luggage trolley. Paramedics and a firefighter tried to wheel him to an ambulance but were frustrated by protesters. Eventually they were able to work their way through the crowd over the course of several hours and get the man into an ambulance.
Note that all of this could have been planned to sway mainland China opinion as well against the protesters.
Eh, I’m pretty sure I was watching this when it was occuring, and I didn’t see them beat the dude and leave him unconscious. I was trying to figure out what was happening though. Also, I had to stop watching after a bit, so I guess it’s possible it happened then.
It’s possible it didn’t happen in any way reported, and the news being filtered over is just that, filtered. Especially so with these protests, it’s hard for me to take anything as straight up facts. I’m very sure that China will come down hard on the protesters, and they will point the blame on the protests, like now, calling them terrorists.
The Chinese method of handling dissent is, to many of us, heavy-handed and oppressive at best; often, “vicious and reprehensible” comes closer to describing how Beijing reacts to challenges to central authority.
There is not much you can do about it in terms of actual practical impact on the ground, though. There’s simply no way to prevent the Chinese authorities from doing what they will do in the territories they operate in, any more than it would be possible for, say, the Russians to interfere with how the American border patrol handles immigrants or ICE handles raids (and no I’m not equating that necessarily with the Hong Kong police or whatever, not directly).
We could, and probably should, publicly criticize excessive use of force and violent repression of demonstrations, but even that gets a bit iffy considering our own record at home and abroad. When you add into that the deep history of Western interference in Chinese affairs, there’s precious little room for righteous indignation. While I loathed (and to some extent still loathe, though time has eased some of the feeling) G.H.W. Bush, I do agree that at the very least he was a savvy internationalist who understood how the game was played, and more importantly actually understood that there was a game, and that there were rules. I agree someone like that, or Clinton, or maybe even Obama, would be able to craft a response that would at the very least not exacerbate the problem.
Trump of course cannot/will not. He doesn’t understand or care about reality, nor does he really care about the people affected by the Chinese actions. It’s all a stage for him to strut on, and prance about.
It’s one thing that Trump doesn’t criticize. It’s quite another that he signaled to China that they can do what they want:
“Well, something is probably happening with Hong Kong because when you look at, you know, what’s going on, they’ve had riots for a long period of time," Trump told reporters at the time. “But that’s between Hong Kong and that’s between China, because Hong Kong is a part of China. They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.”
W. choked on a pretzel while watching a Ravens playoff game. He passed out and got a shiner. At least, that was the official story.
If he had died from the pretzel and Dick Cheney had become President, and history had unfolded in unknowable ways from there… would anyone prefer to hop over to that timeline?
Here’s another question. Great Britain returned Hong Kong to communist China in 1997 following the expiration of their 99-year lease. Would there ever have been the chance that they could have instead returned Hong Kong to the Republic of China: Taiwan? Taiwan had the better claim of being the original government that had leased Hong Kong to the Brits. But of course they, unlike China, had no hydrogen bombs or an enormous army.
