[colliric]

If you can kill them all then this single action worths much more than 1,000,000x words like this.

Possible this is an emergency services response(Security and other personel moving into the region to preempt), given a Typhoon(Warning level Eight) is headed towards the province. But in today's climate it appears terribly aggressive.

[JohnRawls]

Pretty good.

[Patrickov]

Update 2019-08-02 (late)

A compromise has been reached between protesters and the police for the arrangements of Saturday's (2019-08-03) march in Mong Kok, an important commercial area in Hong Kong. The rally is confined to the fringe of the region.

Another march is planned on Sunday (2019-08-04) in Tseung Kwan O, a new town which houses almost half a million people, but relatively far away from city centre.

Finally, a general strike is called on Monday (2019-08-05), with some even try to force the matter by calling for encircling of transportation facilities (like bus depots), so that other people cannot commute as well. AFAIK reactions are mixed on this one, and I suspect this single action might induce PLA intervention, which they have hinted on Thursday (2019-08-01). Still, media like the Guardian did not realize that Chinese organizations like to make exaggerated comments on their anniversaries (August 1 is the anniversary of PLA's establishment), so I think they might be overworrying things...

[colliric]

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/ ... 25813.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/worl ... trike.html

The General Strike is Hong Kong's first major strike since 1967.

Carrie Lam should resign.... Everyone knows it, but they won't do it. Stupid stubborn Beijing idiots should tell her to go.

Instead they're making idiotic threatening videos in which they're clearly "threatening" a June 4th Style military crackdown, even though everyone knows they're too chicken shit to go through with that, and this isn't Central Beijing like it was last-time.

[colliric]

https://www.asiaone.com/china/beijing-c ... w-flag-sea

Should have been burnt, pissed on and flushed down the toilet where it belongs.

But I guess we'll have to take tossing it into the sea like trash for now.

[colliric]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-06/ ... s/11388966

Hong Kong is basically being openly threatened with a declaration of Martial Law.

Of cause this will make things worse for the entire country and everyone knows it. But try telling that to Beijing who seem to be hellbent on reliving the "Glory Days of 1989".

[foxdemon]

I share a stirring article from an influential Australian. Quite frankly, it is about bloody time the Australian nation started standing up for the people of HK. The money grubbers have had too much say over China policy for too long.


https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/how-hong-kong-plays-out-will-define-both-china-and-our-world/

How Hong Kong plays out will define both China and our world
7 Aug 2019|Michael Shoebridge

The protests in Hong Kong started over CEO Carrie Lam’s extradition bill and have turned into a defining issue for the trajectory of China as a state and a society, and for the Chinese state’s relationships internationally.

What Carrie Lam does is important, but what President Xi Jinping orders to be done is definitive.

The protests are not, as Chinese state media likes to say, about ‘escalating violence by radicals’. Some 2 million out of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million people have taken part in the demonstrations—which makes this a mass expression of views, not the efforts of a ‘tiny number of radicals’.

Footage over the past two months has shown the world that the protesters come from all walks of life and all age groups. Professionals like air-traffic controllers, civil servants, construction workers, lawyers and finance workers have joined in strikes or other protest action, disrupting essential services. Their bravery in doing so should shame all of us who mutter about Xi’s state ‘punishing us’ by holding up wine shipments. John Howard’s recent comments about our fundamental democratic values, the effects of authoritarianism and the resilience of the human spirit on display in Hong Kong remind of us of what’s really at stake here.

The violence has been perpetrated by a mix of police action, dubious thugs and exasperated protesters. For the scale of the mass movement, though, the protests have been remarkably peaceful. That might change as Hong Kong authorities fail to engage with what is driving the protests and treat them as simply a public order problem and a challenge to their own and Beijing’s authority.

The protesters certainly want more from Lam than her condemning the protests and painting them as violent radicals. They want her to withdraw the extradition bill she has suspended and they want an independent public inquiry into police actions. They’ve also called for Lam’s resignation, an end to labelling the protests ‘riots’, and universal suffrage to elect the legislative council.

Most of all, though, what’s got millions of Hong Kong residents onto the streets and disrupting services is Beijing’s and Lam’s moving away from ‘one China, two systems’ towards Hong Kong being assimilated into authoritarian China’s one-party political and legal system. So it’s ironic to hear Chinese state media talking about the protests as endangering the ‘one China’ framework.

The protesters’ fundamental call is about preserving Hong Kong’s rule of law and expanding the people’s voices in how they are governed. They want more difference in the two systems, while Beijing wants to fast-track convergence.

What must be causing sleepless nights in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai compound is what to do from here. It’s not really about Hong Kong now, but about the future of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule of the multi-ethnic empire that makes up today’s China, and about the kind of relationship Xi’s state can have with other nations.

Handled badly, Hong Kong will ripple through China, further widening the unhealed wounds from Tiananmen and showing the repressive will and brutality of the CCP and its security organs. It will make clear to any doubtful Taiwanese that unification means assimilation and doesn’t mean Taiwan’s democracy becoming one of two systems. And it will make it even harder for advocates of uncritical, deepening engagement with China under Xi to look themselves in the mirror and be credible in public.

You can sense the anxiety about internal stability and unity in China’s latest national defence white paper. It’s like hearing someone desperately telling themselves things are fine when they know they are not: ‘China continues to enjoy political stability, ethnic unity and social stability.’ That’s why China’s expenditure on internal security forces is higher even than its expenditure on the People’s Liberation Army.

In this Beijing echo chamber, problems don’t flow from the CCP’s authoritarian rule, but instead come from surprising, isolated outbreaks of ‘separatist forces’, with ‘external separatist forces’ responsible for unrest in Tibet and ‘East Turkistan’. This pretence appears to be fooling no one but the party, those without a source of news other than Chinese state media, and the wilfully blind advocates of getting hold of as much of China’s wealth as they can. It’s certainly not fooling Chinese citizens in Xinjiang, Tibet or Hong Kong about the reality of Xi’s China Dream.

But Xi and his colleagues on the CCP’s central committee and the Central Military Commission, including defence minister General Wei Fenghe, don’t have many good options given the actions they and Lam have taken to date. Had it been delivered early in the protests, a gesture of withdrawing the extradition bill could have taken momentum out of what is now a mass movement.

Done now, concessions from Hong Kong’s authorities—like withdrawing the bill and announcing a public inquiry into the use of violence by police—might split off some of the protesters and so slow momentum. It would fit with the way the CCP tries elsewhere in China to use local actions to spot and neuter dissent before it grows.

Lam’s resignation might sound like an appropriate response; however, the immediate obvious problem is what happens next. Any candidate Beijing might produce to replace her would almost certainly bring protesters back out onto the streets. A popular public Hong Kong candidate would be unacceptable to Beijing. Lam will probably stay on as a shock absorber for dissent.

Voices like Wei’s won’t help. His remarkable dose of truthfulness at June’s Shangri-La Dialogue, when he said the Tiananmen Square massacre of unarmed Chinese youths and other citizens by the military at the party leadership’s direction was ‘correct policy’, shows adherence to the CCP and ‘Xi Jinping Thought’.

The temptation to intervene has to be there, just as proved to be the case in June 1989. Well-publicised footage of PLA units stationed in Hong Kong training to do urban operations is partly about sending a message. Beijing could order in the PLA and say the incident was ‘political turbulence’ and the central government took measures to stop it. They could also order in the aptly named People’s Armed Police. That would fit with the party’s line about subversion, separatist forces and external forces fomenting unrest.

Can Xi manage Hong Kong so that it doesn’t become a petri dish example of the limits of his rule? To do so, he’ll need to shift strategy and provide some outlets for the mass public sentiments expressed by the people of Hong Kong. His instincts are probably to keep a tough line and wait things out, but Hong Kongers seem to be gaining energy from this approach, not losing it, and the stakes for Xi are increasing as this happens.

If Xi sends in the PLA or People’s Armed Police, it will be a crystallising moment for all people, governments, companies and universities engaging with the Chinese state and economy.

In 1989, a similar use of force by Xi’s predecessor led Australia’s Bob Hawke to grant asylum to 20,000 Chinese students and families living in Australia. Just as it did then, the Chinese state’s use of lethal force against its own people will split the international community.

There will be states and individuals who will downplay even the most egregious violence—talking airily and in abstract terms about the importance of ‘stability’. There will be voices saying we should separate trade from foreign and defence policy and turn a blind eye to actions against our deepest values and our interests. But Xi’s China Dream of win–win peaceful development and resolution of disputes will be an artefact of propaganda that can be stored with back copies of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’.

Xi will have demonstrated that the PLA remains the party’s armed wing, to be used against his people and any other enemies of the party. Trade deals and investments will have a bald new context. The term ‘trade war’ will be exposed for the overblown label it is in light of real violence. Xi will be at war with his own people and the question for the rest of us will be, ‘Whose side are you on?’

[foxdemon]

Here’s a link to an article about the growing protests in my own city, Brisbane. The article is a bit too long to paste.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/world/australia/hong-kong-china-queensland-protests.html

The local Marxists are trying to use accusations of racism to control this growing movement. I guess Australian students siding with liberal democratic HK students threatens their Marxist narrative. After all, what is happening in HK is communist oppression of political freedom. Wouldn’t want Australian students to see what Marxism is all about, would we?

[colliric]

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/as ... t-11788926

Hong Kong's Lawyers are continuing to show support for the protestors.

[skinster]

[Sivad]

The local Marxists are trying to use accusations of racism to control this growing movement.

A gulagist calls me a racist and I'm thinking even if I was I'd still have you outclassed in the morals department. Gulagists are total fucking degenerates.

[skinster]

Not sure if you realize referring to countries with dumb-ass words like 'gulagists' displays a bunch of racism, but ok.

"even if I was"

[Sivad]

Not sure if you realize referring to countries with dumb-ass words like 'gulagists' displays a bunch of racism, but ok.

So I could gulag over a billion brown people and that's not racist but if I call the people who did gulag over a billion brown people gulagists then I'm racist?

"even if I was"

Well I'm sure as hell not taking your word for it, your definition of racism seems a little too flakey to take to heart.

[skinster]

You are off-topic (and boring).

[foxdemon]

Protests have spread to NZ and Canada, as well as Australia.

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3020639/chinese-students-clash-new-zealand-university-over-hong-kong

All three of these countries have seen significant levels of Chinese immigration in recent decades and share a similar world view to Taiwan and HK. All of these five countries have also been subject to the political attentions of the CCP. These five nations are the people whose struggles will decide Xi Jinping’s future.

[foxdemon]

Another weekend of protests in HK. Troops have been reported to be on the border since the end of July. There still hasn’t been a military intervention. The following article from SG discusses why not.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/would-china-risk-another-tiananmen-in-hong-kong


The theory is that the threat of a Tiananmen Square intervention is being used to intimidate protestors but that the government in Beijing can’t afford the repercussions of such a crack down.

I agree with this analysis. If Beijing tried using military force to end the protests, it would mean the end of the CCP’s global soft power. Those who currently support Beijing, typically because they object to American neo con wars, will either withdraw their support or be marginalised and condemned. Beijing will be left without any more ‘useful idiots’.

[Ter]

Let's see if the old saying is still valid:

if there are 1,000 protesters, the police will beat them back
if there are 10,000, the police will observe
if there are 100,000, the police will join them

[Rugoz]

Let's see if the old saying is still valid:

if there are 1,000 protesters, the police will beat them back
if there are 10,000, the police will observe
if there are 100,000, the police will join them

You forget the part where China has 1.3bn people.

[Rancid]

You forget the part where China has 1.3bn people.

Was listening to a Pod cast where they talk about violent versus non-violent protests.

Part of the research showed that if 3% of the population comes out to protest, historically/statistically speaking, it results in successful change. The estimates for Hong Kong is like 10%. That said, you really need to count the percentage against the mainland population as well, in which case the percentage is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY under 3%.

Conclusion, statistically speaking. Hong Kong protests will fail. That said, I think they know that already, they are just trying to make the historical point of what happened in Hong Kong, so as to raise distrust of the mainland internationally. In that respect, I think it is already successful. Lots of people that know nothing about Hong Kong's history, are now understanding how nasty the Mainland can get.

I'm sure Taiwan is watching closely. Unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan has a stronger chance of remaining independent. I suspect a massive war could break out over Taiwan.....

[skinster]