Posted on 11/13/2019 8:00:08 AM PST by SeekAndFind
How will historians in 2060 frame the 2019 Hong Kong crisis?
"The first battle of the Second Cold War" is one possibility, though Russia's 2014 Crimean invasion deserves that cruel award.
Perhaps the first Cold War isn't over. The USSR's communist dictatorship collapsed in 1991. China's party tyranny didn't. In 1989, the Kremlin didn't order its puppet regimes to murder protesting citizens en masse. On Nov. 9,1989, the Berlin Wall cracked without a shot.
Not so in China. On June 4, 1989, the People's Liberation Army attacked peaceful pro-freedom protestors in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and murdered over 2,000 Chinese citizens.
Hong Kong's first major 2019 demonstration commemorated the Tiananmen Square massacre's 30th anniversary. That demonstration was pro-freedom, not anti-government.
The Hong Kong-Tiananmen Square connection suggests Hong Kong is a continuation of the 20th century's great battle between imperial tyrannies --monarchies, Reichskanzlers, Politburos -- and political systems that protect essential individual freedoms such as free expression and assembly.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is a tyrant. Xi and his Communist Party brutes run a police state that uses Karl Marx's bogus 19th-century theory of history as propaganda cover. Marxist-Socialist Workers Paradises -- plural -- whether in Russia, Cuba, Venezuela or China, have always employed terror and committed mass murder. Marxist tyrannies corrupt their own societies.
Hong Kong residents know that fellow Chinese living outside the Hong Kong special administrative region face totalitarian restrictions.
Mainland China today -- China under Beijing's boot -- is an authoritarian national socialist state. National socialist -- Nazi -- that's a German acronym. China's "state capitalist" system -- a corrupt nexus of government, industry and spies stealing technology -- gamed the international economic order until President Donald Trump's administration said no more.
There's more to it than tariffs. The Politburo knows China must reform its domestic economy, but that involves breaking the money-skimming "rice bowls" of connected party members and PLA senior officers, and permitting more freedom.
Xi and his propagandists have spent the last six years portraying China's dictatorship as a successful ideological competitor to what they label the U.S.-led "liberal international order," or LIO. The LIO, however, is a straw man that Xi's "fake news" brigadistas attack with propaganda tropes employed by 19th-century European nobles and 20th-century Nazis and communists. Authoritarians of every stripe fear the creativity of individual freedom.
Hong Kong's demands for liberal freedoms and its distrust of Beijing shame Xi and his propagandists.
Which is why Hong Kong is under attack by the Chinese Communist Party.
Consider the past 10 days. On Nov. 8, security forces killed a student protestor. Another was wounded Nov. 11. On Nov. 12, Beijing sycophants claimed Hong Kong mobs had brought the city to "the brink of total collapse."
Beijing blames the U.S. and Britain for the violence. But accusing adversaries of doing what communist sympathizers and agents are actually doing was a standard Cold War Soviet and Red Chinese tactic.
Stuart Heaver (reporting from Hong Kong for The Independent) thinks Beijing is already invading. "There may be no tanks," Heaver wrote, but many locals believe "PLA troops are already here, disguised as Hong Kong riot police ..." They intend "to impose Tiananmen by stealth and create a climate of fear."
The suspect police "are often heard speaking in Putonghua dialect," Heaver writes. Putonghua is Mandarin (Beijing) Chinese. Most Hong Kongers speak the Cantonese dialect. Eighty-five to 95 million Chinese living along the south China coast speak Cantonese or Hakka, a related "southern" dialect.
Which leads to a linguistic connection that disturbs Beijing's mandarins (pun intended): Seventy percent of Taiwan's 24 million people speak Hakka.
In the past four years, Beijing has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan. Would that ignite World War III?
Beijing should be forewarned. Tiananmen Square did not end the desire for freedom. Crushing Hong Kong won't either.
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The blame for this falls entirely on Britain’s shoulders.
Trump, of course, duh!
Soros controls China? He’s behind their putting down any rebellion in Hong Kong?
Let’s not get SDS here either :)
“many locals believe “PLA troops are already here, disguised as Hong Kong riot police ...””
Guangdong People’s Armed Police, I’d figure.
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“Seventy percent of Taiwan’s 24 million people speak Hakka.”
No. He’s mixed up Hakka with Taiwanese, aka Hoklo/Hokkien or Min Nan.
Maybe 20% speak Hakka and 70% might be a high estimate for Taiwanese.
“The Hong Kong-Tiananmen Square connection suggests Hong Kong is a continuation of the 20th century’s great battle between imperial tyrannies —monarchies, Reichskanzlers, Politburos — and political systems that protect essential individual freedoms such as free expression and assembly. “
The dictatorship has one thing on its side - the deep cultural remnants of the imperial age of China, with the majority of the people’s acquiesence in respecting the rule and control by the center of power in China. That culture has long convinced the sheeple that as long as the center held China would survive - and the corallary that China would not survive if the center of power did not survive.
Then the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s saw the possible flowering of democracy with the boxer rebellion, followed by Sun Yat Sen and the Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the last emperor and established the first Republic of China. But that led to a compromise with the last military strongman of the emperor, and eventually warlords, and instablity followed by the chaos of both the rise of the Communists and the war with Japan. So the beginning of possible democracy is colored with great division, chaos and civil war. What is the mantle Mao held? It was that he restored the center, holding China together. In essence he assumed the same mantle as the emperors of old.
And in many ways the dictatorship is, culturally, a continuation of many aspects of the old imperial order; including its present foreign policies.
It is not politics alone in China that has to change, the culture has to change and that cannot be done by politics alone. Some kind of great awakening in China has to occur.
RE: Maybe 20% speak Hakka and 70% might be a high estimate for Taiwanese.
You are right. I lived and worked in Taiwan for 5 years and learned to speak the Taiwanese language as well as Mandarin.
Ya have to know that eventually the Chi-Coms will tire of this and squash
The rebellion like a bug, critiques be damned
OH, that makes sense!!!!
I should have known better with you.
Apologies.
RE: It is not politics alone in China that has to change, the culture has to change and that cannot be done by politics alone. Some kind of great awakening in China has to occur.
I can understand your description as it applies to the Mainland.
The problem is the people of Hong Kong *AND* Taiwan are now politically so used to more freedom and democracy that any attempt to impose an imperial system on them will be resisted.
To defuse this situation, It would be better for the folks at ZhongNanHai to assure HK, that they will maintain the One China, Two Systems way beyond 2047. I believe that would go a long way towards cooling things down.
Let’s use the USA and our imperialistic control over the Philippines after we defeated Spain for example.
The Filipinos thought then that we were going to give them independence after Spain ceded their country to us.
Instead, we made them a colony resulting in a rebellion that killed hundreds of thousands.
It was not until we made them a Commonwealth with their own President ( Manuel L. Quezon ) and eventually independence ( which could have been given sooner had World War II not began ) that things cooled down.
Today, the USA is popular with over 90% of Filipinos.
China could take a page from history when dealing with Hong Kong and Taiwan.
FORCE is not going to lead to a happy ending.
Somehow the notion that the mainland world actually try actual violence with Taiwan rather than saber rattling fails to impress.
The dictatorship of China is not in the same mental state as the U.S. vis-a-vis the Philippines circa 1930s. They have no inclination, and no cause or reason they can see to follow the example of how the U.S. and the Philippines moved away from their past. That they would sounds nice but the dictatorship does not even have those cards in the deck it is playing with. They knew when they granted the “two systems” gambit that they would slowly over time strangle Hong Kong out of that which the mainland saw as a pretext, done just to get a polite exit from Britain. As far as the dictatorship is concerned the movement in Hong Kong is proving, to them, why they must take full control, and it does not say “compromise” to them in anyway. It will be another Tianamen before it ends. There will be a mass refugee exodus from Hong Kong, many of whom will go to Taiwan, and again the dictatorship will see that as reason to be harsher with Taiwan, and not any other kind of concern to them.
Yeah. There were about 6 million people in Taiwan in 1949 when about a million Chinese went there after the communists took over. About 2/3 were from immigrants from southern Fujian and spoke what’s called Taiwanese now and about 1/3 were Hakka.
These are ball park numbers.
“To defuse this situation, It would be better for the folks at ZhongNanHai to assure HK, that they will maintain the One China, Two Systems way beyond 2047. I believe that would go a long way towards cooling things down.”
Yes.
But they’d have to do so something to prove it. Allowing popular election of the Chief Executive and all Legco seats would possibly do it.
But ChiComs are moving in the opposite direction, deciding they need more police clampdown and an increase in “patriotic education” ie communist party indoctrination.
It’s going to end just like Tiananmen Square.
The Communist Chinese do not tolerate freedom.
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