If Hong Kong becomes a Palestine-style cause celebre it will be bad for China.
China is trapped. They are stuck with this democratic appendix attached to a communist body. China can't keep Hong Kong under a democratic system as they have zero understanding of democracy. But if they try to repress it they risk endangering China's relationships with the rest of the world. They made a
mistake thinking they could transform a democratic territory into a communist one without any consequences.
Hong Kong's entire value, as far as I can see [and I'm referring to the value of Hong Kong as a community including people and businesses, not just their geographic value], either as a place to live or to do business or to visit, comes from it being a SAR with its own government, culture, historical legacy, and lack of interference from its mother country. If it becomes a homogenized satellite of Shenzhen with sky high real estate, which seems to be what China wants, what's left of Hong Kong?
I thought China was smarter than this. I thought they would realize the value of Hong Kong. Apparently China doesn't want Hong Kong. They want to remove the perennial thorn in their side, that democratic city-state of Chinese heritage right on their border. They want to grind it into dust, slowly if possible, but immediately if Hong Kong makes too much fuss about the pestle. They want to remove the painful reminder of [their losses during] the Opium Wars and British influence in the Sinosphere. They want to do that at any cost, including destroying Hong Kong's culture and attractiveness as a business location.
This is the height of tragedy. There will never be another place like it, and China is destroying it out of spite and ideological inflexibility.
What proportion of China's economy is HK? I don't know a good source but I recall seeing it's a low single digit percentage of China as a whole. They definitely punch above their weight per capita but I feel like China is more than willing and able to take the loss.
After all, with Western governments changing every few years, who will even remember in a decade?
I think the usual argument is that Hong Kong is much more attractive as a meeting place for foreign and domestic businesses than other cities (in no small part due to the Great Firewall getting in the way of corporate communications). It might represent a small fraction of China's GDP (or whatever other measure we're using for economic significance, since IIRC attempting to calculate China's GDP is a pretty wonky affair), but if it stops being that place where domestic and foreign businesses meet (and other cities fail to take up the slack), it could make things a lot harder for operations in other cities to continue.
That is: HK's value is less about its own numbers and more about the numbers it enables other Chinese cities to achieve.
not very convincing. The lack of CCP-imposed restrictions is hardly an inimitable differentiator. The unfortunate truth is that HK's cultural and economic importance is so diminished that the government is not that afraid of the current situation.
Never said it was convincing. Just the usual argument here on HN.
It sounds reasonable to me, though. If I'm gonna go to China to meet up with some manufacturer, then I'd rather do it in a place where I can send/receive emails without having to figure out which VPN providers the Party hasn't blocked yet. If I'm gonna stick around there as a full-time job, I'd definitely rather do so in a place where I'm not restricted in what I do online.
>Hong Kong's entire value, as far as I can see [...]
Keep in mind that that's the perspective you've been conditioned to see by the media you've consumed.
>If it becomes a homogenized satellite of Shenzhen with sky high real estate, which seems to be what China wants, what's left of Hong Kong?
Well, for one thing, the unstable political condition is likely to change the "sky high real estate" bit.
>I thought China was smarter than this. I thought they would realize the value of Hong Kong. Apparently China doesn't want Hong Kong.
Oh, please. They do want Hong Kong. They just want Hong Kong in a different way from how the rest of the world thinks Hong Kong is valuable to China.
>They want to remove the painful reminder of the Opium Wars and British influence in the Sinosphere.
The Anglosphere wants to remove the painful reminder of the Opium Wars. You seem to. China doesn't.
As for foreign influence in their own backyard, ever heard of NIMBY ("not in my back yard")?
>There will never be another place like it, and China is destroying it out of spite and ideological inflexibility.
Not quite. For one thing, Hong Kong has lost its lustre as "a place to live or to do business or to visit". Recent IMF data show that its GDP per capita is almost half that of Macau SAR:
It's not a matter of whether Hong Kong becomes "a homogenized satellite of Shenzhen", but when, because Hong Kong is already heading down that road.
What you, and other commentators, seem to fail to understand is that China absolutely wants Hong Kong, but not for it being an SAR. No. Reread Carrie Lam's leaked comments again:
>Lam noted, however, that she had few options once an issue had been elevated “to a national level,” a reference to the leadership in Beijing, “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.”
This has now been elevated to an issue of national security for China. Do you know why?
Because the Hong Kong activists are now demanding independence.
Set aside the issue of self-determination for a minute. Suppose you are playing as China in this game of Civilization and a city that you've got back is doing this. How would you react?
Would you fold to the demands of Washington and Elizabeth?
Or would you look at South Korea? At Taiwan? At how Mongolia got away with the help of Catherine?
Notwithstanding the rhetoric around the Opium Wars, Hong Kong is strategically valuable -- and not simply economically valuable -- to China because it's located on the other side of the mouth of the Pearl River from Macau. It's literally a physical gatekeeper to Guangzhou. Have a look at the geographic reality:
>Independence is not one of the demands of the protestors. Please provide a source for that claim.
Point taken. But it was one of the demands of some protesters in the past[0], so I must have got that confused with the current demands of the 2019 protesters.
Be that as it may be, the comment I was replying to was echoing points made by the pro-independence movement in justifying their stance, in particular by highlighting Hong Kong's allegedly distinct cultural identity.[1]
I'd think, for instance, that Macau has a more distinctive cultural identity than HK, and in any case, harshreality's argument sought to portray China as a cultural monolith.
The reality is that there are at least as many cultural identities as there are provinces, and in Guangdong province alone, there are three separate dialect groups -- Yue (Cantonese)[2], Hakka[3], Southern Min (Teochew[4], Leizhou[5]) -- each with their own distinct culture.
You may see why, from a certain perspective, the cultural identity argument of the pro-independence movement is rather specious. But harshreality isn't the only commentator I've seen who's brought up HK's cultural identity as an argument.
Finally, perhaps I should let a Hongkonger speak for himself. Lewis Lau Yiu-man is a commentator based in Hong Kong, who writes for Stand News[6], a pro-democracy online news website, and contributed this piece[7] to the New York Times last month. After a historical preamble, he made this claim:
>That’s because — want it or not, know it or not — the Umbrella Movement planted the seed of separatism in the city. I don’t mean that the idea was entirely new: There had been some proponents of localism, at the margins. And I don’t mean that separatism is now the order of the day[...] I mean that the Umbrella Movement was, in fact, an independence movement — but an independence movement that didn’t know itself.
He even analyses Beijing's perspective:
>And so from Beijing’s perspective, when pro-democracy protesters and their supporters reject what it perceives as its right to intervene here, they are challenging its very sovereignty. In this, at least, Beijing is correct. It knows what many Hong Kongers don’t seem to have fully appreciated: Admit it or not, we are actually rejecting Chinese sovereignty — we are already an independence movement in disguise. And it all started with the Umbrella Movement.
Thanks for your comment. I don’t see why Macau would have a stronger cultural identity than Hong Kong, but I haven’t been there, only to Hong Kong a few times.
It seems to me that there certainly is a distinct cultural identity in Hong Kong. Children are raised with less indoctrination in school, they have more access to Western media, and they have different values and manners. It’s obvious the minute you get to Hong Kong. Ask the mainlanders who complain about pretentious, condescending Hong Kongers whether there’s a distinct culture there.
I do think I see your point - there are many distinct cultures all over China and it’s certainly not a monolith. But I still have the impression that in certain ways the values of Hong Kong people are, on average, different. They certainly don’t seem to want to give ground on some of their individual freedoms.
Anyways, it seems hypocritical for Beijing to characterize this as a sovereignty issue, if your analyst is correct about their view. They agreed to one country two systems (for now), and the whole sovereignty argument seems more like a distraction to me.
It seems like they just don’t want to admit mistakes - easier to blame Western influence than admit that they’ve pushed too hard and made the people too angry.
Anyways, I really appreciate the discussion. I’m kind of starved for people to talk to about it.
>I don’t see why Macau would have a stronger cultural identity than Hong Kong
They actually have their own language, Macanese Patois[0], which is a Portuguese-based creole, in addition to Cantonese, English and maybe Portuguese. Their cuisine is also a blend of Cantonese and Portuguese cuisines.[1] They don't really have a film industry, but my impression is that neither does Hong Kong these days.
It's interesting to compare and contrast the two SARs. You hardly ever hear about Macau, and Beijing didn't seem to have been as compelled to spell out what it thinks "one country two systems" should mean for Macau, as it did for Hong Kong in 2014.[2]
The discussions I've seen point more towards Legalism, a Chinese theory of governance that's similar to fascism. I guess "Fascism" is a decent analogy, but its probably more accurate to just call it Legalism. Especially because China has a long, cultural history with Legalism (while Fascism would be associated with WW2 Germany or Italy)
>Especially because China has a long, cultural history with Legalism
This is something that most people won't know without a detailed study of Chinese history. Legalism in China won the day against Confucianism a long time ago in 221 BC, when the First Emperor of China came to power, and has never quite lost its place in Chinese political thought since.
Hmm, perhaps the best approach is to use the official translated word from Chinese: Fajia, to represent the concept and minimize confusion.
Ex: We could translate "Samurai" into "Knight", except a Samurai code of feudalism was completely different than a Knight's code of feudalism (even if both were forms of feudalism). There are also major differences in how the aristocracy worked between Japan and Europe. At some point, its best to just stick with the native tongue.
How about we just use more specific terms? China remains very much Leninist, and to a lesser extent Maoist; it has however mostly ceased to be Marxist. They kept the basic political forms but moved to a relatively liberal economic model.
I'm curious as to how China is "Leninist" at all. The fact of rule by one party that claims to represent the working class does not a Leninist state make.
Perhaps Leninist in a historical sense of "thought violence to gain control in a type of region Marx himself thought wouldn't be viable".
Putting aside his philosophy's flaws he expected a feudalism to capitalism to communism progression more or less.
Lenin was not only part of ousting the czar but establishment of the party as a nominally proletariat peasant dictatorship. That attempted teological speedrunning to try to "skip to the end" is classic Lenin.
Even if the system later reforms there is still a legacy in the how. France and England are both parliamentary representative democracies who were once under monarchies but the UK has far more monarchist vestiges than France. While technically accurate to call France as monarchist legacied they would have far more grounds to object to the labeling given the purge of nobility and subsequent traditions - even when they fell into dictatorships again they certainly weren't kings.
To be pedantic we could describe these aspect vestiges as "x legacied". That the West uses latin as it does for mottos and species names is a Roman legacy for instance for it is a trace of their power as lasting influence even though it does not exist today. It does not imply current control any more than Byzantium had control over western Europe.
China may be better described amongst many other attributes as Leninist legacied, oligarchy legacied, Capitalist dictatorship until Xinjiang's inevitable demise.
The fact he consolidated control over Oligarchic and has no clear explicit succession line makes him dictatorial as opposed to mere Oligarchic "the remaining few interests will pick after him". If as the whispered snark of "Emperor Xi" holds and he successfully transmits power to offspring he will have founded an empire (if it dies quickly it wouldn't be the first Chinese dynasty to do so).
>I'm curious as to how China is "Leninist" at all.
China officially describe its ideology as Marxist-Leninism. I mean, depending on how strict your definition of "Leninist" is, even the USSR may not have been "'Leninist' at all".
>The fact of rule by one party that claims to represent the working class does not a Leninist state make.
The notion of the vanguard party is, in fact, a key concept in Leninism.[0] The vanguard party was conceived in opposition to forming trade unions, and was supposed to recruit from the working class. AFAIK trade unions don't exist in China, and the CPC does recruit widely, so it does satisfy the criteria of a vanguard party.
Marxist-Leninism also advocates atheism, another key aspect of Chinese policy.[1]
Also, I found this amusing: did you know Singapore is led by a party that was originally organised as a Leninist party? [2]
>In Singapore, the People's Action Party (PAP) was organised as a Leninist political party featuring internal democracy. The PAP initiated single-party dominance in the government and popular politics of Singapore.[3]
Of course, the PAP later expunged its leftist faction and swung to the right, but it still retains a lot of the Leninist structure.[4] Imagine, a billionaire's playground run by a centre-right party organised like a Leninist vanguard party.
Fascist is maybe not a good term, because fascism is actually quite specific and to some extent euro-centric (plus, nowadays it just means "bad people" without people necessarily understanding what fascism actually is).
But China seems to be a country run on a totalitarian and ethnic nationalist ideology.
Only if words don't mean things, though you can see how the least charitable (which is not to say least accurate; who knows) reading of Chinese policy would lead you there. In particular, I think there's a trap where if you cherry pick from Maoist China and modern China, you can assembly a Frankenchina that meets some of the definitions.
There are some pretty obvious elements of most common academic definitions of fascism that China flunks, no matter how you read them; for instance, Chinese society has not been mass-mobilized and militarized by any reasonable definition of those terms. Modern China not only doesn't reject modernism, it wholeheartedly embraces it. If there's a secular civic religion, with ceremony and liturgy, it isn't powerful enough to crowd out other faiths; there is a national patriotic spirit, but it isn't articulated through quasi-mystical symbols and rituals. Violence isn't employed for its own cathartic sake, and is largely "professionalized".
People want to use fascism as a shorthand for "authoritarian nationalism", but it isn't; there are plenty of examples of authoritarian nationalist states that are demonstrably not fascist --- in fact, there are plenty of right-wing authoritarian nationalist states that aren't.
Maybe a good acid test for this: if you were living in a fascist state, you'd know it, in much the same you'd know if you were living in an actual according-to-Hoyle theocracy. China is a huge country and millions of people there live with a relationship between themselves and the state that we would recognize in the west.
I want also to acknowledge that it is kind of squicky to debate whether China is "fascist", in that it's an extremely loaded term that carries implications for ordinary Chinese people living their lives (that's part of the point of fascism). But a discussion about what fascism is or isn't is at least more in the spirit of HN than a lot of the other comments on these threads.
If you want to get technical it's a very advanced fascist dictatorship - the way it leverages elements of capitalism, for example. An innovative fascist dictatorship, even. But ideologically speaking, it's very simple.
Like most communist places there is either an infinite black market or eventually they give up on that whole "no private property" thing, at which point you're effectively just left with a shitty excuse for a corrupt government.
Communists killing and imprisoning other communists has happened since the ideology was first conceived so you will need a better argument than that to say they are not communist.
I really dont understand why so many people feel the need to post comments online distinguishing that China is not communist.
Its a disgusting authoritarian regime just like every other self proclaimed communist country in history.
Historically communist countries have been pretty fascist, but communism itself (in theory) is about workers' rights and the elevation of the little people. I don't know how genuine Mao was about those ideals, but Xi is dropping all pretense by intentionally targeting labor movements. So he shouldn't even get to hide behind a flawed idealism. He has no idealism except power.
You're just ascribing the negative aspects of communism-as-realized to fascism but this seems trivially ahistorical. The internecine conflicts in communist states were much more pronounced than in the fascist ones, perhaps in part because communism was always a more complex and developed movement ideologically.
Communism as a political theory is anti-nationalist, and fascism as a political phenomenon arose in part as a reaction to Marxism. One of Payne's Fascist Negations is "anti-Communism".
There are multiple species of authoritarian tyrannies; fascism is just one of them. I think people get in trouble trying to generalize and apply fascism to places it doesn't fit. "Communist are fascists" might be one of the text book instances of that problem.
"Communist are fascists" might be one of the text book instances of that problem.
Mildly amusing thingie - a Bulgarian dissident's dissidenting involved writing a book about fascism (titled, for clarity, Fascism) which was really an oblique critique of the communist regime. It got past the censors and was published and then fairly quickly recalled. He later became Bulgaria's first post-communist president.
US foreign policy is a big reason why only authoritarian communist governments have been able to survive.
Nicaragua is a great example of this. The Sadinistas lost power through free elections in which the US interferred. Now that the Sadinistas are back in power, the freedom of their elections has been rapidly decreasing.
"Communist" as a lable has been so misused and unclearly defined for so long that it is mostly useless as a descriptive term.
> or does every country that calls itself Communist fail the test
That's how I look at it, though I'm no expert.
> what precisely would be different about a true Communist country versus these pretend-Communist countries
True collective ownership/Marxism. It's unclear whether it's even possible to create this kind of society without it regressing to brutal authoritarianism, but that's the idea at least.
People do give a shit about Palestine in Muslim countries, to the extent that Israel is not recognised in those countries and/or Israelis are banned from entry. China risks making Hong Kong into what Palestine is to the Muslim world.
China, as the largest exporter of consumer goods, is much more exposed than Israel. If China wants to become an advanced economy such as Japan and South Korea (and this is what China wants most of all) they need to keep consumers in democratic countries on their side.
>People do give a shit about Palestine in Muslim countries, to the extent that Israel is not recognised in those countries and/or Israelis are banned from entry.
As much as I don't want to get into an Israel Palestine debate, that's not because they displaced Palestinian, it's because Israel is filled with Jews.
> If nobody gave a fuck about Palestine, people wouldn't be so bent out of shape over Representative Omar's comments on the topic.
Nearly nobody (outside of Palestine, and weighted by political power) has a positive concern for the Palestinians, but lots of people (particularly in the US and Israel) have an interest in assuring that anyone who shows any sign of such a positive concern be punished to pressure them to recant and, even if that fails, to discourage others.
China is trapped. They are stuck with this democratic appendix attached to a communist body. China can't keep Hong Kong under a democratic system as they have zero understanding of democracy. But if they try to repress it they risk endangering China's relationships with the rest of the world. They made a mistake thinking they could transform a democratic territory into a communist one without any consequences.