China is a dictatorship, Xi a leader for life. That dramatically changed Beijing's political profile.

Pre-Xi, one could argue China had long-term planning capacities. The rotation of leaders and intraparty competition limited corruption and promoted political fitness. Dictatorships have neither. They're cronyist, corrupt and focussed on short-term political survival.

A strategic China would have waited until 2050 to deal with Hong Kong. Instead, Xi got insecure about Winnie the Pooh or whatever. A strategic China would have slowly accumulated technology, capital and soft power. Instead, they're pivoting into a wall.

> On the one hand I think the CCP bought a dud with Chairman Xi. But maybe that’s good for the rest of us.

In the short term, sure. In the medium term, it's a security nightmare. In the long term, we're going to watch billions of peoples' humanity and productivity get squandered. That's a loss to everyone.

History has limited examples of such peaceful (i.e. no civil war) transitions of power. (Most are from the modern era.)

My guess is the CCP’s senior guard would need to orchestrate his “illness.” But Xi has done a good job of purging the Politburo of able competition.

If I were giving this question serious study, I’d look at the PLA.

But then China went completely overboard, banning Chinese tourism to Korea, and forcing out many Korean companies from Chinese market. And to what end? It hurt Korean economy a bit, but the primary effect was that Koreans' opinion on China cooled down remarkably.

As some of you may remember, the conservative president got kicked out in 2017 amid national protest - we now have a reformist president who is less pro-American than his predecessor. If China waited just a bit, they could have negotiated a better position. But they had already played their cards. THAAD is getting built anyway.

It seems China's national pride is getting in the way of their diplomacy.

I think especially when it comes to entertainment they know how much it goes into shaping their own public discourse and they cannot lose that.

Hong Kong is a problem manufactured by Xi. Most Hong Kongers identified as Chinese not more than a few years ago [1]. Come 2050, almost every Hong Konger would have lived under Beijing's rule their whole life. The sensible thing was to wait.

But Xi got impatient. So we got this mess. Hong Kong accelerated the outcome for a die cast when Xi installed himself as leader for life.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-anniversary-idUS...

We all shared the same view with the west that China will eventually transform itself to democracy and we shall have harmony in 2047.....right until China shattered the promised universal suffrage.

Also, China had singlehandedly groom the separatist sentiments HK. Initially in 2014, there were only a handful of activists and they weren’t even treated seriously even within the pro-democracy circle. But lately you see Chinese state media started to put the separatist hat on every pro-democracy movement and figure. You can imagine people are extremely frustrated by this narrative and many young people started to wholeheartedly support independence (no matter how impossible it seems).

But even back in 2008, the pro-democracy paper namely Apple Daily also was celebrating our Chinese identity, and praising china’s progress.

We've had to ask you multiple times not to do this. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are?

After the Seven Years' War, a certain European country accidentally kicked off strife with its colonies which morphed into a struggle over legislative sovereignty. For a decade, this simmered until a particularly hard-nosed governor ending up allowing a confrontation to escalate into a very notorious act of vandalism, one that was nearly universally condemned, even on all sides of the conflict. In response, the government enacted a series of laws to punish not just the perpetrators but the entire colony. They hoped to turn moderates into loyalists, to better rein in neighboring radicals lest the same happen to them. Instead, they turned moderates into radicals, and furthermore caused the radicals to shift their demands from autonomy to outright independence, especially as the government chose to double down on their mistakes at every opportunity instead of reversing course hard and fast.

This provoked other British tea merchants to organise a campaign, publicity and letter writing to colonists to try and get the boycott going again.

It was the Company that then chose to send the four(?) ships to Boston.

T'was mostly the East India Company lit that touchpaper. Then, as you say, a series of government responses that turned moderates into radicals, and subjects of the Crown into Americans.

But it long predates Xi, he's just stepped it up, and been particularly clumsy with it. They've been fiddling with HK's agreed status pretty much since the moment of handover.

HK, China is declaring that it will flex its muscle.

There's nothing clumsy about it.

Flexing muscle now will risk destroying the advantages of Hong Kong in the process. It will almost certainly have to come with some international reaction.

Given the sheer numbers, and visibility, if they react similarly to Tiananmen, the international reaction will be far larger than then. Whether it will be sustained...

Thank you for keeping an eye on HK. How you can help from abroad: https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/cv0ws4/how_can_yo...

If you're in the US, contact your senators and representatives to voice your support for passing Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. May be Global Magnitsky Act sanctions against Chinese officials also (much like the recent visa ban for Xinjiang officials).

Boycotting Chinese companies/products may also be useful in the long run.

I wonder if this was intentional?

Perhaps the CIA orchestrated these companies play?

It doesn’t seem entirely implausible.

His solution to every problem is fight (power struggle) until all your opponents are down. It may work in China's party politics but if taken to the international level, it fails. You can see this same solution being applied to the handling of Hong Kong.

He also believes that China is invincible because they have this massive supply chain thing which nobody else has.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%9D%8E%E9%94%90_(1917%E5%B...

https://www.voachinese.com/a/voanews-20180413-former-secreta...

The scary part of the Chinese strategy is conteolling people with AI and social credit score together. So far it seems that it works.

As for control, intense power struggle is happening at the top right now, between Xi fraction and his opponents. Of course due to the opaque nature of Chinese politics nobody is sure.

Xi wants to be China's most powerful man since Mao but he is very insecure. So he is tightening control of the whole China, including Hong Kong (the extradition bill). It is working in the mainland but in Hong Kong it caused a blowback.

For me as an outsider it looks like Chinese people are scared from another massacre (for a good reason), but it's interesting to know that Xi's power doesn't look that stable for you.

China got away with the Tiananmen massacre. Is this worst than Tiananmen? Sadly people have a short memory and dealing with China is profitable for Western companies. I hope not but most likely this episode will be forgotten soon.

source: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

But in the other hand they have begun to bring their glorious past (myth or otherwise) back into the fold of their national story...

Everybody in Asia knows this. Only the American public doesn't and thinks this dynamic is something new.

The experiment with free-market capitalism has to come to an end one way or another, and the CCP has chosen to be in control of the situation instead of letting their citizens decide.

   I believe the CCP is looking ahead at the next 
   decade or two and realizing that the global economic
   boom is over for everyone - especially for them.

Would they just sit back and let the turmoil play itself out? Would they not be drawn into it somehow via North Korea / Russia or their interests in Africa and the new Silk Road (the Belt & Road initiative) ?

Everyone ignored a superpower's rampant abuses over the last 30 years and still did business with them, what exactly makes you think that same world will stand up for "human rights" this time?

It's funny how certain places care about rights far removed from their own existence while ignoring those right in their face.

The US still has the most people imprisoned per capita. 85% of which are for non-violent crimes, mostly drugs. To ignore that (mostly)black guy who got 5 years federal prison for selling weed who now has to work for $0.70 an hour (sound familiar?) while actively campaigning for the release of violent muslim separatists who want to create their own country in far western China is staggering.

I guess freedom is just a word to some.

That or Americans in general are 10x more evil on the whole than the rest of the developed world due to their prison population? Perhaps the police are 10x more effective than everyone else.

I'd be interested in the number of US citizens that actively campaign about their prison system compared to those who talk about China bad.

Let's face it, unless you are an expert on the subject virtually everyone you meet simply repeats what the news media tell them, that's the extent of their knowledge on basically all topics.

Now, how many people watch, experience or live outside of that nationalistic media-infused bubble? Fraction of a percent?

To talk about another country with no experience of it is farting in the wind. There's really no point discussing China with Americans anymore online because there's far too much emotional baggage, media disinformation and talking points repeated verbatim. The fragile ego's of the biggest, strongest, most militaristic country is on show for all to see while China charges forward towards being the largest economy on Earth.

Undoubtedly when that day comes, "biggest" will mean GDP per capita, not gdp and those fragile sandcastles of the national psyche can rest easy for a decade or two longer.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...

Millions of people in US prisons faced "justice" and lengthy incarceration as far as American society is concerned, why exactly do you consider the imprisonment of Chinese Muslim separatists undeserved? They are bombing civilians and actively trying to create a new nation-state. Who is the bad guy here?

Exercise for the reader: when was the last foreign civilian child killed by both the US and China? How many civilians have been killed by each countries military in the last decade (last two decades)

You're being downvoted, but while it's not a direct cause and effect, he has supported and encouraged authoritarianism the world over.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-china-promise-hong-kon...

I am otherwise aggressively anti trump.

My opinion, which I can't support, is that the dream of information technology automatically progressing democratic and liberal ideals has failed. Information technology is no different than chemistry. It can be weaponized effectively. Right-wing parties around the world learned how to powerfully engage with the masses. It really was a meme war. Propaganda is undoubtedly effective even when it's standing right next to the truth.

If you only read the news you would think it's only national leaders taking over and oppressing the populations. I don't think so. I think this is a trend towards grassroots nationalism and fascism. The people want this.

No I don't think the dream was for left wing ideology. I meant classic liberalism and democracy which aligns well with libertarianism. So regardless of political leaning the dream was that information will free the people. What we're seeing is that information is being used to entrench the establishment. It is the opposite of libertarian today.

Fascism and nationalism were in a time in history attached to left wing ideology rather than right wing. I don't want to imply that those movements are inherently left or right. But I do see that today they are attached to the right, who are using information very effectively to achieve their goals.

So while I think you're basically right, I'm not sure under what conditions we'd be hearing comments such as, "China has grown into a legitimate economic power by playing fair and square. They really caught the rest of us napping."

In another 10 years they’d take the mantel of world superpower from the US.

But I guess it’s true of totalitarian government as it is with most evil: it contains the seeds of its own destruction

HK is basically an exercise in calling Xi's bluff. Everyone will now see his cards, whatever they are. The residents of HK have judged that now is the time to do that, for better or worse, and they deserve our support.