I know exactly what you mean. I have a friend on wechat from my time living in China. It is remarkable for me to talk with this person. He's not at all the belligerent nationalist type nor the insufficiently critical news-bubble type. Yet even he finds the narrative pushed by the news to be compelling. It's been a stimulating exercise talking with him without falling down the rabbit hole of dismissing each others facts by dismissing the others news sources as propaganda.

The 3 narratives I see are

  1. the organizers are sell-outs to the US and the followers are just stupid. Western imperialists want to split China again.  
  2. the protestors are rioters, violent mobs, essentially a zombie horde not a movement with demands that can be met.  
  3. the stated reasons for the protests aren't the real reason. the real cause is economic. (subtext: freedoms and democracy is intrinsically a Western thing and Chinese people asking for it are denying they're Chinese) 

Part of why I asked for data is because I'm being lazy and want to use the response in my other conversation. Engaging in debate as one person, when the other side has entire media outlets working for them, is kinda hard. Help me.

1.a Ask how much a protester is paid for participating. The number I've seen floating around is 3000 RMB. Then ask how much it costs to buy a million protesters. If they think that that's a reasonable amount, ask why they didn't simply buy every single Hong Konger for just slightly more. Hopefully they'll realize that most protesters aren't paid.

1.b The protesters' demands are all about changing the behavior of the local government. They have no reason to split from China unless the mainland government intervenes to prevent that change. As a bonus, consider that the current Hong Kong government is only in power due to the election system with functional constituencies put in place by the British to secure their grip on the city. In a way, China simply replaced Britain as the colonial power rather than freeing Hong Kong from colonialism. (On the other hand, this argument can backfire since Hong Kong would be even worse off if all former British institutions were replaced by their mainland equivalents.)

2. If all protesters were violent rioters, they'd have conquered Hong Kong by now. But the majority are peaceful and have even less power to stop the rioters than the police; whose indiscriminate use of tear gas and rubber bullets has hurt people who were either participating peacefully or just happened to be in the area. That's why they want an independent investigation of the police.

3. The economic situation may make them more likely to protest, but what they choose to protest is still something they care about.

Consider the protests that erupted at Nanjing School of Applied Technology in April [1], at Beijing Normal University's Zhuhai branch in June [2] or in Wuhan's Xinzhou district also in June [3]. Were those all for economic reasons? Also ask whether they were aware of these or any other protests.

[1] https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/19/4/28/n11220048.htm

[2] http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/19/6/11/n11315690.htm

[3] https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/19/7/4/n11363038.htm

(I'm linking to Epoch Times articles, but in each case you can find raw footage on YouTube searching for "南应", "北师珠", "武汉阳逻")

Finally, you should know that there just as you are here asking for help arguing with your Chinese friends, so are Chinese people asking on Zhihu for help arguing with their Western friends.

>Finally, you should know that there just as you are here asking for help arguing with your Chinese friends, so are Chinese people asking on Zhihu for help arguing with their Western friends.

Well the more the merrier. So long as the discussion is in the basis of sound arguments and not who can spam/upvote more, adding more people will only increase the quality.

In fact I wouldn't even call what I am doing arguing, as I haven't actually offered any position of my own on the protest and therefore have nothing to defend (yet). I guess you could call what I'm doing "hypothesis testing the Chinese state media narratives" (aka "calling bullshit").

Thanks for the links and ideas.

addendum: with respect to 1a I haven't seen it suggested that the protestors are being paid. I've seen it suggested that a few key organizers are being bribed and the rest are mindless followers. For instance the insinuation that Nathan Law got into Yale as "payment" for "helping to split China". How could I ever disprove that the CIA arranged someone to be admitted to Yale? Its an unfalsifible yet plausible claim. That's what makes trying to disarm it fun!

Regarding the mindless followers, there's still the question of why they're mindlessly following the protesters and not so much the counter-protesters waving the Chinese flag and chanting the national anthem.

Well, the problem is that the same could be said for Shanghai. Talk to any taxi drivers in Shanghai and ask what they think of the economy nowadays, same for people working in unskilled jobs, the gap is so big that it's extremely difficult for them to make a living. This was not the case 15 years ago but the gap has only increased since then with costs of living increasing faster than salaries for unskilled labors increased.

It is definitely a problem in Hong Kong and the rise of real estates prices definitely factors into that but isn't it partly also the Chinese government's fault which has increased immigration from mainland China to Hong Kong resulting in much higher real estates prices since the supply is constrained due to the small area Hong Kong occupies?

However, a lot of people protesting are also professionals who are making a decent living and are not only doing it for economic reasons