
Hong Kong protest: What is mainland China hearing? - onetimemanytime
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-49354507
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xster
> "The fastest-growing period of Hong Kong has already passed, so the young
> people there find no way to climb up the social ladder. They feel choked in
> an environment of expensive housing, sweltering climate and a neighbour [the
> mainland] that's becoming richer and richer,"

I think these problems will continue to re-occur until this root issue is
solved. In the same way how I believe Caesar/Sulla/Gracchi brothers are all
symptoms of an underserved common populace by the senate class and where the
commoners are constantly ready to be incited into a mob rule when economic
interests are not pinning them to vest in the system.

And now the vestigial, oligarchic functional/geographic-split legco voting
system and the colonial parallel governorship (aka chief
executive)/legislative system is failing the Hong Kong common class with 20%
poverty rates and twice the housing to pre-tax median annual income ratio than
San Francisco in a monopolistic/unregulated/colonial elite-serving economic
framework. And that's without even counting in the half-million class-less
filipino/indonesian domestic serfs.

I think their way out of their structural societal problems would be to
emphasize the class issue and on decolonializing their governmental and
economic framework as soon as possible (which I think part of the protest
movement gets, and which isn't against Beijing's interests) or go the Chinese
socialism route (since China holds humanity's record on poverty reduction, but
the locals will obviously not accept this route). But re-glorifying their
colonial past or preserving the status quo (which I find is the mainstream
protest ideology) isn't it.

To put it in American terms, I think they need Bernie, not Trump.

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wobblegong
Agreed, I'm an HKer who grew up there but am in the US now. There is a certain
desperation that is palpable from talking to my friends back home.

They've been so let down by the HK govt that they've just given up all hope.
Career sucks, family sucks, home sucks, can't marry cause houses are too
expensive, rent is unaffordable so you can't move out, unless you're in the
top 20% of your senior class, you can't go to college, it's grim. Most people
I know are trying to move.

Unless the societal ills get solved, people will always find another
proxy/reason to protest.

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xster
Right. Protests are a means to an end and the people should be clear about
what the end is. That's the whole point of not being administered by China in
the first place, where you would just voice your discontent and let the
'technocratic' 'leadership' figure out a solution. The people have to self-
direct towards a long term goal.

I think the current situation is tricky in that the 2 issues are partly
conflated in the sense that Hong Kong needs to be careful to not just give the
half-democratic colonial leash to China. But that's the extent of it (since
Beijing didn't setup that colonial structure), and it's important to not
conflate the rest of the issues with it. The institutional/functional half of
the legco basically seems like a collection of medieval guilds and I don't see
it trying to, or having the financial incentive to resolve societal issues for
the bottom of the society anytime soon.

The fight for political reform does seem like the right thing to do but I
think the only way to success is to stay extremely focused and framing it as a
people vs colonial oligarchy issue rather than a British vs China issue or a
woke vs brainwashed wumao issue. And most importantly, to not make it about
defending the status quo, where Hong Kong will fall deeper in the hole since
it not being able to continue to skim off the top of all China trades like it
could during the 80s can't float all boats like it could in the past anymore.
If Hong Kong fails to prove that its current political system is an advantage
rather than a disadvantage that translates to economic and social wellbeing,
Beijing will have little incentive to not scrap its system come 2047. And from
the present perspective from the Beijing side, all signs would point to it
looking like a disadvantage so far when comparing the relative deltas of urban
and rural development and wellbeing vs the mainland. This, of course, ignores
the fact that the CCP system will hit a glass ceiling in economic development
vs countries with mature judicial systems, checks and balances etc, but that’s
a limitation for its future potential rather than a present problem for Hong
Kong and mainland.

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flying_sheep
I lived in Hong Kong for 30 years. What was happened in these 3 months did not
come out of nowhere.

1997 - now: HK gov allows 150 people from China to immigrate to Hong Kong
_every day_ , even there are strong opinion to suspend immigration due to lack
of housing and crazy population density problem. Even worse, HK gov does not
pose _ANY_ restrictions of the immigrant about their education, language, or
criminal background. There was one case that one pro-Beijing arsonist killed 2
immigration Officers but still obtained residency in HK.

2012: HK gov tried to introduce a compulsory brain-washing subject to high
school. 500 thousands (out of 7 millions) people protested.

2013: HK gov used crappy reason to turn down a well-known HK businessman to
obtain free public broadcast license. So that HK has effectively only one
company to run free TV channel. And the news of that channel is highly biased.

2019: HK gov tried to pass extradition law to China. Even after 1 million
people protested, HK gov still continues legislation. After 2 millions people
protested, the CEO of HK gov only said "the bill is dead" in TV but did not
formally withdraw the bill in legislation council.

This is only a tiny list of what gov did in the past 22 years. What gov is
going to do is to pass a construction that cost trillions of HK dollars (app.
120 billion USD). That will basically empty the treasury of HK, and the future
of every HK people. That's why people are so frustrated and protest in that
extend.

~~~
ToniCipriani
Article 23 and the National Security provisions is also a big one.

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AnimalMuppet
I'm not sure it matters so much what they're hearing now. What matters more is
what they've heard for the last decade or two - that it's all about great
China and uniting to follow the CCP leadership, that anyone disturbing that is
an antisocial troublemaker, and that such people deserve negative
consequences. After having that mindset drummed into you for long enough, it
may not matter what perspective they hear about the Hong Kong protests, at
least if they don't hear it for too long.

~~~
Leary
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4GXZOss6J4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4GXZOss6J4)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdxXCTpHARQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdxXCTpHARQ)

This is the scene that mainland Chinese people are seeing. A reporter of
Global Times was bound by protesters in the airport and attacked until
unconscious.

~~~
yorwba
Those are on YouTube, so law-abiding citizens aren't seeing them. The search
results for Hong Kong on Weibo are a bit different:
[https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=100103type%3D1%26q%3D%...](https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=100103type%3D1%26q%3D%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF)

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tzakrajs
Sounds like CCP did a good job of stoking division between HK and mainland
China leading up to this powder keg being lit.

