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Hong Kong pushes bill allowing extraditions to China despite biggest protest since handover
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam vowed on Monday to push ahead with amendments to laws allowing suspects to be extradited to mainland China a day after the city's biggest protest since its handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997.
Riot police ringed Hong Kong's legislature and fought back a hardcore group of several hundred protesters who stayed behind early on Monday after Sunday's peaceful march that organizers said drew more than a million people, or one in seven of the city's people.
"I don't think it is (an) appropriate decision for us now to pull out of this bill because of the very important objectives that this bill is intended to achieve," a somber Lam told reporters while flanked by security and justice chiefs.
Also at NYT.
See also: Here’s How Hong Kong’s Proposed Extradition Law Will Impact Its Competitiveness
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday June 11 2019, @05:45AM (14 children)
Sadly, since the British turned Hong Kong over to China, Hong Kong only has whatever freedoms China feels like giving it.
The people can protest all they want. They can only pretend that they actually have any power, or any say in the matter.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 11 2019, @05:49AM (5 children)
They can make a lot more trouble than normal Chinese people can, and could spread dissent into the mainland if completely absorbed.
But yeah, the cynicism is appropriate. China has had years to work on this slow boil.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday June 11 2019, @08:26AM (4 children)
For the most part they were treading a slow road to liberalisation, up until the Poo.
Any idea why the Poo got selected and all these decades of slow liberalisation got the quick reverse?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday June 11 2019, @08:50AM (3 children)
China is seeing how long prosperity can substitute for liberalization. Compare to the dissolution of the Soviet Union or other situations.
If liberalization/political freedom isn't a requirement for economic prosperity, they might be able to keep it going for a long time. But if they foul things up, the consequences could break the system rather than lead to a change of leaders as in most democracies.
Pooh had to do a little work to consolidate his power, but now that he's done it, we'll see if he can do what's required to keep it (and how he will select a successor if applicable).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @12:04PM (1 child)
Theoretically, it's not. Only the control of parasites (corruption) and elimination of dead wood (old, deprecated practices) are necessary. But those two are a very hard thing to do without political freedom.
By the by, corruption is hard to avoid even in democracies, no matter what name you chose for corruption - e.g. bribes, lobbying or super-PAC.
The death of "empires" is never nice, but it's as inevitable as the extinction of mega-fauna. An empire is a huge ossified structure too slow and heavy to move ahead through time.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday June 12 2019, @06:27AM
Right after I defeat compound interest and infidelity.
Hold your breath now!
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday June 12 2019, @06:25AM
Fair enough, but also contrast.
There's no equivalent to Poo in Russia. At least no one even moderately successful.
Which is actually a possibly important point to notice. Russia and China are similarly beset by Oceania, but there is no Russian Poo.
I think the reason is that Russia has been an Empire, and learned what it cost.
China, you can certainly call an Empire without being exactly wrong. There is Tibet, there is the western desert, there is 'inner' Mongolia, a few Russian towns, a few Korean towns, a few towns where at the least north Vietnamese gangsters seem to operate as natives.
I'm no fan of the PRC, but I so advocate perspective.
Stack em up against the average European power and they seem positively self-absorbed.
Poo has come the fore, to the chagrin both of foreign investors and native 'liberals' equally, as a result of western escalations in the south China sea and Taiwan straits.
That's stated in their terms, but I think it's important it be confronted in their own terms.
They aren't going to back down on core sovereignty issues, and they have the technology and the industrial capacity they don't have to.
Are we really willing to pay the bill to hold them down? For what benefit exactly? For just how long?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @05:53AM (4 children)
FTFY, cold war cretin!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @07:39AM (3 children)
Didn't the Brits steal a lot more from China, than just Hong Kong? Not doing my homework now, but it seems there was much more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @07:51AM (2 children)
What are you talking about, 'twas fair deal, the Brits paid with opium.
And it was the Chinese that started the brouhaha, who set them to ask silver in exchange for the tea, silk and stuff?
Trump would do the same today, if he only could. Unfortunately, the generic Chinese fentanyl is so much cheaper than the American one.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday June 11 2019, @08:21AM (1 child)
They invited everyone they thought might help them into the theatre. The Japanese didn't need an invitation. They'd been watching the Brits, and learning everything their example had to teach. It made perfect sense to anyone steeped in British Imperialism that the Japanese were every bit as entitled to rule China as the Brits were to rule India, ^2.
And then there were the Americans. Picking up pieces of the British Empire, to add to our own, as the former collapsed. Learning, it must say, absolutely nothing from the fact that Brits were collapsing under the weight of their own Empire, as we rushed to build another, and even more unprofitable. Deciding the Japanese were an intrinsically inferior race that deserved to be exterminated on the basis of observing the rape of Nanking.
Not that it was anything but a truly horrific atrocity. But those who anathematize the other, while covering up their own crimes, should not be role models.
History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 11 2019, @08:56AM
For the sociopaths running the show, it's their wet dream.
Probably this is why we, the rest, aren't gonna succeed in waking up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday June 11 2019, @08:10AM (2 children)
And almost as sadly, before the UK relinquished their lease, Hong Kong had only whatever freedom the UK felt like giving it.
For a considerably time, the mainland control was relatively benign, but with recent events that's no longer the case.
Without support on the mainland, and with western powers only willing to cluck and preen but not to intervene, any rebellion is ill-fated.
BUT, were foreign powers willing to do more - well that could much more easily backfire spectacularly than do any good as well. Western powers intervening actually caused most of the current problems, and not all of them together is anywhere near willing to commit the number of troops that would be necessary to occupy just half of China. Even assuming full withdrawal from every other 'theater of operation.'
It's a devilishly difficult position for the residents at any event. My prayers to them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @09:16AM (1 child)
without mainland support.
Hong Kong is a trade/port town. Without access to mainland Chinese goods and services, particularly food, the entire city would collapse like one of those zombie/apocalypse films in a matter of days, then weeks as the food supplies shrank. I had online friends there during the changeover. They all knew the writing was on the wall, only how long they would retain their freedoms was the question. Now we know the answer: Almost 20 years. But by 30 they will be slaves to the Chinese Empire once more, and the former autonomy they had in the weird middle ground of British parliamentary democracy will be gone and replaced by the love of the party. Because anything else deserves reeducation.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 11 2019, @12:26PM
You mean... like the purpose-less existence of, say, the City of London or Wall Street?
False assertion again. Counterexamples:
- Berlin Blockade [wikipedia.org]
- Singapore [wikipedia.org] is not self-sufficient today in the matter of basic needs, and yet France and UK are, by value, ahead of China as a source for food imports [worldbank.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford