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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that brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets in a largely peaceful call for the withdrawal of a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed suspected criminals to be extradited to mainland China for trial.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: 3, Informative) by Arik on Friday November 22 2019, @12:40AM (4 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @12:54PM (3 children)
Or much of France (not for some kind of independence, more general demands from yellow vest. Yes, they are still going on after 1 year, yes protesters are still losing eyes and have bad things happen to them.)
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 22 2019, @02:35PM (2 children)
Spain and France being NATO members?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @10:05PM (1 child)
Where do you think US dominance drives from? It's certainly not moral or any sort of historical relationship. IMO it's almost entirely from our economy, still riding off momentum since WW2 where we became firmly established as the dominant economy in the world. Our economic advantage even played a major role in the fall of the USSR. We got them into an arms race, which was a proxy for an economy race. Their economy was driven in large part by oil and funny money. When oil collapsed, all they had left was funny money, and their collapse became imminent.
American world dominance corresponds pretty much 1:1 with American economic dominance. The thing that's changed is nobody really expected China to keep progressing at the rate it has. And so our economic dominance is coming to an end. And not like a sort of gradual decline, but hard and fast. This [wikipedia.org] is a list of countries by their effective (purchasing power adjusted) GDP. China is already, by far, the world's biggest economy. But the unique thing about China is that they still have a ton of people living in rather extreme poverty. And so they not only continue to grow extremely rapidly but have an immense amount of room to continue growing into. Their "slowing" growth recently reported in the news is an economic expansion of 'only' 6% against the forecast 6.1%. Our rate was higher than expected - 2%.
And the nasty thing about a globalized world is that the rich get richer. What's going to happen as China begins to cement it's position as the leader of the world economy? Well what's already happening - countries and corporations alike will begin to "defect" to China. This, in turn, results in even faster growth in China that is also paralleled by slower growth outside of China. The exact same effect that we've been benefiting from for decades. Only catch is that as all other things start to equalize, a country of 330 million people cannot compete against a country of 1.4 billion people.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday November 23 2019, @11:48PM
I don't think that's true at all. At the end of WWII the US had a position of moral leadership; we used it to create the UN and the rest of the post WWII world order essentially to our taste. We have positive historical relationships with allies and potential allies around the world, many dating from that time. Unfortunately we've also consistently resisted taking note of changes since then, which is one of the reasons that we've increasingly eroded our own position with bad decisions.
The Russian Federation is not the USSR, but our foreign policy insists on conflating them and refuses to adjust. The PRC is now focused on soft power, but we're still trying to counter them by sailing warships up and down their coast. Despite decades of blowback we continue to prop up salafists in the ME, etc. etc.
"IMO it's almost entirely from our economy"
Well, economy is a lot of it, yes, but it's the economy of a century ago. At the end the great wars the only major industrial power not bombed was the US. After WWII our economic power was such as to essentially guarantee superpower status. Again, we've been eroding that lead, to the point it's arguably already gone, but that is still the root of the current international system with the US on top.
"The thing that's changed is nobody really expected China to keep progressing at the rate it has."
I disagree. What's been, not really surprising, but a bit disappointing, is how little the mainland has really liberalized after decades of very generous economic treatment which allowed this to happen.
You're right about the disaster looming ahead, and we're still wasting money hand over fist on solutions that might have worked a century ago.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?