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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
China says its courts trump Hong Kong's on face mask ruling
China's top legislature has insisted Hong Kong courts had no power to rule on the constitutionality of legislation under the city's Basic Law, as it condemned a decision by the high court to overturn a ban on face masks worn by pro-democracy protesters.
The statement on Tuesday came a day after the high court ruled that the face mask ban - introduced through colonial-era emergency laws - was unconstitutional.
[...] "Whether the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region comply with the Basic Law of Hong Kong can only be judged and decided by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress," Yan Tanwei, a spokesman for the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, said in a statement.
"No other authority has the right to make judgments and decisions," he added.
[...] Protests started in June with rallies that brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets in a largely peaceful call for the withdrawal of a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed suspected criminals to be extradited to mainland China for trial.
They have since evolved into a series of demands for greater democracy and freedoms as well as an independent inquiry into alleged police brutality. Protesters worry China is encroaching on the freedoms given to Hong Kong when the United Kingdom returned the territory to China under what was known as "one country, two systems" in 1997.
[...] China has repeatedly warned that it would not allow the city to spiral into total chaos, heightening concerns that Beijing might deploy troops or other security forces to quell the unrest.
"The Hong Kong government is trying very hard to put the situation under control," China's ambassador to Britain, Liu Xiaoming, said on Monday.
"But if the situation becomes uncontrollable, the central government would certainly not sit on our hands and watch. We have enough resolution and power to end the unrest."
[...] Protesters had been using masks to hide their identities in public. The proposal was widely criticised by supporters of the anti-government movement, who saw it as a risk to demonstrators.
Hong Kong's High Court ruled on Monday that colonial-era emergency laws, which were revived to justify the mask ban, were "incompatible with the Basic Law", the mini-constitution under which Hong Kong was returned to China.
Will China run out of patience with Hong Kong protests?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @01:45PM (3 children)
Please speak holistically. This line by line nonsense is difficult to have a conversation flow with and a very lazy form of discussion/debate. It's also especially prone to disingenuous comments. E.g. in the above you decide to take my comment about Gandhi out of context and respond to it in a way that is utterly nonsensical given the context of what was stated.
Cutting to the chase here, China is dealing with protest in a new way. You don't have to engage in hypotheticals about what would happen if these protesters engaged this way in another country, there are protests going on all around the world -nearly all of them far less violent and destructive than the Hong Kong protesters- and we can see what happens. In the French protests, which had no meaningful violence whatsoever (but did have property destruction), the police responded in force with militarized tear gas grenades that were laced with explosives so you had fun things like protesters getting their hands blown off when trying to lunge back the grenades. The police have blinded more than a dozen protesters by firing nonlethal projectiles aimed at people's faces, destroyed limbs of various protesters, and even managed to murder a completely uninvolved elderly woman in her house (near one of the protest areas) after hitting her with a launched gas grenade. Spain responded with a militarized crack down, hundreds of arrests, and kangaroo court sentencing of leaders upwards of a decade a piece. So forth and so on.
By acting with extreme restraint they achieve two goals:
1) They turn the people against the protesters. Imagine if in e.g. Ferguson, the police force not only didn't respond in force but didn't respond at all. It wouldn't be long before the people of the city would be begging for intervention. At the same time it would also have worked to radically shift the general perception of the protests from perhaps an exaggerated response to little more than an excuse for rioting. Instead the police force acted decisively. They won in the short run, but completely lost the battle for mindshare which is far more important.
2) They destroy propaganda efforts. As one example here are two videos of one of shootings. The first is the US propaganda cut of the shooting, the second is an actual in-context video of the shooting. The videos are safe-for-life and mostly non-graphic:
US Version [reuters.com]
Singapore Version [youtube.com]
I particularly love the overt propaganda in the US version:
It implies, but does not say, that the Chinese statement is referring to the officer who had his arm brushed as the one who's life was in danger - not the police officer laying on the ground being beaten to death by a mob of protesters who refused to disperse even after the police arrived - and whom the "US cut" makes sure to cut out of the frame each time he'd become visible. Propaganda is the art of lying without ever speaking a false statement. The problem the US faces is people can find the "real" video with like 30 seconds of searching, if they're so inclined. On top of that I expect China is also ensuring the real videos are being made readily available to those in Hong Kong, and so the propaganda is not only not working, but backfiring. Effort to make the protesters seem like good people just demonstrating for a better tomorrow is undermined by their own behaviors and shines a spotlight on the agenda of those aiming to try to push a narrative.
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The reason I'm so enthusiastic about this topic is because I don't think people realize this may end up setting a new normal in dealing with civil unrest. Should Trump win in 2020, we'll probably see some people chimping out on the streets stateside and this may even be an opportunity to utilize such techniques stateside. Don't arrest them, don't move in force, do nothing except make them uncomfortable enough that they feel obligated to continually push the "pace". If the protests don't organically dissolve, within a matter of weeks any support for them (outside of the protesters themselves) will have plummeted. You come in not as the militarized police enacting government agenda, but as the vet reluctantly putting down a rabid animal.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:47PM (2 children)
Ok, your post is apologetic junk. And anyone can spin incompetence as playing a deeper game. China wouldn't have to "deal with protest in a different way" - which let us note isn't actually different, there certainly isn't "extreme restraint" here in the first place, if they had approached this smartly in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @07:02PM (1 child)
Awesome and appreciated! Reading line by line stuff is simply tedious!
Now can you elaborate on your view perhaps with supporting evidence or logic instead of just unsupported assertions? In particular do you disagree that these protesters would have met a far more brutal response had they decided to start e.g. attacking police, destroying businesses, and other such behavior in the "free world" such as, for instance, the USA? If you do agree, as I expect you would, how could you not call the Chinese response restrained? Also, for what am I being apologetic?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 25 2019, @02:08AM
On the last part, the typical developed world response would be to arrest those responsible. My point is not to claim that somehow the Chinese and Hong Kong responses are unrestrained, but that they aren't dealing with the protests in the alleged "new" way, different from developed world approaches. So far, that's fine. The real problem is what would happen should China start calling the shots directly. After all, the tanks are idling nearby.
As to supporting evidence and logic, there's the initial conditions - as I noted already. We wouldn't have gotten into this situation in the first place without both a history of Chinese interference in the operations of the Hong Kong government and the blatant injustice of the failed extradition bill. You can assert that the protesters would have found some other, flimsier pretext for protesting, but those protesters didn't need to.
And that overlaps with a previous AC assertion, that China as part of its alleged competence is attacking some ideology which will be more effective at discrediting the protesters than attacking them directly. Such things don't exist in a vacuum. As long as the problem exists, protests will continue to erupt over and over again. Not a one of the great ideologies of the world, be them religious or secular existed in a vacuum, but as a reaction to great injustice, poverty, or oppression.
Let's consider some of the other things said in this thread. For example, a number of words were wasted on a single alleged beating of a police officer by protesters. Even if everything is as the claimed narrative, it's something like a dozen protesters beating a single police officer with a different spin by some sloppy foreign media. There were a lot more than a dozen people involved in the protests and there's a lot more sad stories than that one. One incident doesn't tell us anything about the whole.
Of course, there's serious problems with the claimed narrative of the "real" video. How is it that whoever took the "real" video could stand closely around both alleged protesters and a cluster of police who had just used deadly force to protect a downed officer without interference from either group? How did one police officer just happen to be so isolated that he could be jumped by a dozen protesters? Why did the video taker linger over the police officer rather than the dying protester? My take is that we don't even know that the "real" video was of the real attack!
There was an assertion that non violence doesn't work in protests, while quoting Gandhi - who was greatly successful at nonviolent protest contrary to assertion.
Or the initial dishonesty of equating support for the protests with support for separation from China.
So that's supporting evidence and logic for these posts by one of more AC to be apologetic junk for Chinese tyranny.