I have a colleague from China and she's on the side of the protesters after having lived in Sweden for many years. She's Christian though so her family has some stories of being oppressed, especially during the Cultural Revolution. She told me that if she was in Hong Kong she hopes that she has the courage to join the protests.

However, she has a friend who moved to Hong Kong who's firmly pro-Beijing. Her friend even organizes counter protests and marches in support of the police. Both are statisticans. My colleague works as a data scientist in my team, her friend works as a quant in Hong Kong.

It's fascinating how two people can come to such different opinions on this. As a Swede this looks so clear cut to me.

There is a nativist/anti-mainlander/anti-mandarin-speaker aspect to the protests that isn't being talked about by Western media. Once you realise that it starts to become less clear cut.

Such aspect is quickly fading out in this round of antiELAB protests. People know that the opponent is the totalitarian regime, and they welcome all mainlanders who are open-minded and supportive.

Yeah, I can imagine being from the mainland in Hong Kong while the people are actively protesting mainland influence feels uncomfortable. I live on the other side of the world and can't begin to understand that aspect of the protests.

Please, feel free to elaborate here. As person from small country I feel that you don't have a leg to stand on here but prove me wrong.

I got slammed in another thread for trying to elucidate this point, but the parallel is the "economic anxiety" narrative behind increase in right-wing nationalism in liberal western countries. HK is no different, but as a city state this animosity is expressed as nativism against the influx of rich mainland Chinese immigrants buying up real estate and changing local culture.

When HK accounted for 1/4 of Chinese GDP, it had an industrial and service sector that supported a comfortable middle class life. The joke was that even HK taxi drivers could support multiple secret families on the mainland. Then mainland manufacturing made HK Detroit. HK also had a vibrant media/culture scene that has diminished in softpower. So you have a generation of kids who are doomed to live at home in cramped apartments with very few economic prospects watching themselves be economically, culturally, politically eclipsed by mainland "locusts" [1]. The same way alt-right dog whistles about immigration politics when there's perceived privilege change in the social order. HK is not a woke place. See drama over HK/Singapore beef, treatment and valuation of foreign domestic workers according to ethnic hierarchy. HKers want suffrage and autonomy, it's all very nice to western ears, but implicit in that desire is to keep HK for HKers because when China sends their people they're not sending their best.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/article/991355/anger-mainland-visitors-...

>A row between Hongkongers and mainlanders is reaching boiling point after internet users raised more than HK$100,000 in less than a week to finance a full-page 'anti-locust' advertisement in a Chinese-language newspaper in the city.

...

>Mainlanders have already crossed our bottom line,' said Yung Jhon, who refused to disclose his real name. 'Why are mainland mothers flooding in to take up resources in public hospitals, getting our benefits and social welfare? Why do mainlanders ... refuse to follow our rules and order? We can't accept that.

This is not an isolated incident but popular sentiment that culminated from increasing mainland immigration to HK since handover. By law HK has to accept ~150 one-way permit holders from mainland per day under family reunification plan. That's 55k a year or ~1million mainland immigrants (in a city of 7 million) since handover. These mainland immigrants are disproportionately elderly and impoverished, "draining" HK social services. There's also extremely affluent mainlanders buying up property in HK, flaunting their wealth in shopping day trips. Spoiled, rich mainland Chinese kids whose parents were pig farmers a generation ago makes people's blood boil around the world. HK is no different.

Where is it being talked about?

I don’t think it is the patriotic education (which many sleep through) so much as a successful promotion “us vs them” stratification. Trump does something similar with his followers (western media bias vs fake news).

What is frightening to me is that some people don’t even know they are being used by the communist government. Repeating things like the US sponsored this protest against China without any proof. Referencing articles with highly questionable sources.

Granted. Not all Chinese people are like that. Some I personally know are very level headed and see clearly when the state is trying to manipulate them.

I just hope there are more level headed people in China than there are hate-filled individuals that keep calling other people “cockroaches”. Propaganda is truly frightening.

Even police have been caught on camera calling protesters "cockroaches".

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/search/?q=cockroaches&incl...

If worst comes to worst, the people who try to silence you today will tomorrow lie about having done that.

> I just hope there are more level headed people in China than there are hate-filled individuals that keep calling other people “cockroaches”.

It's in response to Hongkongers calling mainlanders "locusts". IOW, Hongkongers started it. You might want to know the whole story before deciding to pick a side.

> You might want to know the whole story before deciding to pick a side.

I took your advice and did a quick google search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Kong_Qingdong_incident

> In January 2012, Ken Wai, a Hong Kong passenger, asked a Mainland Chinese woman and her child to stop eating on an MTR subway in Mandarin Chinese on a train bound for Mong Kok East Station.[15] Eating and drinking is prohibited on the MTR. While the kid stopped eating, the mother reacted with hostility towards Wai.[16] This infuriated Mr. Wai, who began to shout at them passionately in Cantonese... On 18 January Mr. Wai conducted an interview with Xinhua News Agency on the issue and expressed his anger.[16] (by calling Hong Kongers dogs)

It seems like it was not Hong Kongers that started this but a Beijing professor that called people "dogs". And the incident was pretty clear-cut on who was wrong. Although, the old man could have handled the situation better, the professor calling people "dogs" was inappropriate.

Were you genuinely misinformed? May I ask where did you get your information?

And I don't really care who started it. Two wrongs does not make one right.

I am not condoning the word "locust" either. All these words are disgusting, and have no place in a civilized discussion.

I'm Chinese and I'm living in Hong Kong, and I'm guessing you are neither of those things.

A Google search and one Wikipedia article do not give you the whole story.

Please refrain from jumping to conclusions and spreading partial truth, unless you intend to misinform and mislead.

1) You told me I don't know the whole story, so I took your advice

2) When I find the truth, you say I am saying its the partial truth.

So basically, what I am getting, is that you are right because you said so.

> you intend to misinform and mislead

You made an accusation and I refuted it. The person misleading others is not me as I like you to recall that you are the one accusing Hong Kong of "starting it".

Please provide some evidence to back your claim instead of just saying you are Chinese (I am assuming not from Hong Kong). That means absolutely nothing in the context of the argument.

I am sorry, but this is getting tedious..

> That incident was not even relevant here

It is 100% relevant.

> That incident was not even relevant here, it specifically did not start the name calling from either side.

So where's your proof? Again, you are saying the same thing as your last, which is, I know better because I am Chinese.

> You clearly know next to nothing about the situation.

Ad hominem

> unless you intend to misinform and mislead

Accusation with no proof. Just name calling.

Let's end this argument, because it clearly is going nowhere.

Hong Kong provides a sort of comfort to Western society, a place where, in the face of increasingly credible challenges to hundreds of years of unchecked dominance, Westerners can still have their superiority complex validated in the image of yellow people willingly speaking their language, believing their religion, singing their songs, using their laws, wearing their wigs, and waving their flags. Any change to that is an unimaginable evil and a moral affront.

What is shocking is how many Western people I know who are nice and rational people, but once the word China is spoken, become angry tape recorders spewing hate. This is proof nationalistic religious-style racist education in Western society is dangerous to both Westerners and the world.

You see, Chinese and Western reactions are completely predictable, none better than the other.

I'm an Australian citizen and know that every day evil things are done in the name of my government. People are beaten in police cells and detention centers, important policy and budget decisions are made out of self interest, not for the public good.

Very few people may be truly intentionally evil, but we are flawed, greedy and lazy. I have every reason to believe that this is universal. I don't believe that the inherent nature of westerners or Chinese people is any different.

I also know the democracy is not the wonderful perfect mechanism we like to imagine, it is an arena, in which the contest is heavily weighted towards government and the powerful. People who fight in this arena against power are brave and rare. Most of us, in China or the west do not do this.

I admire the Hong Kong protesters, not because I see them as representing the west against the east, but because I believe they are individuals bravely standing together against power. I have stood in more modest protests, before lines of Australian and American police, and I know how scared I was and how limited my own bravery was.

Nationalists who embrace government propaganda without thought are frightening whether they are Australian, American or Chinese nationalists.

Knowing these things, I believe any argument that presents the Hong Kong protests as a conflict between east and west, regardless of whether they take a pro-western or pro-Beijing stance, is using a grain of truth to tell a dishonest story. But it's a story that will continue to be told because seems to be something we all enjoy about hearing a story in which the the most generous, idealistic view of ourselves or our group is contrasted against the most negative achievable portrait of the other group.

So I am not surprised to hear, that mixed into the Hong Know protests is an offensive caricatures of mainlanders. If it were not true, it would be the perhaps the first conflict in human history to rise above petty unproductive insults

trying to explain what i mean further: Stories that portray an idealistic image of ourselves against a negative portrayal of others are intoxicating. Nationalism is a state of dwelling within those intoxicating stories, and what makes nationalism so frightening is that in that state, people will do terrible things to others, I believe, in part, to sustain the immersion in the story. This same thing happens in protest movements too, being part of a movement, especially if the cause is noble and good, the sense of yourself in a grand narrative is exhilarating. Even if you believe the protests are good, intelligent and brave - as I do - it's unrealistic to think there would not be people in the protests who view the conflicts in racist terms. When I said people are lazy, what I should have said is that we are limited, we can only comprehend reality through simple models, and it can be very hard to remember that the models we use to navigate reality are only models.

So many of the squabbles on this an other forums seem to begin with people who have models of reality, perfectly suitable for navigating their own lives, and assuming with no evidence that their model is also adequate for describing other peoples lives, shouting their models at each other without a lot of listening.

There's well deserved disapproval here of the 'whataboutism' approach to debating, but a some whataboutism is necessary. You need to be able to see the ways in which Tiananmen square and the Nagasaki bombing are similar events in order to get past a cartoon view you, your group and the other.

I agree that prejudice plays a role in the West's view of China, and I'd agree that while China doesn't have democracy, the government has done tremendous good for millions of people. But that being said, what's happening with the Uighur population and "reeducation camps" is beyond unacceptable. And for that alone, I think the current Chinese government deserves all the criticism it's receiving.

China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.

Comments like this are especially funny and dishonest because you, like most Westerners, likely have absolutely no idea what's happening to the Uighurs. Reports of "millions" being forced into camps are pure propaganda. And while China is taking some drastic measures in the region, most Uighurs at this point likely welcome the enhanced investment into the region.

The West' "view of China," like the West's view of the HK situation, is just a fantasy. It has nothing to do with actual evidence, facts or serious research. Like Iraq, the entire narrative is being driven by anonymous sources that do nothing but validate the Western hatred of China.

> China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.

Oh, the irony. As we speak American bombs are being dropped on Yemen, slaughtering thousands of children and escalating what the UN has repeatedly called the worst humanitarian situation on planet. But yes it's China that's engaged in human rights atrocities.

> The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.

-- George Orwell

And it's not continued murder and pretending it and Tiananmen etc. never happened, all sorts of flowers can bloom on that:

https://shanghai.ist/2019/09/05/this-group-of-scholars-have-...

Bombs dropping every twenty minutes is a heinous evil that most Americans are ill-prepared to confront.

It takes a great deal of courage to learn the truth of the American military endeavours that have plunged the world into chaos and war for decades now. This concept is too scary for most Americans - even, Westerners in general - to deal with, and therefore: it continues.

Yeah, while this story joins the mass of stories that get flagged off the front page. Right now, one opportunity to be moral and show solidarity was given to you, and this is how you used it -- you aren't making a thread to help with what you use to belittle this, you use one atrocity to cover another, and think you're better than "most Westerners".

It's not primarily about who does bad things, it's about the victims, and how to help them. That's what empathy is, and that's why punishing evildoers even matters, not because the evildoers do. And yeah, I said evildoers instead of bending over backwards to say the same thing in more bloated language.

The victims need to be acknowledged by those who enable the perpetrators of the crimes.

I myself have helped multiple refugee families get their lives back together again. You?

> The victims need to be acknowledged by those who enable the perpetrators of the crimes.

Nah, I dont engage in and normalize sophistry, and still acknowledge them, and I don't use straw men to look the other way.

I happen to have a keen interest in the HK situation, and propaganda in general.

> Reports of "millions" being forced into camps are pure propaganda

Might it be possible for you to tell us what the actual number of Uighurs is that are are being forced into camps (and the number that are going there willingly, if some are doing so), as well as how you came to know the truth (actual numbers) of what is going on?