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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that brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets in a largely peaceful call for the withdrawal of a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed suspected criminals to be extradited to mainland China for trial.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: 1) by Sulla on Friday November 22 2019, @07:11PM

    by Sulla (5173) on Friday November 22 2019, @07:11PM (#923479) Journal

    Democracy is good but overrated. No/low democracy doesn't mean things are automatically bad. Most people won't care that much about democracy as long as things are going well enough. Many people are happy to work in organizations where they have near zero votes on policy. Most children don't get to vote much in their family or orphanage.

    Spoken like someone living in the western republics who takes simple things for granted, like calling trump Orange and not being beaten for it

    I suspect the issue is life in Hong Kong has not become better (google for coffin homes) and expectations may have gone up faster than quality of life. Then for comparison google for HDB and Singapore.

    Watch the protestors and listen to their actual complaints.

    Perhaps China could divert some of their excess in construction output and other overcapacity towards Hong Kong and make life better. But would China do that? Unfortunately for the Hong Kong people the harsh reality is the rest of the world and China no longer needs Hong Kong that much. Unlike the old days most investors, trade etc can go directly to China without Hong Kong involved.

    China has no desire to help the people of HK. Those who disagree politically will have their organs harvested (Falun Gong) and those who are not "city people" are expelled from the cities to live in the country.

    China might even be able to (ab)use the Hong Kong protests as a convenient example of why the Gov should be more restrictive in mainland China.

    You don't get much more restrictive than putting political dissidents in prison camps and harvesting their organs. Although I suppose you could burn them for energy.

    The HK protesters are destroying stuff fairly indiscriminately (ice skating rinks, subway stations, tracks, etc). I've seen some bullshit excuses given for destroying stuff.

    And we threw tea in the bay. You do what you can. You destroy the bread and circuses so people are forced to see the world before them. You destroy transportation to make logistics harder for the invading force.

    Can't say the HK Gov responded well either... Did they really need that law so much?

    The purpose of the law was to show that the CCP promise of not enforcing the extradition law was a lie. And it worked.

    Maybe you are right and the Chinese aren't that bad, or maybe the protestors are right and they will be rounded up and put in prison camps and have their organs harvested like everyone else who has not aligned politically with the government. Maybe they will be lucky like the Tibetans and only be sterilized and put in work camps.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam