
China Is Drafting Urgent Plan to Resolve Hong Kong Chaos, SCMP Says - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-18/china-drafting-urgent-plan-to-resolve-hong-kong-chaos-scmp-says
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jknoepfler
"urgent" is obviously false. That would have entailed action weeks ago. I'd
say China is drafting a maximally expedient plan to capitalize on the
situation in their own sweet time, since the rest of the democratic world is
committed to playing corporatist small ball in Hong Kong, but I'm not the
editor in charge of creating clickbait titles.

~~~
east2west
I think they meant emergency plan. The article could be translated from
Chinese. "紧急" could be translated as "urgent," but "紧急计划," with plan attached,
is better interpreted as emergency plan.

BTW, Google translator gets this right.

~~~
jknoepfler
thank you, that makes sense.

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Leary
Military response is not being considered.

Original Article:
[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3019007/chi...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3019007/chinese-
officials-scramble-deliver-new-hong-kong-strategy)

~~~
IIAOPSW
Take it with a grain of salt. SCMP is owned by Jack Ma. Jack Ma isn't going to
die on this hill even if he agrees with HK. He's going to do what the PRC asks
of him. SCMP have maintained reasonable independence from the mainland so far.
But if ever there was a time for the PRC to pull strings and use SCMP for
disinformation, now would be it.

~~~
bllguo
could we address the implication here more critically? what logical reason is
there for violence and bloodshed? it feels like us westerners are so prone to
caricature the Chinese government as some kind of cartoonish villain. to me
the CCP is coldly rational, and I don't see the reasoning here for them
escalating the conflict.

~~~
inlined
The “one China” philosophy is a pretty core government tenet. If Hong Kong
exercises its independence it could exacerbate other territories/provinces
that want independence like Tibet and Taiwan (whose residents seem to pretty
explicitly consider themselves a different country)

One the other hand, military action could plausibly cause long-lasting
international upset.

I don’t envy Xi Jinping’s position.

~~~
petre
Taiwan is de facto independent. It's just that China is sabotaging recognition
of its independence through the one China policy. But that could change if a
country like the US would openly challenge this.

~~~
tepidandroid
The One China policy states that there is one China, either under the PRC or
the ROC.

The PRC claims that Taiwan is a Special Administrative Region of the PRC while
the ROC claims de jure sovereignty over all of China. There are significant
political parties within Taiwan itself (the Pan-Blue Coalition parties) that
support the One China policy.

If there isn't even internal consensus regarding independence in Taiwan, I
think it's fair to say that the issue is a little more complicated than "China
is sabotaging recognition of Taiwan's independence".

~~~
loyukfai
Indeed, and what's happening in Hong Kong is already affecting Taiwan, giving
additional support to the pro-independent camp.

BTW, the ruling party of ROC was pretty authoritarian back then too. IMO, the
contrasting political development of the ROC and PRC in the last few decades
is worthy of further evaluation and consideration.

~~~
petre
Both the ROC and South Korea evolved into functional democracies while China
and NK remained authocracies.

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duxup
Internally it feels like China has been more and more aggressive. Interesting
to see more caution here....and if it lasts.

~~~
chongli
It makes sense. Xi has a lot more to lose than he has to gain by cracking down
on Hong Kong.

~~~
tepidandroid
There is no need for Xi or China's establishment to do anything here. They
will simply wait it out. Hong Kong is and always will be wholly dependent on
its relationship with China. There is no end game where democracy and freedom
wins and they secede from China and live happily ever after.

What will most likely happen: the everyday people (shopkeepers, professionals,
etc) who need to earn a living will tire of the endless disruptions currently
paralyzing their streets and businesses. They will realize that the more
radical elements of the demonstrations are undermining the very things that
they are fighting for that make Hong Kong an attractive place for investment
and international business in the first place: societal stability and the rule
of law.

This will most likely occur some time around mid-August, when the school
season begins.

~~~
derefr
> Hong Kong is and always will be wholly dependent on its relationship with
> China.

They're dependent on their relationship with _somebody_. Not necessarily
China. It used to be Britain. It could be someone else. (Maybe the US, similar
to the relationship the US has with Japan, South Korea, and sorta-Taiwan.)

~~~
bllguo
but they were only valuable to the UK because it was their gateway to China.
it has always been about the relationship to China

~~~
derefr
North Korea is valuable to Russia and China because it keeps (US-allied) South
Korea away from having a land bridge into either of those countries.

In other words, entire countries can be propped up for decades not on their
worth as an ally or vassal, but rather on their worth as a hindrance to your
enemies.

I would expect, if HK found a new patron, it'd be for that reason.

~~~
r00fus
New patron? They're legally part of China, and honestly have no secession
rights, no defensive position, and no allies willing to fight the PRC.

Someone earlier on HN made a comment that the HK-Macau-Zhuhai bridge newly
built was expressly designed to put Chinese tanks into HK in under 30m, which
would easily stomp any resistance. That projection of power is also likely to
deter any possible allies, as it's an indefensible position.

This article has a nice picture:
[https://www.vox.com/world/2018/10/22/18010254/chain-
bridge-h...](https://www.vox.com/world/2018/10/22/18010254/chain-bridge-hong-
kong-macau-zhuhai)

~~~
flukus
HK relies on China for power and water, not to mention economically. If push
comes to shove China is in no hurry to get tanks in.

I'd be interested to set what sort of damage they could do by turning off
wechat.

~~~
derefr
Sure, HK is a city as well as it’s a state, and you can besiege a city.

Doesn’t mean, under the hypothetical where someone went to war with China and
HK allied with them, that that larger nation wouldn’t extract protections for
HK from China as a concession, win or lose. It’d be an obvious “price of
entry” for HK to participate in any such war. (Heck, I bet with the way things
are going, if said ally was trying to recruit _Taiwan_ to stand in rebellion,
I bet Taiwan would _also_ demand protections for HK as a concession, at the
same time it was demanding protections for itself.)

Of course, in the mean time, the population of the city would probably have to
evacuate to allied territory and only re-occupy the city after the war, lest
they become an easy hostage for their allies.

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rado
Hard to believe they already don't have a plan.

~~~
Arn_Thor
They've badly miscalculated. As the original SCMP article points out, their
ears to the ground in HK failed to pick up, or convey accurately, the
intensity of the broad public sentiment against the extradition bill.

That was especially unfortunate as, following the failure of the Umbrella
Movement to produce results in 2014, the public's frustrations over mainland
interference and tone deaf local politicians have been building. All it took
was one big target to catalyze the populace. And for lack of information,
Beijing allowed Carrie Lam to provide the spark.

Beijing certainly has a 30-year plan for Hong Kong, but the (usually
pragmatic) regime needs to re-think how they approach the next decade

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dvduval
I don't think this is a race. If anything I think they're going to slow down a
bit. That will be good for both sides.

------
petre
How to resolve HK chaos in two easy steps: 1\. Scrap the extradition draft 2\.
Resign

~~~
calyth2018
No it won't.

The extradition bill is a bad fuse to light up the power keg.

If one could at least temporarily park the emotions aside,
[https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/hong-
kong/arti...](https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/hong-
kong/article/3013512/hong-kong-extradition/index.html) shows what is actually
being proposed. The bill would actually allow judicial oversight compared to
the existing process.

One thing that it left out here is to articulate which of the 30 some odd
offenses, with a minimum 7 year sentence, would such an extradition would
actually be considered. They're generally violent crime, and even before the
protest started, some of the white collar crimes were removed.

This CE has been dumb as a post in terms of trying to rush this, and failed
spectacularly in articulating the proposed change. The key fact being that the
judiciary has been carried over intact, because the elites needs it for their
day to day business, and it has on many occasion overturned what the HKSAR
government had proposed.

There are far deeper problems with HK, many of which were carry-overs from the
colonial days, that has not been resolved. Eg. housing prices has been high in
the colonial days by design. The tax base was narrow, so the colonial
government operated by jacking up land lease prices. The HKSAR government had
mostly carried over the same practices, spare an unfortunately timed proposal
of building new public housing right before the Asian financial crisis shortly
after the handover. CE Tung took the brunt of that and no subsequent CE had
proposed anything too serious. To be fair, the elites then and now includes
lots of real estate tycoons, and unlike the governors of the past who are
appointed by the Queen; the CEs now are voted in by small groups of electors
that often are "business leaders".

Grey market goods had been a persistent nuisance, which is no surprise that
one of the protests had been in that area.

Job market prospects has been quite bad for the post-secondary educated.
Manufacturing started leaving in the 80s under the Colonial watch, and nothing
substantial had been proposed to replace that then; nothing substantial had
been done to fix that now under HKSAR.

There are lots and lots of reasons for HKers to be unhappy - earning a living
has been tough, long commutes, impossibility of owning a place, lack of public
/ subsidized housing, and there's little surprise that they'd turn to chucking
out whomever is running the place.

Compare that to the 80s and 90s: The first popularly-elected legistlator
started in 85, after the Joint Declaration was signed in 83. But people had
decent living, getting housing was tough, but not as tough. Mainlanders would
bend over backwards if you start waving HKDs. There weren't massive protests
then against the Colonial government.

\---

Even if what you said happens, it would temporarily cool down the chaos.
People don't turn to chaos easily. Look at the US - it's easy to say the
people voted for Trump are uneducated, bigoted. It's so much harder for people
look a little deeper. Their livelihoods had been stagnant at best,
manufacturing departed and left a vacuum, etc... They turned to something that
promised to blow down the current order.

These problems needs real fixes, or the chaos would simply return.

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mikehines
How is this hacker news?

~~~
geuis
1\. Most of the technology we work on and with is manufactured in China

2\. A significant fraction of engineers, especially in the Bay Area, are of
Chinese heritage at some level. By extension, users of HN.

3\. Things happening in China have an effect elsewhere, like the US.

I don’t personally like China all that much as a political or cultural
influence these days, but that’s just me. Given that, it’s not smart to
discount what’s going on there.

