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posted by martyb on Thursday November 21 2019, @09:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the courting-disaster? dept.

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that brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets in a largely peaceful call for the withdrawal of a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed suspected criminals to be extradited to mainland China for trial.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?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Fluffeh on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:06PM (14 children)

    by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:06PM (#923202) Journal

    China isn't letting go of Hong Kong in any way. shape form or other. Ever.

    So what? Who is actually trying to take Hong Kong away from China?

    The people protesting in Hong Kong right now want to have a freer system, one that's not built the same way as the rest of China. They are asking for help from outside sources - I'm saying that there isn't a single country that will help them in the way that they want help - as that will require a conflict with China. You can't give complete democracy and freedom to Hong Kong while China is running the show there. You can't make China not run the show - even if that's what the population there wants (and I'm not calling that one way or the other).

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:19PM (12 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:19PM (#923207) Journal
    Ok, consider why China hasn't moved already to crush these protests? There are other constraints on China's power than merely the potential for foreign conflict.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @05:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @05:24AM (#923316)

      China has moved to crush these protests. They don't want another Tiannamen in the world of livestreaming, and so they're not coming in boots and steel, they're easing into boots and steel, as the 'soft'er techniques of persuasion which they expected to work continue to fail.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @02:31PM (9 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @02:31PM (#923391)

      I think this one is pretty simple.

      One important nuance that most people don't understand is that the protesters are not popular in Hong Kong. Only 17.4% [reuters.com] Hong Kongers would want to separate from China, peacefully, after the one country, systems agreement expires in 2047. And that number, if anything, may be inflated due to the source. [wikipedia.org]

      And that number is definitely lower now. The protesters had a fair amount of support early on in the protests. That support has been largely lost due to their increasing tendency towards violence and destruction. What is China's goal with Hong Kong? Again that's very easy, they want complete reunification. Xi Jinping spoke [chinadaily.com.cn] extensively of such goals during the most recent Chinese National Congress.

      And so I think China is using the protesters to undermine themselves. That 17.4% seeking independence is not high, but it's much higher than it used to be. By letting the protesters destroy the country's economy, attack people, and generally engage in deeply unpopular behavior the protesters are undermining support for their own cause. By contrast if China cracked down on them hard, then the protesters would work as living martyrs for their own cause. It leads to this rather paradoxical scenario where the protesters want the police to crack down on them and the police want to exercise restraint.

      I think China would be perfectly content if the economy of Hong Kong tanked, if it aided their goal of reunification - it can be built back up afterwards anyhow. So for now I think they are happy to simply play the waiting game. What they want to do is frustrate the protesters enough that the protesters act out. And there's no doubt they've also infiltrated the protesters and are probably trying to internally push for violence, destruction, and so forth. It leads to this quite paradoxical outcome where the Chinese are using the protesters as useful idiots to further their goals of national reunification. It's paradoxical because it seems that the protesters are also being used as useful idiots by Western interests who think the internal turmoil is damaging to China. So I suppose it turns into a contest of who has the more accurate political foresight. The one thing that's for certain is that it's damn sure not the protesters themselves!

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 22 2019, @04:51PM (8 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 22 2019, @04:51PM (#923447) Journal

        One important nuance that most people don't understand is that the protesters are not popular in Hong Kong. Only 17.4% [reuters.com] Hong Kongers would want to separate from China, peacefully, after the one country, systems agreement expires in 2047. And that number, if anything, may be inflated due to the source.

        The protests aren't about Hong Kong independence. So it doesn't matter that there's only 17% support for an unrelated issue.

        And that number is definitely lower now. The protesters had a fair amount of support early on in the protests. That support has been largely lost due to their increasing tendency towards violence and destruction. What is China's goal with Hong Kong? Again that's very easy, they want complete reunification. Xi Jinping spoke [chinadaily.com.cn] extensively of such goals during the most recent Chinese National Congress.

        China's "number" is lower too as well. It was a pretty dick move to try to include political persecutions with what could have been a relatively standard extradition law (still ignoring China's shoddy court system which on its own should rule out extradition laws). And the Hong Kong police have resorted to violence as well (and perhaps some China-directed counter protesters). Nor is it clear to me that there's more violent protesters than there are police.

        And who in China has this goal of "complete reunification"? In Hong Kong, we could see that there was widespread support for the protests just from the number of people who turned out. But what protesters are turning out for this goal? Just because an elite has decided on a goal doesn't mean China has decided on a goal.

        I think China would be perfectly content if the economy of Hong Kong tanked, if it aided their goal of reunification - it can be built back up afterwards anyhow. So for now I think they are happy to simply play the waiting game. What they want to do is frustrate the protesters enough that the protesters act out. And there's no doubt they've also infiltrated the protesters and are probably trying to internally push for violence, destruction, and so forth. It leads to this quite paradoxical outcome where the Chinese are using the protesters as useful idiots to further their goals of national reunification. It's paradoxical because it seems that the protesters are also being used as useful idiots by Western interests who think the internal turmoil is damaging to China. So I suppose it turns into a contest of who has the more accurate political foresight. The one thing that's for certain is that it's damn sure not the protesters themselves!

        If China were playing the long game, they merely need to wait till 2047. And frankly, it's no loss to China's future, if Hong Kong autonomy continued forever. You should look at why this goal exists in the first place. A moderately free Hong Kong is not a threat to China. It is a threat to the establishment.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @08:32PM (7 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @08:32PM (#923506)

          What percent of those still supporting the increasing violent and destructive behavior of the protesters do you think would choose to remain controlled by China, given the choice for a peaceful option of genuine independence? I think it's quite difficult to form a genuine argument proposing that that number is not extremely low. There are a variety of other metrics we can measure the popularity of the protests by, but I think that one is simple and clear.

          The waiting game and the long game are very different. Patience is something Sun Tzu obsessed over.

            - He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.
            - The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
            - Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
            - Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
            - It is more important to out-think your enemy than to out-fight him.
            - When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.

          China is simply taking advantage of the situation the protesters are in. The only way the protesters can win is if China responds in a way that is framed as inappropriate, unwanted, or disproportionate. So all the protesters can do is to try to provoke that action. But the way they try to provoke that, with violence and destruction, is the exact thing that's killing off whatever dwindling support they have left. See even e.g. our coverage in the NYTimes. As the police forces exercise restraint against an ever more unrestrained mob, it's becoming increasingly difficult to spin the protests in a positive way. And now imagine the people in Hong Kong - businesses are closing or leaving, schools are closed, the region is now in outright recession, and the violence and destruction continues.

          This will not take long.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 23 2019, @02:23AM (6 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 23 2019, @02:23AM (#923612) Journal

            What percent of those still supporting the increasing violent and destructive behavior of the protesters do you think would choose to remain controlled by China, given the choice for a peaceful option of genuine independence? I think it's quite difficult to form a genuine argument proposing that that number is not extremely low. There are a variety of other metrics we can measure the popularity of the protests by, but I think that one is simple and clear.

            Who are "the protesters" here? I imagine that there's vastly more support for peaceful protesters speaking out against extradition for speechcrime than there is for the people practicing a reenactment of the Alamo in a local campus building. The latter are more violent than the former. You tar with a very broad brush.

            Sure, we could weasel all day about the alleged unpopularity of a few people holing up in some makeshift fortress as if that were everyone who has protested here.

            As to the Sun Tzu quotes, consider this more relevant one:

            Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

            This whole conflict existed in the first place because someone was too impatient and tried to pull a fast one legislatively. The resulting mess has ballooned into a protest that's almost half a year old. They weren't prudent, they didn't wait for the enemy to defeat themselves - they didn't even wait for an opportunity to not have an enemy in the first place, they aren't breaking said resistance without fighting, and so on. Just because someone is aware of these precepts doesn't mean that they're following them.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @08:29AM (5 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @08:29AM (#923750)

              Obviously there is vastly more support for peaceful protests than the people chimping out. Yet the latter invariably determine both the perception of the former and ultimately the outcome of a protest, because they bring things to a critical point. The idea of a peaceful protest, a la Gandhi, just naturally overturning a superior oppressive force is a fantasy. Britain gave up India not because of some civil disobedience but because their empire was already collapsing and they were effectively bankrupt after WW2. They would, in short order, grant nearly all of their colonies independence (including those without any meaningful independence movements) - without getting into the nuanced exception that is Hong Kong.

              Take for instance something like the Boston Massacre. This was a, if not 'the', pivotal moment in the 'American' protests against the British. And indeed without it it's entirely possible outright revolution might never have gained enough support, almost certainly not as quickly as it did. But when you actually look into the details of the Boston Massacre we absolutely provoked it. Nonetheless, the winners and losers of that event at not judged by a court of law but by the court of public opinion - as all protests are subject to. Because the British responded poorly, they lost that judgement and perhaps the country alongside it. In Hong we now see the opposite happening and the protesters are being judged guilty in the court of public opinion.

              As for what sparked these protests, I do not think it was the bill in and of itself. That a literal and admitted murderer could not be charged by police due to the lack of jurisdiction and the lack of extradition emphasizes how broken the system in Hong Kong was, and now remains. The proposal put forth by some of the protest movement was that the bill should be introduced only for the murderer, only for Taiwan (where he was from), and then immediately rescinded. That proposal was obviously not put forth in good faith. I think many in the protest group wanted a new protest and were looking for some sort of justification. The bill provided that justification. And similarly I think China now fighting not only against this protest, but against the root of the protests which is support for those ideological views. They could have ended these protests long ago if they wanted. They're letting the protesters continue to act out to undermine not only this protest, but the entire idea that the protesters stand for. In a nutshell, the protesters are being used as propaganda against themselves.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 23 2019, @01:00PM (4 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 23 2019, @01:00PM (#923801) Journal

                Yet the latter invariably determine both the perception of the former and ultimately the outcome of a protest, because they bring things to a critical point. The idea of a peaceful protest, a la Gandhi, just naturally overturning a superior oppressive force is a fantasy.

                Except, of course, it worked in the case of Gandhi. And you might want to consider what the end states would be for a government where the only ways to express disapproval are through violence.

                Because the British responded poorly, they lost that judgement and perhaps the country alongside it. In Hong we now see the opposite happening and the protesters are being judged guilty in the court of public opinion.

                I have yet to see China act "opposite".

                As for what sparked these protests, I do not think it was the bill in and of itself.

                The protests came in response to the bill and have been a key component of the communication of at least "some" protesters as you note in your second paragraph.

                The proposal put forth by some of the protest movement was that the bill should be introduced only for the murderer, only for Taiwan (where he was from), and then immediately rescinded. That proposal was obviously not put forth in good faith.

                So what?

                And similarly I think China now fighting not only against this protest, but against the root of the protests which is support for those ideological views. They could have ended these protests long ago if they wanted. They're letting the protesters continue to act out to undermine not only this protest, but the entire idea that the protesters stand for. In a nutshell, the protesters are being used as propaganda against themselves.

                It's institutional problems like creating the power to extradite someone to a Chinese kangaroo court for speechcrime, not nebulous ideology, that is the root problem here.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @01:45PM (3 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @01:45PM (#923817)

                  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:

                  “A large group of rioters was attacking police officers in Tsuen Wan,” police said in a statement. “Police officers warned them, but they were still attacking police. A police officer’s life was seriously endangered. In order to save his and other officers’ lives, they fired at the attacker.” One clip posted on social media and verified by Reuters shows the protester, an as yet unnamed 18-year-old man, swing a baton at a policeman, brushing his right arm.

                  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.

                  ---

                  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)

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:47PM (#923867) Journal
                    Please speak holistically.

                    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)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @07:02PM (#923917)

                      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

                        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 25 2019, @02:08AM (#924360) Journal

                        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?

                        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.

    • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday November 22 2019, @07:00PM

      by Sulla (5173) on Friday November 22 2019, @07:00PM (#923475) Journal

      Because the actual Trump card is wild. China is most likely not going to get the trade deal they need on pork and rice because of their desire to not end the Fentanyl trade, our key trade people have hinted at a decoupling instead with intense investment in Vietnam, India, etc as a replacement for dependence on Chinese exports. China might be able to get us to overlook the Fentanyl issue to at least get them more pork and rice even if no further trade deal comes. Crushing Hong Kong will cost them any hope they had for that, and possibly spark a rebellion in the mainland. Access by the Chinese people to pork has caused significant problems for the ruling party going back hundreds of years.

      A soft takeover of Hong Kong will be overlooked, a hard takeover will cost them greatly.

      --
      Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @05:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @05:16AM (#923314)

    HK Protesters are not asking for outside help as far as I am aware. Also none of the five demands, from memory, are about separating China from Hong Kong or China making democratic reforms.