I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics.
I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit darker. It almost felt like another Chinese city. I had even been to HK several times when I was in middle school in Taiwan (I was born in America, but was a “reverse import” to Taiwan) as well as a mandarin language tutor during university, and was always amazed by the richness of HK culture from fishing villages in Saikung to bustling life in Tsim Tsa Tsui and in Central with relics of British colonialism. Now many unique elements of HK life had disappeared.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution. It has its own identity from the aboriginal population, the settlers from the dynastic period, Japanese colonization, and influences from the Republic of China refugees (or occupiers, depending on your POV, post 1949 Chinese settlers) and American forces. And since 2018, I’ve seen the Taiwanese double down on their Taiwanese identity and pride, and in many ways Taiwan is the envy of China (also literally).
If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history. Now I would probably live in Taiwan and Japan.
Edit: Taiwan hasn’t always been a democracy, and the path to democracy hasn’t been easy (just ask America). It’s not perfect like any other well-running democracy, but it’s the closest paragon we have in the Chinese diaspora. The presidency has transitioned peacefully to different parties since the 1990s.
I had no idea how wide it is until a family member married someone from Asia and he explained ot me that his family thinks of themselves as ethnically Chinese, although they're totally disconnected from China.
It's actually pretty fascinating if you spend time in SE Asia. Chinese have been immigrating to all the countries for centuries. There are super old communities of Chinese in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, everywhere in fact.
And they are often a distinct community, with their own language (a dialect from where they came from in China). They were often economic migrants, so tend to be seen as a "merchant class" in these countries and hold quite a lot of political power.
The Peranakan in Malaysia are a good example. And there is continued strife in those countries as these Chinese-Malaysian often have much more political power than their numbers alone would suggest.
Thailand is weird[0], in that there's no love lost at all for mainland Chinese or Chinese tourists, but it's very socially important to have a Chinese grandparent or two.
[0]: Actually I think this is true of most of South East Asia where the Chinese community doesn't have as distinct a separation as Malaysia and Singapore
My understanding [0] from speaking with locals throughout SE Asia is a general resentment towards mainland Chinese tourists which boils down to - what else - money.
It turns out most Chinese tour operators throughout SE Asia run a completely vertical business, wherein they own all touchpoints their guests interact with (e.g. the restaurants, the bus company, the gift shops, etc.). Further, these are all staffed by immigrant Chinese. This results in all tourism profits being captured by Chinese nationals and businesses (and being exported back home as remittances) while burdening local infrastructure. Locals hate this.
For what its worth, I never heard / witnessed any hostility towards local ethnic Chinese (Peranakans), whose status, as the parent comment notes, is locally prominent. (Though there have been some bloody clashes in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_Chinese...
[0] Living in SE Asia, lots of extended chats with locals throughout the region.
> It turns out most Chinese tour operators throughout SE Asia run a completely vertical business, wherein they own all touchpoints their guests interact with (e.g. the restaurants, the bus company, the gift shops, etc.). Further, these are all staffed by immigrant Chinese. This results in all tourism profits being captured by Chinese nationals and businesses (and being exported back home as remittances) while burdening local infrastructure. Locals hate this.
I heard the exact same complaint in Italy. Chinese tourist groups come to Venice, annoy all the locals by dropping trash on the floor, but only buy their souvenirs at Chinese-owned gift shops. And they sleep on the Chinese-owned cruise ship.
Last time I was on koh phi phi someone greeted my Chinese wife in Chinese, which was a new development (english is fairly common, mandarin is also becoming more common). It seems like a lot of the tourists are now mainland Chinese, and the Thai tourist economy at least likes their money.
Bangkok is ethnically a mostly Chinese city, and is also Thailand’s richest region by far.
Just before Covid, DMK had a dedicated immigration line for Chinese passports; Chinese visitor numbers were huge already and growing until Covid, when they dropped off a cliff, and they haven't yet recovered in the same way that most other tourism has
> and the Thai tourist economy at least likes their money
Yeeees, but the government (regardless of which) has been talking about trying to move to richer tourists since forever, and discouraging large numbers of Russian and Chinese tourists who they think spend less. So yes, lots of Chinese tourists, but if they could wave a magic wand to replace those with Japanese, Korean, and American tourists, they'd do it in a heartbeat
> Bangkok is ethnically a mostly Chinese city
This is untrue, although I've heard (and would believe) that the majority of middle-class Bangkok has some Chinese heritage
> and is also Thailand’s richest region by far
Actually, until Covid's effect on tourism, that crown was held by Phuket, although Phuket also has a high Chinese influence.
Average Chinese tourists often spend a lot more than Norwegian backpackers. And it is a relatively recent phenomena for Thailand to fill up with Chinese tourists over CNY. Why limit your tourist peaks to just thanksgiving and Christmas?
Ya but it isn’t peak season. Things are much affordable in Thailand in February than they are in December. Heck, a week after new years it’s already sane again.
Places like koh chang (my personal favorite) become really deserted, not devoid of people, but you might be the only person at some lazy restaurant or bar that was full and bustling just a few weeks ago.
> As of the 2000 census, there were 6,355,144 registered residents in the city. However, this figure does not take account of the many unregistered residents and daytime visitors from the surrounding metropolitan area. More than 50% of Bangkokians have some Chinese ancestry.
They are still Thai, they often don’t even speak Chinese, just ethnically Chinese (and then I guess it depends on how you count mixed ancestry).
England has a long and proud history of being invaded, colonised and overbred by the French. Anglo-Saxon isn't exactly an English pedigree. It isn't French either, but "French" doesn't have an etymology that originated in France.
So it is quite possible that the argument of Thai people being Chinese would parallel more strongly; English people don't just speak a bit of French, they have the same ancestors and may as well be French. Hopefully the ethnic Chinese entered Thailand under more rosy circumstances!
> has a long and proud history of being invaded, colonised and overbred by the French
That’s not really true though unless you take an excessively liberal interpretation of what it means to be French. The Celts weren’t French, the Danes weren’t French, the Romans weren’t French, the Saxons weren’t French, and even the Normans had only been in France for a century before invading, although they picked up the local language pdq. The only people to successfully invade after 1066 were the Dutch, and they would assure you they weren’t French.
50% is still close to a majority. Perhaps mostly is the wrong word exactly, but it isn’t far off. And I didn’t claim Chinese language was common in either way, just that Chinese ancestry was common, which has huge ramifications to culture. Like Toledo and poles.
When I worked in Beijing, one of my friends was from Fujian. His parents lived on and off in Malaysia, which isn’t very uncommon for people in Fujian. It is alot southern Chinese, mainly Guangdong and Fujian (and maybe Wenzhou) that go abroad. It is much less common in northern China.
It's mostly because societies, where they're minorities, actively work against their assimilation. Just look at the US alone where they're always the outsiders.
I had no idea how sprawling Chinese diaspora was until I was in Ecuador and a sailor on the boat with me took me to a Chinese restaurant. In Ecuador. Of course there would be a Chinese restaurant in Ecuador, but of course there's also a sailor on my US-flagged ship who's ethnically Chinese and speaks Mandarin. And so we ordered Chinese in Chinese, in a Spanish-speaking country. In 1999.
The dominican republic is covered in "Pica Pollo" restaurants and they are often run by chinese people. The main food at pica pollo is fried chicken and sometimes they also serve dominican beans and rice. The only asian dish is fried rice called "cho fan" in spanish. It wasn't until years later that I learned cho fan is just "chǎofàn" spoken with a spanish accent.
I saw lots of chinese people at Pica Pollos across the country, but never saw them outside the restaurants and don't know much about where they live or what life is like for them in the DR. I'm not sure if each pica pollo is run by a chinese family that lives on site at the restaurant.
Amsterdam, Vancouver and lots of other big cities have a large enough Chinese population that there can be whole districts that are mostly Chinese. To the point where the street signs are in Chinese.
I always like to reference the moment I saw on tv in Vancouver interviewing an old lady who was so immersed in her enclave she referred to white people as foreigners.
Someone married an Asian whose family happened to be ethnic Chinese, which made you think "huh these people are everywhere". (With regards to the diaspora comment)
Then the comment, paraphrasing, "they think they're Chinese when they're not Chinese nationals at all". If their ancestors were from China, they don't "think" they're ethnic Chinese, they are ethnic Chinese. Unless you get into the nitty gritty clans and groups of the gigantic landmass. The use of "think ... although" indicates you disagree with how they identify their ethnicity. Thus I assumed you felt it was a problem.
Apologies if I read intentions that weren't there.
Calling it a strong enough link is giving it too much credit. It's more of an acknowledgement of lineage. Not difficult when names, festivals, languages are retained. In fact, if you're within 3 generations of emigration, you would even know the province and town your great grandparents came from.
Just as an example of something with a flimsier premise. Say a German American who doesn't speak the language, don't have known family there, have no loyalty to Germany, celebrate none of the German festivals, and the only indication left is a last name Schmidt. We don't say, "huh the German diaspora is everywhere" when these people say their ancestors are from Germany.
> It’s a problem in that not a common way to perceive one’s identity
This is super common in Europe. We have people who think of themselves as X and speak Xian as their mother tongue even though the region has been part of Y country for centuries.
Slovenians, for example, managed to survive under foreign rule for about 1100 years before re-gaining independence.
Nationality and ethnicity are very different concepts.
for a more American example: Ask any of the indigenous peoples how they feel about their American, Canadian, Mexican, etc. nationality.
It may not be common in your part of the world, it is extremely common in the former USSR (maybe because it was called "the prison of nations" or something to that effect). I am honestly surprised that anyone would have trouble understanding the difference between ethnicity and nationality as it seems very obvious to me and everyone I've ever met.
> Consider the way Russians-in-exile perceive themselves in the current geopolitical context.
Those who I've spoken to identify themselves as Russian citizens temporarily in exile, whilst I am ethnically Russian who has no connection to the country at all. I don't think these are the same.
That's a bad example because France isn't really an ethnicity. It's a group of regions that used to speak different languages even after World War II.
You have Bretons that are ethnically close to Irish/Scotish, Alsaciens who are ethnically Germans, Basque who are similar to the Spanish Basque, Corse who want to be independent...
A better example of a country that more or less encompass an ethnicity would be Germany, or Japan. But even there you'll find exceptions (Ainu in Hokkaido, Okinawa being also ethnically different as Ryukyu vs Yamato...)
I suspect many powerful people in Thailand feel the same (as many powerful families in Thailand are of Chinese decent).
Another interesting tidbit is that after a civil war in China, part of the Chinese army that lost the war fled to northern Thailand. And there they settled in the mountains [0].
From my understanding (from a Dutch man that lives nearby who used to be a travel guide in Thailand) many (Thai-)Chinese people here in northern Thailand still maintain very close ties with their families in Taiwan. Also, several villages here also have their own little "China-towns", which can be interesting places to visit.
> The soldiers' war did not end after their own "long march" from Yunnan to Möng Hsat in Burma's Shan State. The Burmese soon discovered that a foreign army was camped on their soil, and launched an offensive. The fighting continued for 12 years, and several thousand KMT soldiers were eventually evacuated to Taiwan. When China entered the Korean War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a desperate need for intelligence on China. The agency turned to the two KMT generals, who agreed to slip some soldiers back into China for intelligence-gathering missions. In return, the agency offered arms to equip the generals to retake China from their bases in the Shan State. The KMT army tried on no fewer than seven times between 1950 and 1952 to invade Yunnan, but was repeatedly driven back into the Shan State. The ending of the Korean War in 1953 was not the end of the KMT's fight against the communist Chinese and Burmese armies, which continued on for many years, supported by Washington and Taiwan and subsequently funded by the KMT's involvement in the Golden Triangle's drug trade.
>In 1961, Tuan led some 4,000 battle-weary KMT troops out of Burma to a mountainous sanctuary in Mae Salong in Thailand. In exchange for asylum, the Thai government allowed them to stay on the understanding that they would assist in policing the area against communist infiltration. As a result, most of the village's inhabitants today are ethnic Chinese and direct descendants of those KMT soldiers. At the same time, General Lee of the 3rd Regiment established his headquarters at Tham Ngob, north-west of Chiang Mai. The KMT army was renamed "Chinese Irregular Forces" (CIF) and was placed directly under the control of a special task force, code-named "04", commanded by Bangkok.
> After the soldiers reached Mae Salong, China and Thailand struck an agreement to transfer the administration of the group to the Thai government. The provincial governor of southern Thailand, Pryath Samanmit, was reassigned as the governor of Chiang Rai, to oversee the KMT division, but upon taking up his position, Samanmit was killed by communist insurgents. Soon afterwards, the KMT division was ordered to assist the Thai government in countering the advancing armies on Thailand's northern borders and the internal threat from the Communist Party of Thailand. Fierce battles were fought in the mountains of Doi Laung, Doi Yaw, Doi Phamon, and Mae Aabb, and the communist uprising was successfully countered. The bloodiest operation was launched on 10 December 1970, a five-year-long campaign that claimed over 1,000 lives, many from landmines. It was not until 1982 that the soldiers were able to give up their arms and were discharged to settle down to a normal life at Mae Salong. As a reward for their service, the Thai government gave citizenship to most of the KMT soldiers and their families.
That's interesting. I learned that historically, China has been many 'nations', with related but different languages - more like Europe than like the US. And I learned that every Chinese government has struggled to hold together these regional peoples under one central government.
The current map of China is one variation of many, many historical maps, which vary considerably. (Ask the Tibetans, in particular.) It might look like a cohesive government today, but so did the USSR - the Communists suppressed the ethnic differences, but the USSR exploded into many different countries when the Communists lost power - including Ukraine, Belarus, Modova (afaik), the Baltic states, Central Asian countries, and more.
I wonder what the truth is of China now; it's a question nobody asks.
It's not that unique, really. It's quite the same as India. I guess it's harder for us westerners to appreciate Chinese diversity because they don't broadcast so much English content about themselves.
If the European Union had been more successful and had a couple more generations totally immersed speaking English, you could imagine some Chinese people in the year 2123 saying 'wow, Europe is actually a whole Civilization politically unified as a nation. Who would have thought".
That'd be true today in a timeline where Napoleon won.
I don't know about Japan, but this is certainly not the case for Italy and Germany. Even though they might have started existing as political entities in the late 19th century, the idea of "Germany" or "Italy" existed long before that. To give you an example, both Dante and Machiavelli mention an idea of a unified state for Italians. Not to mention the Roman home province of "Italia" which corresponds more or less with today's Italy.
Although off topic from the original post, would you entertain this question? What's Taiwan's position on integration with China? What does Taiwan want for itself? I'd like to hear more about that minus American and Chinese input.
This is an extremely interesting question because I’ve heard various viewpoints. The vast majority want to keep the “technical debt” (legacy code being “Republic of China”) of this uneasy bridge to China—that is trade and movement of people between the strait, and maintaining the status quo of the “Republic of China” government (controlling Taiwan) and PRC (controlling China or “mainland”).
Many Taiwanese don’t want war, but they already are functionally independent. The PRC has never governed in Taiwan. The ROC, which governed China from 1912 to 1949, governs Taiwan and its child islands.
Many young Taiwanese just want to be Taiwanese and left alone, but the vast majority want to keep the status quo as long as it’s tenable (it’s not, Xi Jinping has indicated a timeline). The big question is how this might be possible without poking the bear that resembles Pooh… It’s obvious to most Taiwanese that China won’t keep its promises, since it made clear violations of promises made to the HK people and UK.
Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war.
> Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war.
Maybe data suggest otherwise?
The number of Taiwaneses that support Taiwan to "Maintain status quo, move towards unification" and "Unification as soon as possible" has been dropped from 12.8% and 5.0% in 2018 to 7.5% and 1.4% in 2019. Meanwhile the number of Taiwaneses that support "Maintain status quo, move towards independence" has been rised from 12.8% in 2018 to 25.8% in 2020.
Note: I am a one of the HongKongers fled to Taiwan after the Anti-Extradition protest in 2019.
Well, if China invades it'll have even less incentive to maintain anything remotely like pre-invasion. You gave HK as the example. That was only paperwork to get in the front door.
A HKer murdered a HKer. said murderer moved back to HK. HK government said "nope can't deal with that sorry"
Taiwan: fine, we can negotiate the extradition if you insist on us taking the case.
HK gov: actually we are gonna make an all encompassing law that deals with extradition. It also makes extraditing criminals/political refugees/booksellers/whoever the ccp request quick and easy but please ignore it.
Having lived in Taiwan both before and after China's crackdown in Hong Kong, I can say that post crackdown, I haven't encountered a single Taiwanese that wants any integration with China. They just want to be Taiwanese, which after nearly a century of being an independently governed country, is very different from the life on mainland China.
And yet most of the young people I encounter are somewhat resigned to the inevitability of invasion.
Prior to the HK affair, some older Taiwanese I met would suggest that closer integration could bring economic benefits, but I don't hear that these days.
With a number of HK journalists that I respect now in prison or having fled, I can only agree. The HK spirit and culture that once thrived in the city has all but disappeared, as the Chinese government applies their embrace and extinguish approach to cultural assimilation. When you can be imprisoned for life for uttering the wrong words, it tends to silence any dissent.
Economical benefits has always been a hit and miss and lots of the older generation have learnt their lesson (even before the HK affair).
Lots of producers of different kinds have had their technologies copied, skills learnt and then abandoned for and only to hire them on a consultancy basis for when things break.
In hindsight it has likely hurt Taiwan's economy more than it has helped.
My wife is Taiwanese. She's seriously planning on fighting for her country should there be an invasion. She doesn't want anything to do with China and my understanding is that most younger taiwanese share that opinion. But some consider that a reunion could bring them better economical prospects and would be willing to sacrifice their freedom.
One surprising aspect of that is Taiwan's very limited compulsery military service - I think it was a month, recently lengthened to 6 months? What I read says that such service is very unpopular.
I don't understand a lot about it, but wouldn't people expecting an invasion from a much larger country want universal compulsary service and as much training as they can get? Even for those less motivated about winning, it would help them survive a war.
A strong majority want to maintain the status quo or gradually move toward independence. Very few want unification. It's important to understand that China promises to invade if Taiwan declares independence (the Anti-Secession Law requires that response), which means many people would ideally prefer independence but in practice support the status quo because de facto independence (the status quo) is better than being invaded. Both sides of Taiwanese politics formally support the status quo, although the DPP has stronger pro-independence leanings.
Taiwanese identity (as opposed identifying as Chinese) has also trended up in recent decades and now most people only consider themselves to be Taiwanese and not Chinese. https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7800&id=6961
Since Taiwan became a democracy, Taiwan's stance has always been against "one country, two systems". It was like that wayyyyy before the Hong Kong protest.
Mention of the chip industry makes it hard to take the source as unbiased from US side. Other comments were more insightful on the perspective of Taiwanese and on the cultural and historical aspects.
> it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been.
I don't want to reduce what you've said, but the fact is that Taiwan grew rich because of US support that helped integrate it into the global economy, and that wouldn't have come without its opposition to the mainland.
Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR. India plans on doing the same wrt to China, but that country, like Africa, is too deeply colonized (likewise, with a despicable morally corrupt elite) to do anything of value to its own people IMO.
People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream.
Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth (regardless of what 'expats', who often both fetish-ize and dehumanize Asians, think).
> that country, like Africa, is too deeply colonized (likewise, with a despicable morally corrupt elite) to do anything of value to its own people IMO.
> Since the 2000s, India has made remarkable progress in reducing absolute poverty. Between FY2011/12 and 2015, poverty declined from 21.6 to an estimated 13.4 percent at the international poverty line (2011 PPP $1.90 per person per day), continuing the historical trend of robust reduction in poverty. Aided by robust economic growth, more than 90 million people escaped extreme poverty and improved their living standards during this period.
And, as another reply noted, China grew rich after the USSR collapsed. So your facts are wrong.
But even apart from the facts, your thesis doesn't make much sense to me. "Western powers helped Taiwan and China grow rich because politics, and this is bad because ..."?
Can you provide any good sources for these claims?
> China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR.
China's split from the USSR began in the early 1970s under Mao. The first seeds of economic growth didn't sprout until the late 1970s under Deng Xiaopeng. Most of China's economic growth didn't happen until after the USSR was gone.
i can't speak for the Taiwanese link, but my recollection was that China's rise in wealth (and investment and support from the US) only really took off in the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
hard no. usa helped but taiwan themselves made TSMC's due to their work and family culture and studying and working hard their entire lives. To say Nvidia and AMD and Gigabyte and the numerous brands from Taiwan are due to USA is farfetched. It's actually more reasonable to say it's due to China or Malaysia/Thailand etc where the manufacturing is then USA.
They got all the know how from the US as a jump start. Plus loads of financial aid especially during the 90s.
Sure, during the 2000s they moved ahead as they weren't stupid and didn't blow that chance, they're smart and hard working, but their rise is ultimately due to the US great interest in that island for military/strategic reasons.
Still really off the mark. Things like TSMC were started in a lonely garage in a warehouse district in Taipei. No USA help in sight. USA have given a few planes here and there but that's not even close to 1% of the support to have given Taiwan's rise. USA got all the know how from ancient China too. Financial aid is correlative not causative as a majority of countries receive it and don't rise like Taiwan has so it's A/B tested as not the reason. As an American it's egocentric of american's to think another place's rise is due to some abstract american propogandist support that really has no effect on Taiwan's rise.
> Things like TSMC were started in a lonely garage in a warehouse district in Taipei.
What a romantic reinterpretation of reality. TSMC was founded by a guy who studied at MIT and then worked in semiconductors at Texas Instruments for over twenty years, after which he was tasked by Taiwans government to develop the country's technological sector.
> USA have given a few planes here and there but that's not even close to 1% of the support to have given Taiwan's rise.
Maybe if you total it over the last 6 decades or so. It's hardly surprising they don't need financial support for their economy today. In the 50s, their GDP didn't even hit one billion yet, and over that decade and the early 60s, the US provided more than 2 billion dollars in financial aid, in the early years over 10% of their GDP. No other Asian country ever received that much financial aid (in relative terms). This was absolutely a relevant factor that jump started their economy.
> I don't want to reduce what you've said, but the fact is that Taiwan grew rich because of US support that helped integrate it into the global economy, and that wouldn't have come without its opposition to the mainland.
Taiwan didn't get rich because of the US. Taiwan got rich because of mainland china. The rise of Hong kong, taiwan, singapore and even to some degree south korea all resulted from the opening of china in the late 60s and 70s. The chinese elites' decision to open up trade with the world is what resulted in the rise of the asian tigers.
> Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR.
Had nothing to do with the USSR. China was never a pawn for or against the USSR or US or anyone else. China got rich for the same reason saudi arabia got rich or any other nation got rich. China decided to utilize their greatest resource ( a billion relatively cheap labor ) after the USSR fell.
> People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream.
Who underestimates it? The entire world order is understood to be an american world order by everyone on earth.
> Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth
Barring ww3, I doubt china's growth can be slowed. We shall have to wait and see.
Hong Kong was promised to have democracy, human rights and access to China. If they had kept those promises, then I believe many Taiwanese would have welcomed reunification.
We all knew (hopefully) that would never happen (keep their promise). It's nothing China specific. Even lots of elected politicians fail on it in any country.
I think hindsight might've clouded your assessment of the attitude during the time pre-HK crackdown.
It was originally a time of optimistic hope that China would become more and more democratic, and the integration of HK back to the mainland will not have been hard (at least, china would meet somewhere in the middle).
There was already a wave of people considering, planning and did actually leave pre-1997 and around that time. A few did go back to HK afterwards when things looked better but left again due to the current issues.
I don't know who was optimistic. The West? Definitely not those in HK. It was a time when anti-China sentiment was high and supported by the media, artists, etc as the trend (vs the crackdown now). There were songs and campaigns supporting those that wanted freedom. Learnt from history many of the older generation that have witnessed the war and after knew of how CCP and army worked.
No 1 wanted a death sentence either. Those have worked in the mainland know the "law" doesn't exist as it does in the West (including HK at the time). Gang activity vastly dropped post-1997 because of a fear of the death sentence. A lot of them and their money left for other countries.
British HK was an act of aggression and a national humiliation for China.
The ROC/Taiwan was also happy to see the British go and their regret was that the communists succeeded where they had failed (and in fact did nothing at all as all foreign settlements were kicked out by the PRC).
Why would ROC/Taiwan be happy about it? It helps distract the PRC from ROC/Taiwan. The focus has shifted to Taiwan recently because HK has been "dealt with".
British HK was an humiliation for China. That does not mean for the PRC, that does mean China as a whole and a whole people. Both sides for the straight were glad to see the British go.
It's a lack of cultural and historical understanding not to realise that.
Likewise the focus since 1949 has always been Taiwan. It's HK that has been used as a distraction and 'tool' by the West.
Your statement does not falsify the quoted statement; both can be true that the ROC would not surrender and that China might inevitably absorb Taiwan. If we want to get really pedantic, no timeline was also stated, so this could also be 50 to 500 years from now.
Your comment is indeed pedantic and misses the point.
Obviously, the context the meaning was that there was a cause to effect link between how things were going in China and, especially HK, and the likelihood of a reunification with Taiwan.
So I pointed out that the situation in HK is not really relevant because, even if it had gone perfectly 'well' the ROC would still never had surrendered to the communists. The bottom line is that regime change on the mainland is a necessary condition.
> it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution.
How would you wrap Singapore into your comment? I was recently there and took note of what looked like significant Chinese cultural influence almost everywhere.
Unlike Taiwan, Singapore is a multi-ethnic state where English is the lingua franca, and the government has a very heavy focus on racial harmony etc.
Also, Singaporean of Chinese descent are generally not huge fans of China. While some older folks have drunk the CCP Kool-Aid, among the young there is a lot of straight up racism/prejudice against "PRCs" (mainlanders), especially around ten years ago when there was a huge wave of immigrants, many of whom didn't even try to assimilate (learning English etc). Taiwan, by contrast, is viewed very favorably.
Singapore is a republic with a large population of the Chinese diaspora. However, the control of government under its system has not changed parties since its independence from the UK (whether you agree or not, some have called it de facto single party state). Chinese culture is weaved extensively into its culture, including Chinese character names in identification cards for those that identify as Chinese ethnicity.
I have many Singaporean friends of Chinese ethnicity, and most would see themselves distinct from China—not Chinese but of Chinese heritage.
Singapore is a complex beast. On the one hand, all the political tools to kick the PAP out exist. Elections are free albeit not entirely fair.
That said the PAP has used the legal system to exclude opposition candidates and the election districts are gerrymandered [0].
But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections [1]. They've steered the economy well. The PAP regularly receive praise here on HN because of their effective technocracy.
> But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections
It only takes one person going "rogue" to topple this system of trust. Is it so hard to imagine that not all authoritarian systems could be continuously benevolent?
You’re right of course but I think the more likely cause will be typical. A policy misstep, political scandal, protests, external factors etc. The PAP will be booted out democratically if it happens at all.
But having a party that can, during the "good times" manipulate the situation, such that during a bad time, they can still stay in power. Aka, they only "pull the trigger" after they know they'd be kicked out, thus preventing themselves from getting kicked out.
Which is why the preparations should be prevented, even against someone who seems benevolent at the time.
and it's not just one of those fake democracy - it's as free as a true democratic country can be, as experienced anecdotally and demonstrated in their constant top 3 finish in Freedom Index.
I watched a Taiwanese election in Taiwan. I observed their polling stations. A Taiwanese citizen started a conversation and educated me, an American, on democracy and elections.
This Taiwanese person told me that elections are for the loser. If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose.
That's why electronic voting machines are anti-thetical to the purpose of an election. Electronic voting machines exchange trust for a more efficient election. That is why Taiwan does not use electronic voting machines.
That is a pretty impressive insight that was absent from my American civic education. I was very impressed with the civic education in Taiwan, and I was impressed with the average level of education in Taipei.
My subjective experience as an American was that Democracy is more healthy in Taiwan than it is in America.
Have to agree, from study in Taiwan, life in the PRC, Hong Kong, and South Korea over decades: democracy in Taiwan is healthier than that in the U.S.
For the skeptical, check out videos of how ballots are counted in Taiwan. Individual ballots are lifted out on the ballot box, one-by-one, and held up for any and all observers to verify. Compare this to how the matter is typically conducted in the U.S., in near-secrecy behind closed doors, involving convoluted use of a congeries of machines, having closed-source software.
every single election in the US is subject to a complete audit after the fact. counting quickly and verifying accurately after the fact are not mutually exclusive.
If you're an American, you'll be all too aware of what a mess the US electoral system is, subject to varying rules across thousands of jurisdictions, large and small, and involving now prolonged "early voting", "absentee voting" for a wide variety of reasons, mail in ballots only for some states, little or no ID verification for some states, outdated voter rolls, legal "ballot harvesting" etc.
Growing up we used to politely nod at the common belief that the 1960 presidential race (Kennedy vs. Nixon) was decided by Mayor Daley's corrupt intervention in Chicago. And, of course, the wild 2000 Gore vs. Bush race decided in Florida further eroded hugely trust in the electoral system. And etc. etc.
Considering how close you came to a coup and how the elected president could spend months trying to destroy democracy while also personally using his power and influence to try to sway local officials, it doesn’t seem like the complete audit isn’t really helping. Especially when 40%+ of the population thinks those audits are manufactured lies from main stream media.
How is the coup narrative so pervasive? There was no institutional support, nobody got killed except for a rioter, they all cleared out promptly by curfew. By all indications it was a riot and a pretty mild one at that given the previous summer. How is that a coup?
We know what rioters are capable of when they actually want to overthrow govt: look at the autonomous zones and capitals that got ransacked in the upper north west (Seattle, Portland, etc). Those were over weeks where cops weren't allowed into entire city blogs, they declared themselves autonomous, and people were killed to that ends. They also received tons of institutional support from media, politicians, and wealthy people.
I don't get how any honest assessment takes the actions by the partisans in DC as a coup. At LEAST the other riots were coups too, or more truly, only the leftist partisan riots can be considered attempted local coups given their stated goals and actions.
If you remember how the narrative evolved in real-time: in the preceding months the talking point was "only leftists riot", then on the capital riot and following days, the dominant narrative was "SEE! right wing people ALSO riot". Only days after that did the language start to coalesce around "actually this was was a COUP", and even then it was seen as hyperbolic even on reddit. Now it's been repeated so many times it's just taken as fact.
Even a successful coup is possible with no one getting killed;
> they all cleared out promptly by curfew
Because the coup attempt had already failed.
> By all indications it was a riot and a pretty mild one at that given the previous summer. How is that a coup?
“Coup” is not defined by intensity but by objective. The overtly intent was to use intimidation and/or violence against government officials to coerce a rejection of the electoral votes from sufficient states to allow the sitting President to extend his term nothwithstanding having been defeated in the election, at the instigation of the sitting President. It is a textbook autocoup attempt by its goals and ultimate instigation, which failed because the rioters were held back long enough for members of Congress to escape, but not by a wide margin.
Was it a hastily conceived, poorly coordinated, amateurish autocoup attempt? Yes, absolutely. Does that reduce its severity as a crime? No, no it doesn’t.
> I don't get how any honest assessment takes the actions by the partisans in DC as a coup.
It was a coup attempt, specifically an attempted autocoup. It wasn't a coup, because it failed.
> At LEAST the other riots were coups
No, none of those were coups, or even coup attempts. (The “Autonomous Zone” might be viewed as a hyperlocalized secession attempt, but that’s a distinct thing from a coup, seeking to separate territory from the control of an established government, not unlawfully take or extend control of said government.)
Why did the "coup" fail? We've all seen the videos, police never really showed up in force, army never showed up, national guard never showed up. It ended because...people went home. If it were actually an attempted coup, why didn't they dig in? Why didn't a single politician back them?
You just seem convinced of a coup and nothing will shake you. What did they do that was wholly different from a regular riot? Even on the inside they're just taking photos and walking around.
I think you are oriented for defending the American election. I think a better way to orient is to compare how Taiwanese elections are run to how American elections are run.
My assertion is that Taiwanese elections are much more simple and therefore much more understandable and much more trustable. American elections might be cheaper per capita.
If we are choosing a method of elections that is more complex and results in less trust, why are we doing it that way?
In many places in the US you cannot bring your children with you to vote. So many people rely on public schools as day care so that they can vote. In places that cancelled school on election day recently (people vote at schools often, and there were security concerns after recent shootings), the voter turnout was lower in segments of the population that statistically are less likely to have family/partner available to watch children, or the means to pay for childcare.
I think it is fair to restate that your argument is: "Because there are classes of people who cannot vote because children are restricted in voting areas, election day should not be a federal holiday."
I am having a little trouble taking that in good faith. For one, the evidence presented is not of a holiday shared by everyone (friends who could watch kids, partners who also have jobs, etc).
That's before asking if it's right that children cannot be with you to vote or if that could be done better. That's before asking if there was higher turnout in other groups, like underpaid teachers.
That really wasn't my argument at all. In so far as I had one. The US system has so many more severe issues that a holiday seems minor and it is somewhat complex as an issue. Letting a parent bring in five children probably does create concerns as well.
Other than bankers and people who work for the government (like teachers) few people get government holidays in my experience. There is a surge of temporary daycare workers for those days so parents can still go to work. Poorer parents dread those days. Public school, especially post pandemic has turned into free childcare and little more due to teacher shortages.
Early voting seems like a good thing to continue to me.
Fixing the issues that make your vote irrelevant at the national level unless you live anywhere but a very short list of places would be much higher on my list than a holiday. The gerrymandering is painfully obvious on the voting maps.
How hard an election is to rig is not the issue,itshow obviously unriggable it appears to the losing voters. That's the (well, an) important thing the American system is missing.
I disagree. There was no evidence of fraud in 2020, yet the losing party at 80-90% rate still believes it was stolen. At that point, there's nothing that can be done to dissuade.
I thought there was evidence of fraud in 2020, but the problem was that the "evidence" was bogus. One of the complaints I remember was that the results swung sharply from one side to the other at some point in the reporting process, but that of course was because the initial results were from in-person voting, and the mail-in/drop-in votes were counted last, so when those results were added, then suddenly the "blue" candidates were winning, because the red voters tended to vote in-person far more than their blue counterparts. The red voters somehow refuse to believe this however and think the election was rigged.
> If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose.
The idea seems correct, however, unsure how electronic voting machine comes into the picture, perhaps only in a mental sense, but people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
there's that, but an electronic voting machine is more complex. Election fraud for paper ballots is "easily" detected, but not really so for electronic voting machines.
This might sound snide, but I assure you I am asking in good faith to prove a point. What does it mean to audit the election, without skipping the complexity?
A few questions I would expect to be answered:
How do we know all votes cast were legitimate?
How do we know that the voting machines recorded votes correctly?
How do we know the auditors are good faith actors?
How do we know ballots weren't lost/delayed (mail in)?
How do we know legitimate looking votes were cast by the right person?
My overall assertion is not that we can't know. It's that voting is so complex that this can't be easily explained in a satisfying way to (or by) a layman. It's so complex that "trust" is a core part of the election process.
Should I have to take a quarter long class in election mechanics to be satisfied that our voting system is legitimate? That's a bit of hyperbole, but I truly don't know how our elections work and I don't think I could understand them in an afternoon and it doesn't have to be that way.
Taiwan's elections are simple and self-evident. American elections are extremely complex and require trust in institutions.
Taiwan's elections optimize for trust. America's elections optimize for cost. Trust is priceless.
I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
> I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
Every electronic vote has a physical record, and is checked against each other. Fraud/mistakes occur, but never at the scale to shift any election.
Ok, a global wikipedia article. Is there any example in the US of fraud existing at a scale that once audited could have changed the outcome on an election?
That's an hour long technical read. Do you think your average person with high school or a GED as their highest level of education or less, ~40% of the country, is going to be able to read such a meaty document and make sense of it?
8% of Americans are basically illiterate. 54% read below a 6th grade level.
I am not trying to attack you with that statement. This is a statement form one liberal to someone else I perceive as liberal leaning:
Your education privilege is off the charts.
We could have a system like Taiwan, but instead we have an electronic voting system. How do they compare and contrast? Why were electronic voting machines pushed on us? Which one has better understand-ability properties? Which one has better trust properties? What are the properties of electronic voting machines that make them desirable? Why do we have to convince people that voting machines are good (implying a lot of people don't think they are)?
Fully electronic voting cannot be inspected sufficiently to audit. Too many points of failure, too many blackboxes, no way to detect failures.
This has been thoroughly, repeatedly, exhaustively researched and debated. Which is why most jurisdictions (in the USA) have returned to paper ballots.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
This is misleading. The vast majority will have had no exposure to that evidence (there's no big stage you can do convincing presentations on that everyone will see).
Heck, I wouldn't know how to go about finding that evidence atm.
Democracy is about submission of the minority. To believe in democracy means to believe that when you are in the minority, you must submit to things you disagree with. There is grey area around human rights and bad faith legislation/corruption.
If I don't trust the election, that means I don't believe I'm actually in the minority, and if I don't believe I am in the minority, then I am being subjugated and oppressed by people who are using power to get their way rather than a mandate from the people to execute the people's will.
I am extremely liberal and Trump is the avatar of everything that I hate, but I don't believe the election is legitimate either. A sitting president called an election official to sway the election, and 2 years later it's not clear there are going to be any consequences. The mechanics of mail in ballots was messed with during an election cycle, and the person who did that is still in control of the postal system. If there are no timely consequences for attempting to cheat, how can you trust the integrity of the system? I don't. There are clearly no checks and balances for actual and obvious attempts to manipulate elections.
I think you can talk to just about anyone who works in security and they will tell you there is no reason to trust voting machines. On slashdot, the technical community nearly universally said "this is a bad idea" when Diebold voting machines were first adopted. That sentiment has been strong through technical communities for a long time. Even today, I think if you asked HN "from a technical point of view are voting machines a good idea?" there would be a resounding, absolutely not.
Because we won, it's less of an issue for us, but had we lost, we would question the results too. We would look around us and experience that no one else liked trump and ask "how can these results be legitimate" too, the same way they look at the people around them and go "everyone liked trump, how can these results be legitimate?" He called a Georgian election official, are we sure that didn't work? Did he call other state's officials and we didn't hear about it because it did work? How do we know? How do we know Biden didn't do that?
Denial is the first stage of grief.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
You are failing to have empathy for these people. Evidence cannot be presented, because the mechanics of elections are not able to produce evidence. I am a well educated US citizen, but I think our elections amount to "trust us." Of course people don't believe evidence presented, because the evidence amounts to "trust us." "Trust this extremely complex system that only a handful of people might know how it functions in depth."
You say "regardless of evidence presented," but what if the system is not actually capable of producing satisfying evidence? What if the evidence is actually not satisfying? What if there were systems that could be satisfying, bit this one isn't able to be?
In Taiwan I could go watch an election and I found the legitimacy of it to be self evident because I found the mechanics of it simple and hard to argue with. I don't think there is anything self-evident about our elections. In America, who runs the voting machines is an important question. In Taiwan, who facilitates the voting stations doesn't make much difference. "Are the voting stations being watched" is an important question in Taiwan. "Are the voting stations being watched" doesn't really make sense here since we have mail in ballots and other methods.
Taiwanese don't have to say "trust us" they can say "go watch the election happen."
A hard pill to swallow for most of liberal America is that conservatives can be right for very wrong reasons. It's easy to say "you don't think the results are legitimate because you lost," it's much harder to say "can somebody in good faith not trust the election results?" "what might we have done to decrease trust in elections?" "Can we make our election system more resistant to claims of bad faith?"
> That's why electronic voting machines are anti-thetical to the purpose of an election
Losers who have stopped believing in elections will complain about any mechanism, be it electronic or analog.
(In the US, they typically don't believe the hand-recounts, either. They do believe in gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement, though, so that's how the game gets played.)
I don't live in Taiwan but my impressions - people are a lot more engaged with politics, general political knowledge and awareness is higher, voter turnout is higher - all of these may be as a result of the ever-looming threat of being subsumed by the mainland, but also maybe an enthusiasm for democracy since it's relatively new to the country!
Taiwan has its issues with first past the post voting, quality of news media and control of media (eg by sketchy foreign corporations) and conga line of infotainment propaganda outlets. There's a big economic incentive in reunificiation for some actors which perverts politics and discourse to an extent.
But to be honest.. America is currently a really low bar for democracy in the first place (speaking as someone living outside USA as well)
Thanks for the feedback. For example, the US Congress really could use some of the technical bureaucratic competence I hear Taiwan has. US institutions are in post-WWII lows right now, which is like a moist, dark, sugary place for attracting larger-than-life-personalities to no ultimate good.
As one smart guy wrote, there's three kinds of power: tradition, institutions, and personality. My coralary: weak institutions attract strong personality.
See the other conversation re: China & Taiwan below. It'd be a shame to see a good thing go away.
It is difficult to get distances in time into my own mind. But for those other than me reading this and having trouble with this mentally. The first democratically elected president in Taiwan in 1996, which was arguably a high point in the democratisation process, is now in 2023 temporally equidistant to the moon landing in 1969 and us in the present.
It's also difficult for societies with populations absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history, how developments 30, 50, or even 100 and 200 years still leave all kinds of traces and influences, materialized in attitudes, political affiliations, laws, and so on.
History is not a "that was back in the day, doesn't matter anymore" affair.
> societies with populations absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history
That doesn't really describe Taiwan. I'm still not sure of the point you're trying to make, but it seems like you are really trying to push down the people who managed to break free of the dictatorship imposed on them for 50 years by the mainlanders who came to Taiwan in 1949.
I'm not sure what your beef really is, but I have yet to read any reason for dismissing the decades old democracy that now exists in Taiwan. People my age might have been born under martial law, but most Taiwanese alive today have lived their whole adult life under this democracy. That's not incompatible with having knowledge of recent history, and Taiwan also has schools.
Your response feels largely tangential to the point I was making: That the 90s feel closer in history than they really are (especially to those of us that “were there”).
It also feels like a borderline attack, implying that I and others are somehow “absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history”. Pretty odd to make a statement like that in response to someone who you know next to nothing about, no? If you want to contribute to a good debate and hope to bring me around to your point of view, I would ask that you try harder.
>Your response feels largely tangential to the point I was making: That the 90s feel closer in history than they really are (especially to those of us that “were there”).
Well, either the point you were making was even more tangential to what was in this thread - a general observation unrelated to what we were discussing, or (as I read it), aside from the literal point, there was a deeper implicit point pertinent to what was discussed.
In this case, I wrote something along the line of "as close as year X, Y was the case", so your response can be read as: "you might think this date is close and thus events from that era still matter, but we tend to overlook how close a period in living memory is, so they matter less than you think".
>Pretty odd to make a statement like that in response to someone who you know next to nothing about, no
It wasn't writing about you, it even explicitly writes "it's difficult for societies with populations (...)". I was writing about a cultural difference.
Certain cultures got it lucky and didn't have much history of the sort to concern with, and so don't have much of a historical perspective (and how history affects the present). It's easier to have that perspective when you have had huge events like wars, dictatorships, and so on in your local livable history, than when you just read about those in the media (if many even do much of that).
You are entitled to your subjective interpretation. But my own reflection was that I perceived 1996 to be closer to the present than 1969 would have been in 1996. Thus I wanted to state a bias that I had discovered in myself, along with a trick to make it more obvious to perceive it.
> It wasn't writing about you, it even explicitly writes "it's difficult for societies with populations (...)". I was writing about a cultural difference.
Your initial response (which is what I responded to) was phrased differently in terms of the first few words. I do not have access to it, but I think my interpretation was more reasonable before you (arguably) improved it.
Regardless, this is greatly diverging from my minute initial observation. Thus I will “leave it here” and look forward to seeing you in another discussion in the future.
Yeah, god forbid somebody doesn't have the US viewpoint on foreign policy and other countries, especially given its excellent track record and how it has fucked up one country after another for a century!
Anybody having different opinions must be burned to the stake!
I don't believe anyone is saying that. Reasonable objection is fine.
However the reductio ad absurdum tactic you employ to dismiss pointing out actual problematic behavior is typical of trolling itself. My opinion? I don't think that's an accident.
"That was then and this is now" is not how it works in such transitions (and after such wide-ranging power and influence of the far right, and such bad blood from the murders and torture). Not any more than it worked for the blacks after 1865 (or 1964 for that matter), to give an example from US history.
Hell, it took decades even for post-WWII Germany to shake the ex-Nazi-high-ranking influence in its politics, media, finances, and so on, and the Nazi rule was just 12 years, and they had far more horribleness and more shame as a motive to stomp out those elements after 1945...
The same has been true in post-Franco Spain, and any other place with such history.
Keep in mind Germany had to deal with the Soviet threat at the same time. Sadly, the communist influence there will take a few more decades to stomp out.
Things seem to have worked out fine for Central and Eastern European post-communist countries. Also Portugal, Greece.
>If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history
OTOH this attitude is why PRC finally calibrating HK for PRC nationals/one-way permits instead of privileged foreign expats was long overdue. Mainlanders I know in HK find the new mix PRC/HK mix more preferable than UK/HK, less visible discrimination etc. Local nativism still exists but less overt than pre NSL. Applies to the mainland as well - first exodus of privileged discontent expats who thought they were indispensable in the mid 2010s - only to be replaced by qualified nationals. Think of it as PRC fixing their H1B problem. Something many in tech have comparably aligned opinions on.
E: over comment limit @charlieyu1
That's ~2 years worth of one way permits from PRC. Xi can snap his fingers and send 1M unemployed college educated mainlanders to HK tomorrow if he wants. Let's not pretend it's a big / existential loss, reality is PRC now has an abundance of talent who are much more deserving of living/running HK than most HKers who were merely privileged to be born in a city with constrained immigration requirements that puts mainland hukous system to shame. Under any reasonably fair system, HK should be treated like just ANY OTHER CHINESE CITY, like how under qualified people get squeezed out via gentrification in tier1 cities in every other country leading to local culture changes. It's not pretty, but it's how most of the world functions.
Ultimately HK "culture" is the result of undue privilege enforced by 2 systems that benefit locals and expats instead of 1B+ PRC nationals. Expats I get, because some expertise needs to be imported and you need foreigners in the country for track2 diplomacy. But unlike pre 2000s when PRC human capital was borderline North Korea, there's nothing particularly deserving about a person born and raised in HK anymore. If anything they are increasingly less deserving, with a particularly bad human capita / talent pool. HK _still_ some of the poorest tertiary education statistics by high income standards (~25% when it should be 40-50+%) to stay competitive. Meanwhile PRC is spitting out 8M+ higher-ed a year, there's no reason why HKers or expats should have priority over qualified mainlanders anymore. If HKers want to emigrate, go ahead, there's no shortage of deserving replacements in mainland with 100x more bodies to draw from. For mainlanders, continuing HK privilege simply doesn't make sense anymore.
And the result is mass exodus of Hongkongers, especially the younger generation. 110K people moved to UK alone in the last two years. That's 1.5% of population, and UK alone. People are leaving the city faster than back in East Germany before Berlin Wall.
And why people born and raised in Hong Kong have to give way to privileged mainlanders who don't share any culture with us at all?
They may have moved, but how many will ultimately stay in the UK?
I find that asians often have very rosy ideas about the UK, but once they're here they're bound to notice that it's a decaying shithole and leave. Or maybe commit suicide like that 27 year old woman in London.
UK is far from a decaying shithole and based on recent polling many of the elements of Brexit may possibly be wound back in coming years so its future is far more optimistic.
And yet for all its problems it is still a modern, vibrant, multicultural, successful democracy on the doorstep of Europe. Which is why so many people continue to emigrate there.
It might still be better than Asia with crazy working hours, bosses that call/text you outside of work non-stop, having to attend to work gatherings, working on weekends, etc.
Not like people don't commit suicide elsewhere. UK might not be the best but it's still a lot better than some places.
If you swap out the entire population of HK with those from PRC then all you have left is a name and a bunch of buildings. Because it is the people and their unique customs that defines a culture.
You seem to be way too flippant about cultural genocide.
The irony is if Hong Kong was just another Chinese city, OP wouldn't even be in Hong Kong. It is the Hong Kong people and its culture that made Hong Kong into a world class city, not mainlanders. Take that away and Hong Kong will become a second tier city. Mainlanders cannot keep Hong Kong first tier. If they could, they would have done it in China already.
So are you distinguishing "Cantonese Culture" from "Hong Kong Culture"? Guangzhou (just up the river) has a flourishing Cantonese culture... which is where most of Hong Kong culture came from originally.
So really you are talking about the cultural differences developed from 1950 to now. Which is still quite large because of the cultural revolution... but "Cultural Genocide" seems like not the correct term.
No one's swapping out the entire population. But populations change, when people move, demographics recompose, and local customs accordingly. HK nativism/localism rose after ~150/day “one way permits” from PRC to HK (for the wealthy and family reunification) led to 1/7 (15%) of the city's growth coming from mainlanders in 20 years. That's relatively fast, as is visible within a generation, but also about as subtle as the US racial composition going from 75% white to 60% in the same amount of time.
Que similar REEEs from a bunch of young, privileged HK nativist about dirty mainlander shitting on their streets, taking their jobs and leeching their benefits (all somewhat true). But in America/west they're not called freedom fighters, they're called alt right protecting white culture, and (not accusing you) tends to adopt the flippant narrative accusing immigrants mixing their own culture as "cultural genocide". In HK’s case, mainlanders get lumped together, as if there's no regional diversity from a huge country of 1.4B people. It's the familiar culture war pattern of privileged locals mad at poor mainland (Mexicans) doing menial labour while being unsightly eyesores, while skilled mainland labour is taking their jobs and rich mainland pig farmers are buying their penthouses whilst flaunting wealth and reminding locals that HK was great when PRC was poor, so lets make HK great again.
Broad point being, in-demand urban centres in PRC (and around the world) have experienced dramatic shifts in demographics due to rapid urbanization and migration patterns (both domestic and international) causing city folk to collide with country bumpkins or dominant supremacists with ethnicities they find "inferior". But most places largely integrate while life and culture moves on. Until the alt right, or those nativists/localists parallels in HK politicize en masse and rally against filthy foreigners (alien mainland "locusts") and lose their shit and burn down the city over the fact that culture is changing to accommodate/reflect these inferior outgroups.
I'm not even unsympathetic to groups including in the west who think identity / culture has changed too much too fast. But I'm also not going to shed tears after they get stomped when they operationalize their nativism. All these arguments defending that only HKers should determine HK culture forgets that PRC "immigrants" to HK are NEW HKers and get a voice too, even if the flows inevitably shifts them towards becoming "just another Chinese city" - as if Chinese cities are all homogeneous. From a mainland perspective, the alternative vision of a British HK, lashing out to forever be untouched from 99% of "one" country, is absurd.
> All these arguments defending that only HKers should determine HK culture forgets that PRC "immigrants" to HK are NEW HKers and get a voice too, even if the flows inevitably shifts them towards becoming "just another Chinese city" - as if Chinese cities are all homogeneous.
Maybe think about the "why" instead of just complain? Try to understand things instead of just saying they suck?
- Can you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc in China? No.
- Do you get a death sentence in China? Yes.
- If you say something against the current government can you get arrested? Yes.
- Do you know what happened to Jack Ma and many others?
- Can you move your hard earned money out of China?
And lots more...
No it's not the same. HK provided what China mainland couldn't. It was seen as a paradise at 1 point and PRC wanted to get rid of this superiority. It made more $$$, had better jobs, better lifestyle, etc. People wanted to go here like in the "gold rush". The hype train was setting foot on HK = getting rich. Of course this didn't happen. This created a huge divide.
It's not that the culture changed. It's not that things moved fast. It's that it's driven away the essence of what made HK great.
And it's not like Americans don't complain about Mexicans. Trump even wanted to build his own wall :)
Nativist attitude predated NSL, when HK had their obscene privileges and responded to rapid shift in culture due to mainland immigration by shitting on the outgroup like many groups in the west in the last decade. The original post touches on why - HK supremacy where taxi drivers can afford to have multiple mainland mistresses like the 90s ended as PRC caught up. Incidentally PRC tier 1/2 is where $$$ money is made now, and plenty of cities have better lifestyles. Even TW topped at 10% of workforce working in mainland when HK peaking at 8% - plenty of well compensated opportunities in PRC for the skilled english fluent HKers, but issue is again, human capita broadly sucks unskilled and mass thinks they're entitled to a lifestyle that's no longer possible when they have to compete with ~1billion others, so they understandably try not to, and hold on in a city with worse gini coefficient / inequality than mainland. At least the welfare system, paid for by being middle men to PRC wealth, affords them higher income than they deserve. Meanwhile, as their relative status declines, they shit on poor mainlanders who have the opportunity to live in HK like most of their forefathers, many simply under family reunification permits, while lash out at nouveau riche mainlanders whose black money they’re happy to launder but god forbid when said cleaned money is flaunted in polite british inspired society.
Sure it's not the same anymore, but HK status quo was not sustainable, especially on national security grounds from where they basically had carte blanche to commit treason and be spy capital of Asia/PRC by slagging on NSL implementation for 20 years. Bringing "rule-of-law" to pirate cove sucks for the pirates. Yes they had a very good setup where they can flaunt increasingly unearned superiority to the mainland, but no reason why the mainland should maintain that arrangement in perpetuity, especially when it's received so ungraciously. As for your list, post NSL HK, you can still access foreign social media, death penalty still abolished in HK, you can still talk shit about gov (granted you don't conspire with foreign powers / undermine one country security), like a handful of folks renditioned by PRC post handover is pretty mild for the shenanigans HK was up to pre revolution, and HK still hotbed of capital flight. Yes a lot of perks are justifiably constrained, because they never took the one country part of 1C2S seriously.
Again, I get why locals went nativist and think post NSL HK is reduced - and it is - but they're still dripping in special administration privileges. Meanwhile it's great for PRC nationals now, which is frankly how it ought to be. The optimism that mainland would move closer to the HK system instead of vice versa was always hubris to anyone who looked at the numbers. State side, alt right Americans got away with as much as HKer nativists, until they stormed capitol/legco. That's when the hammer drops anywhere.
> Yes a lot of perks are justifiably constrained, because they never took the one country part of 1C2S seriously.
Is that just your vision of the country? As per the other comments before Xi started the country went in a different direction. Just because you're supporting another faction does not make HK a wrong?
> Meanwhile it's great for PRC nationals now, which is frankly how it ought to be.
Your bias is clear as day... so let's leave it there as it's pointless. Like those hands are very clean.
> by PRC post handover is pretty mild for the shenanigans HK was up to pre revolution
Because you're turning a blind eye to it all? Like when they hold up your family, your business, etc hostage just to ensure you cast a vote on a PRC supported candidate and claim the election is clean?
> especially on national security grounds from where they basically had carte blanche to commit treason
The nation isn't CCP. Clearly I give up. To take the analogy you're saying that America = Trump and anything else is treason.
No, that's the OG 1C2S vision, and frankly anyone with half a brain should understand why. HK was to implement NSL on her own, with PRC having unilateral ability to implement if HK politics took too long or security situation dictates. Boils down to this:
PRC gave HK 20 YEARS. 20 YEARS where HK existed in a national security state of exception where they can operate as a spyhub into PRC and HKers can conspire with foreign influence consequence free. That patience/benevolence on the CCP part is bordering on retarded. Literally no country in the world that's not a basket case would allow such a lapse in security to exist. Including HK under british admin. Every CCP leader since handover has hounded HK to pass NSL on their own. They failed, because they never took 1C part of 2S seriously. HK is wrong because when given the opportunity to govern itself, it failed with respect to national security, which is near #1 thing on the list of sovereign priorities.
Of course the west/US looks at this absurd situation and tries to defend it because it benefits them. But it’s not complicated - national security oversight applies to all subjects and every inch of a sovereign soil is the norm. HK is not special in that way anymore, but IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSE TO BE,
>turning a blind eye to it all
It's mild because most they did was arrest and purge a bunch of compromised candidates with connections abroad, again treason. Incumbent HK political class drunk on western influence was overdue for purge post NSL, like why would anyone allow compromised candidates to run for office? Except PRC did for 20 years, leading to accumulation of rot. ~200 arrested and ~125 charged almost 3 years post NSL is kid gloves.
>Trump and anything else is treason
I'm saying storming the capitol hill / legco in HK will get your movement stomped regardless of affiliations. Heads roll when gov building starts being attacked.
Yes, you seriously can't post this abusively here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit darker. It almost felt like another Chinese city. I had even been to HK several times when I was in middle school in Taiwan (I was born in America, but was a “reverse import” to Taiwan) as well as a mandarin language tutor during university, and was always amazed by the richness of HK culture from fishing villages in Saikung to bustling life in Tsim Tsa Tsui and in Central with relics of British colonialism. Now many unique elements of HK life had disappeared.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution. It has its own identity from the aboriginal population, the settlers from the dynastic period, Japanese colonization, and influences from the Republic of China refugees (or occupiers, depending on your POV, post 1949 Chinese settlers) and American forces. And since 2018, I’ve seen the Taiwanese double down on their Taiwanese identity and pride, and in many ways Taiwan is the envy of China (also literally).
If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history. Now I would probably live in Taiwan and Japan.
Edit: Taiwan hasn’t always been a democracy, and the path to democracy hasn’t been easy (just ask America). It’s not perfect like any other well-running democracy, but it’s the closest paragon we have in the Chinese diaspora. The presidency has transitioned peacefully to different parties since the 1990s.