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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Chinese state media has urged authorities to take a "tougher line" against protesters in Hong Kong who vandalised state-run Xinhua news agency and other buildings at the weekend, saying the violence damaged the city's rule of law.
[...] In an editorial, state-backed China Daily newspaper criticised the "wanton" attacks by "naive" demonstrators, adding, "They are doomed to fail simply because their violence will encounter the full weight of the law."
Police fired tear gas at black-clad protesters on Saturday and Sunday in some of the worst violence in the Asian financial hub in weeks, with metro stations set ablaze and buildings vandalised.
Violence also erupted on Sunday after a man with a knife attacked several people and bit off part of the ear of a pro-democracy politician. Two of the victims are reportedly in critical condition, according to reports.
The past five months of anti-government protests in the former British colony represent the biggest popular challenge to President Xi Jinping's government since he took over China's leadership in late 2012.
Protesters are angry at China's perceived meddling with Hong Kong's freedoms, including its legal system, since the Asian financial hub returned to Chinese rule in 1997. China denies the accusation.
The widely-read Global Times tabloid on Sunday condemned the protesters' actions targeting Xinhua and called for action by Hong Kong's enforcement agencies.
"Due to the symbolic image of Xinhua, the vandalizing of its branch is not only a provocation to the rule of law in Hong Kong, but also to the central government and the Chinese mainland, which is the rioters' main purpose," it said.
On Friday, after a meeting of China's top leadership, a senior Chinese official said it would not tolerate separatism or threats to national security in Hong Kong and would "perfect" the way it appointed the city's leader.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:26PM (4 children)
Name any of those problems that get better with the Chinese system, which doesn't even represent you in the first place. There's the "state-run media" as an AC put it, which serves the role of mass media advertising. There's the sole political party which serves the role of partisanship. This is a great example of whataboutism. China sucks so let's peer at the flaws of a single other country to justify the suck. Even if the US isn't the greatest example of democracy at present, it's not the only democracy out there.
Of course, it is - but will we choose to sustain democracy? That is a different question. As to your criticism of the 2020 election, what's supposed to be wrong with Trump versus Oprah? They're both successful business people who have demonstrated ability to lead large numbers of people. What's different about the US system is that we have a vast portion of society who can run for and be successful at political office. It's not just some ideological or technocratic people who have never had experience outside of the political apparatus.
My take is that China is much more likely to replace its present government in the near future than the US. The US has a government that has lasted over two centuries. China has already radically changed its governance over the past few decades. My take is that instead of creating problems in Hong Kong, it's time to complete that process and become a grown-up country.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:39PM (3 children)
I answered your question within the block of text you quoted. When your representative only represents a small number of people - your opinion does matter. 2,000 people is enough such that a single individual could meaningfully influence an election in cases of an injustice from a politician. And, furthermore, those 2,000 people are very physically close to you and so they too are likely going to be interested in issues that matter to you. Partisanship and mass media only start to matter at large scales when both people are quite disconnected from their representative and their representative is quite disconnected from them.
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As for democracy, I assume you're well aware of what a tragedy of the commons is. There's a pond. Each fisherman fishes enough to fill himself. At the end of the year the pond runs dry from overfishing, and there's no fish anymore for anybody. Each person acting in their own best interest results in a catastrophic collapse for everybody - whereas had they chosen to suffer individually, everybody could have at least something for years to come. I do not think democracy is inherently immune to such possibilities.
How many people voted for Hillary because they thought 'I think this person truly stands for the values I believe in and will make a great president.'? How many, instead, voted for her because the alternative was simply unthinkable? And similarly for those that voted for Trump. Think about, from a politician's perspective, what a remarkable achievement they've made. They both managed to get people to vote for them, by the tens of millions, that didn't even like them! All they had to do was to convince enough people that the alternative was Hitler. Politicians discover that dividing people is a far more effective means of garnering votes than actually running on their own policies. And so they set forward on that. And it works. But as a result you end up with increasingly mutually incompatible groups. Democracy does not work when groups are mutually incompatible - it simply reverts to a tyranny of the majority. In the longrun the very act enabling you sustain your control in a democracy ends up undermining that same democracy.
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Trump vs Oprah was simply indicating what our democracy is devolving into. Our early political leaders were political philosophers and writers who spent extensive time considering political issues, writing on these topics, and trying to logically 'solve' politics so much as they could with what information they had available. In modern times our political leaders have become jokes. It's little more than a mixture of celebrity + demagoguery + charisma. Imagine a political discussion between e.g. James Madison and Trump or Oprah... And it's not like great political thinkers no longer exist, but they don't have what it takes to get elected by large numbers of low information voters.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 08 2019, @12:23AM (2 children)
And yet, who pollutes more? The US or China? Just because democracies don't always deal well with tragedies of the commons doesn't mean that they are the worst at it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @04:27AM (1 child)
I'm not sure you're engaging in good faith here. That is a huge tangent that has little to do directly with the point.
But beyond that, it's a humorous tangent. I can only imagine you thought your question was rhetorical, because the answer is that it's the US, by a huge margin. China's CO2 emissions are 7.7 tons of CO2/capita. The US is more than double that at 15.7. Those figures are made even more absurd by the fact that a huge chunk of China's emissions are also driven by manufacturing outsourced by countries, including the US, so we can bypass our more stringent labor/environmental laws!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 08 2019, @01:19PM
A tangent some AC introduced. Several times someone has similarly claimed problems in US or developed world societies while ignoring that China has those problems as well. It's a dead end not because it's irrelevant but because China happens to be worse at it.
Because mass of CO2 emissions are the sole measure of pollution? I assure you that a lot more people per capita are dying of air, water, and soil pollution in China than the US. And it remains that China's emissions driving by outsourced manufacturing are still China's emissions.